HOOP DREAMS: Max Minsky and Me.

“Never work with children or animals,” goes the quip, and it’s sage advice: Movies for adults centered on small-fry protagonists are sucker’s bets even when they dodge schmaltz, if only because they are constantly laboring to counterbalance how much more the audience knows about the world than the little people onscreen. Undeterred, the NW Film Center starts its two-week series of filmmaking from across the diaspora with a weekend of pipsqueak actors.

Max Minsky and Me, the opening-night selection (7 pm Thursday, April 16), stars an intense, bespectacled Zoe Moore as 13-year-old Nelly Sue Edelmeister, who resists her looming bat mitzvah because she’s already decided on atheism. Not that Nelly is immune to magical thinking: She’s convinced that if she can secure a slot on her middle-school girls basketball team, she can win the attentions of Luxembourg’s Prince Edouard. (This is how she meets classmate Max Minsky, reluctant hoops coach.) Director Anna Justice’s bouncy pace flirts with the cartoonish, but there’s a smart performance from Adriana Altaras as Nelly’s initially unlikable mother, who offers the compromise that Judiasm “isn’t about believing in God, but acting like there is one.” My First Levinas!

The rugrat in Noodle (8 pm Saturday, April 18) isn’t Jewish—he’s a Chinese immigrant left in Tel Aviv when his mother is deported—but he lands in the care of bickering Israeli sisters who embark on a scheme to reunite him with mom using the luggage compartment of El Air. “He’s teaching you how to eat,” notes a supporting character as the 6-year-old, nicknamed Noodle, does indeed demonstrate the use of chopsticks—and my, there is a lot of teaching going on here. The Gift to Stalin (4:30 pm Sunday, April 19), meanwhile, is the kind of moviemaking that predates the didactic heartwarmer: It’s an epic-scale historic heartwarmer, set on the steppes of Kazakhstan, where an orphaned boy from Moscow is saved from the gulag by a homestead of displaced Muslims and Catholics. Before a nuclear test provides the movie with a startling and very strange dénouement, there’s a lot of melodrama, some of it featuring a shaman. “A black chicken has just laid an egg,” he announces. “Bring it to me!” And so we get animals as well.