Sabbath Queen is a film about the life of Amichai Lau-Lavie, part of a rabbinic dynasty going back 38 generations. (still from film)
The 36th annual Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs April 24 to May 4, beginning with opening night film Midas Man, which “offers Beatles fans a fresh look at the pivotal role Brian Epstein played in the band’s meteoric rise.” An enormous range of dramatic and documentary films, features and shorts, fill out the festival’s run, and the Independent reviews some of them here.
Tradition!
Hester Street, based on Abraham Cahan’s 1896 Lower Eastside immigrant novel Yekl, was released in 1975, about the same time as Fiddler on the Roof. The movie approaches some of the same topics of assimilation and tradition, without the song and dance.
Yankl (now Americanized Jake, played by Steven Keats) transforms from a yeshivah bocher to a shmatte sweatshop worker. Along comes Gitl, the wife who had waited behind in Russia, and young son Yossele who, payos cut off, becomes Joey.
The 50th anniversary of the film’s release reminds us that the 1970s were a time of nostalgia and of Jewish narratives that both idealized and lamented the American dream. In Hester Street, which is in black-and-white for mood, the boarder Bernstein (Mel Howard) represents tradition and continuity, contrasting with Jake in the fight of money versus learning, of getting ahead versus getting an education. Bernstein’s presence in the home of the primary couple puts Gitl in a predictable three-cornered bind both romantic and cultural.
Younger viewers might take some time to recognize Gitl (Carol Kane) as the kooky landlady from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Meanwhile, the tough-talking landlady in Hester Street is recognizable as Doris Roberts, who contemporary viewers will recognize as the buttinsky mother-in-law from Everybody Loves Raymond.
There are subversive components of the film, including the role of divorce in perpetuating traditional values. Subversion twists again and indeed Gitl assimilates in her particular ways. As the last line in the film declares ambivalently, “We mustn’t be too quick to say this or that.”
Director Joan Micklin Silver was a pioneering woman in male-dominated 1970s Hollywood.
Kosher queen
Tradition, continuity and modern times are absolutely the themes of Sabbath Queen, a film by Sandi DuBowski about the life of Amichai Lau-Lavie.
The scion of a rabbinic dynasty going back 38 generations, Amichai is the son of politician, ambassador (“and we suspect a spy”) Naphtali Lau-Lavie and nephew of Israel Meir Lau, former chief rabbi of Israel. Filmed over 21 years, the documentary follows Amichai as he is ordained as a rabbi, via the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. But choosing the Conservative movement over orthodoxy is the least of Amichai’s rifts with his traditional family.
In 1993, Amichai was outed as a gay man in a news report and, it seems, he never looked back. After fleeing to New York a couple of years later and getting involved with the Radical Faeries, a queer, shamanistic spirituality group, “one vodka too many” leads to his alter ego emerging “out of my head like Athena.”
The drag queen Hadassah Gross – a Hungarian sex advisor, kabbalist, matchmaker and widow of six rabbis – was born. Amichai describes his drag persona as “something between channeling and performing” and it is all about exploring the intersections of feminine and masculine. (“What the goyim call the yingele and the yangele,” says Hadassah.)
“Artists are the new rabbis,” he declares, but eventually seems to decide that being an artist is not enough and he seeks his rabbinical smicha, in large part, it seems, to combat his brother and the larger establishment on Orthodox dogma.
He becomes the spiritual leader of a decidedly unorthodox congregation called Lab/Shul. And, when his officiating of interfaith partnerships clashes with the Conservative movement, the rabbi faces the consequences.
Amichai’s brother, father and mother have their reservations, to put it mildly, about Amichai’s activities.
“We’re pushing a lot of boundaries here,” he acknowledges. Or, as his Orthodox rabbi brother puts it, not entirely sympathetically, “He’s playing with Judaism.”
One feels invasive as the camera goes close up on Amichai at his father’s funeral and that sense of voyeurism repeats throughout the film, as does the feeling that the documentary’s subject is something of an emotional exhibitionist.
The relationship between Amichai and his immediate family represents the larger cultural dissonance between queer and other nonconforming Jews and the orthodoxy of the tradition, though there is an astonishing, uplifting conclusion to some of these challenges by the film’s ending.
A family affair
I first saw A Real Pain on a flight home from Israel last month. Selecting a Hollywood treatment of two cousins doing a Holocaust road trip to their grandmother’s hometown in Poland, I girded myself for cringe-inducing, inappropriate or otherwise disappointing fare. My expectations were pleasantly upended. This is a profound, beautifully presented film that hits the right notes in so many ways.
I am not the only one impressed. Unbeknownst to me when I chose it, the script and the acting were already grabbing accolades worldwide. Costars Jesse Eisenberg (who won the BAFTA Award for best original screenplay) and Kieran Culkin (who won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best supporting actor) deliver moving and multidimensional characters.
David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) are the proverbial odd couple but what I had somehow anticipated to be slapstick comedy turned out to be deeply touching. As we find out more about Benji’s story, his erratic behaviour makes more sense.
Moments that could come off as didactic – almost documentary-like scenes at the Polin Museum and the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, among others – somehow work even when you think they shouldn’t. The British tour guide James (Will Sharpe) is repeatedly challenged by Benji and acknowledges his own shortcomings as a non-Jewish facilitator, inviting viewers to ponder insider/outsider roles in the immediate and larger story.
If you ever wondered what corner Baby from Dirty Dancing ended up in, here she is – Jennifer Grey – playing a supporting role as one of the members of the cousins’ small tour group.
Spousal secrets
It is hard to write about Pink Lady without giving too much away. A seemingly ordinary religious Jerusalem couple with three happy kids and an involved extended family are upended when the husband is subjected to violence and blackmail.
Director Nir Bergman’s Hebrew-language feature film sees Lazer (Uri Blufarb) and Bati (Nur Fibak) pondering the most existential questions of how God challenges even his most dedicated adherents. A deeply serious film with both laugh-out-loud incongruities and eye-covering discomfiture, Pink Lady is a slice-of-life with deep theological questions.
Oct. 7 revisited
At least two films in the festival deal directly with the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Of Dogs and Men is a blend of fiction and documentary. Director Dani Rosenberg’s film follows 16-year-old Dar (Ori Avinoam, also cowriter) as she sneaks back into Nir Oz, her vacated kibbutz, in search of her missing dog Shula.
While the quest for the dog may be a stand-in for the larger search
Israelis have undertaken as individuals and collectively to discover the fate of missing people – Dar’s mother’s fate remains unknown – it is hard not to wonder if the choice to centre a (missing) dog in the story is not meant to invite dissonance among overseas viewers. Given the indifference and even celebration with which some people worldwide have responded to the Oct. 7 attacks, is the tragedy of a lost dog a statement on the qualitative value the world places on Jewish life?
Dar tags along with a woman who rescues animals in the abandoned and war-torn areas.
“Aren’t you afraid of dealing with those dogs?” she asks the woman.
“Look what human beings did. So, I should be afraid of dogs?” the woman responds. “There’s no creature more awful, crueler than human beings and I still live among you.”
Through the imagery of destruction and the litany of names of victims, the film breaks down distinctions between Israeli and Palestinian victims.
The documentary 6:30 provides a harrowing, minute-by-minute narrative of Oct. 7 events from different locations and perspectives. The interviews with survivors just a week after the attacks show raw emotion.
Some of the Nova festival-goers thought they were hallucinating as the hellish day unfolded. Several people, including first responders, speak of detachment, of a disconnect between what they were seeing and what they could believe. In retrospect, one survivor wonders if his liberation is real or if he died and that is what he is now experiencing. Others talk of the emotional burdens they will carry forever.
Linor Attias, a United Hatzalah volunteer who arrived at Kibbutz Be’eri in a mass casualty event vehicle, notes with pride that Arabs and Jews were united among the rescue workers trying to save the lives of victims. She loaded people into ambulances, where they released piercing shrieks of agony, having held them in for hours of silence in order to save their lives.
“That howl of pain cuts through the soul,” she says.
The most chilling thing about the film is realizing, amid all these horror stories, that these are the testimonies of the lucky ones.
Full details and tickets are available at vjff.org.
