The San Diego Center for Jewish Culture and the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center of San Diego County this month present intriguing glimpses of Jewish life — fictional and factual — from Israel, Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and — notably — Argentina.

The annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival screens worldwide cinema from Feb. 5-15 at four primary venues: AMC La Jolla 12 Theatres, Madstone Hazard Center 7, Ultrastar Poway Creekside Plaza 10 and the JCC’s Jacobs Family Campus, 4126 Executive Drive in the Golden Triangle.

The Jacobs campus also is the venue for the opening lecture and exhibit by Peter Zvi Malkin, who captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960.

The Israeli Mossad intelligence officer kept a sketch journal while on the track. “For four whole months, I filled the book with my colored drawings, continually revising,” Malkin recalls of sketching Argentinian life in the daytime and the Nazi hunt at night.

The images from that sketchbook, “The Argentina Journal,” go on exhibit at the Gotthelf Art Gallery at the JCC from Feb. 23 through March 21. The Feb. 23 opening includes a 7:30 p.m. lecture by Malkin. Admission for the lecture is $12-$16. Gallery admission is free. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

From the Argentina of 40-odd years later, comes “Samy Y Yo,” a romantic comedy about a nebbish TV writer who flies to fame on the wings of his anxieties. The film (in Spanish with English subtitles) plays Valentine’s Day at 7:30 p.m. at Madstone.

The film series unspools at 8 p.m. Feb. 5 at Ultrastar with “Monsieur Batignole,” a passive butcher who befriends and saves three Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Paris. The film is in French with English subtitles.

Closing night, Feb. 15 at 7 p.m., at Landmark La Jolla Village Square Cinemas, is “My Architect,” an American film about Louis Kahn, who designed much of the Salk Institute in La Jolla and died ignominiously in a Manhattan train station men’s room a few years later.

The festival encompasses more than 35 independent films, says Patti Malmuth with the JCC. “A lot of them have much broader appeal than just being Jewish,” she says.

For a complete listing and show times, visit www.lfjcc.org or call (858) 362-1348. Individual tickets are $5-$11.