The beginning of the film contains another visual treat: a sly reference to Saturday Night Fever. As Misha steps off the train in Moscow clad in beige plaid and an orange scraf, he participates in a crazed dance sequence before Ursulyak rapidly cuts to a more somberly dressed Misha, stripped of his fantasies, standing in a drizzle outside the train station. At the end of the film, Misha's brightly colored Moscow fades into gray.

Unlike Arik Sharon, Blood Money is a real documentary. It resembles nothing so much as the document-based question on the Advanced Placement history exams, in which students are given an assortment of primary sources and are told to weave them together in an essay. An especially clever student may form an essay of surprising depth and insight from the varied information given.

Blood Money is one of those clever essays, smoothly incorporating a large amount of footage into a clear summary of the Swiss involvement with Nazi gold during and after World War II. Film clips from Europe and America, from World War II and present, are neatly combined to form a cohesive synthesis. Blood Money makes a coherent and damaging, if biased, argument against the Swiss for their role in helping the Nazis hide the plunder they took from Jews and other victims of their regime. The moving testimony of many Holocaust survivors who are still seeking to recover money trapped by the secretive Swiss banking system is far more powerful than any exculpatory evidence the Swiss could produce.

This film was made for the "Investigative Reports" series, which doubtless explains the abrupt endings of various segments of the film (insert commercial here) and the ominous narration. A startled viewer might initially mistake Blood Money for "Unsolved Mysteries": even the most innocuous events are made to sound sinister, and phrases like "the darker questions [about Swiss neutrality] are beginning to emerge" abound.

At times, the film presents too much of its excellent source material at once and becomes tedious. Nonetheless, Blood Money is a solid, thorough treatment of a very timely topic.

The Boston Jewish Film Festival runs through November 16. As of November 14, seven films are still to play at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Call 734-2500 for information.

One film contains a sly reference to Saturday Night Fever.