Stay With Us (still from the film)
Healing. Of body and soul. Of self, community, family, friends. This year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival offers many poignant films – dramas sprinkled with humour that invite contemplation, and hope that we flawed humans are capable of change and loving one another, despite our insecurities and differences.
Of the films the Jewish Independent reviewed this week, Stay With Us and Rose are among the films that will be screened at Fifth Avenue Cinemas in the main portion of the festival, April 4-12, which is followed by various screenings at the Rothstein Theatre April 13-14. No Name Restaurant will be both at Fifth Avenue, as well as online during that portion of the festival, which runs April 15-19.
Stay With Us is a sensitively written and well-performed movie that is based on Moroccan-born Canadian comedian Gad Elmaleh’s real-life fascination with the Virgin Mary. In the movie, he returns to Paris to visit his family, not sharing with them that he is in the process of converting to Catholicism. Perhaps because he’s dealing with his own actual emotional journey (though he co-wrote the script with Benjamin Charbit), Stay With Us delicately and thoughtfully explores some of the roles religion has in life and the effects a potential conversion can have on a family.
Despite being an immensely personal film – Elmaleh’s real parents and sister play his family in the film and most of the cast are people close to him – Stay With Us will resonate with anyone who has questioned their purpose in life, or been curious about other religions and cultures. Elmaleh doesn’t disparage religion or the religious. Thankfully, he chooses to tackle the subject seriously, with well-timed comedy, his own stand-up act as part of the story, as well as other natural-seeming, unforced funny moments – the reaction of his parents when they find a statue of the Virgin Mary in his suitcase is hilarious, for example.
The movie Rose is similarly satisfying – serious but also light and amusing. In the first minutes, set at Philippe’s rocking, festive, friend-filled 80th birthday party, we learn that Rose and Philippe are still madly in love after decades of marriage, that their three adult children each have their own personal challenges and rivalries (between themselves and for their parents’ affection), and that Philippe is fatally ill.
Understandably, after Rose loses the love of her life, she grieves. Her children worry that she doesn’t answer the phone, that she’s not taking care of herself. When 78-year-old Rose does start to take care of herself, to focus on her needs, to rediscover herself after years of being a wife, mother and grandmother, her children worry even more.
Written by Aurélie Saada and Yaël Langmann, Rose is a charming, heartwarming film about how we choose to experience life, its happy, sad and other moments – and how it’s never too late to find joy. Saada is the film’s director, and she also composed original music for the film, which has a notably wonderful soundtrack. The movie is infused with her Tunisian Jewish background.
“It was important for me to put my first film in this setting because I didn’t want to cheat,” Saada says in the press material. “I wanted this film to resemble me and not to borrow anything from cultures that I hadn’t sufficiently mastered. Also, Eastern Judaism is often caricatured in French cinema. I wanted to show its more complex face, far from the clichés. But it remains a setting, a costume, a perfume because the heart of the subject is not there. This film may be imbued with Judeo-Eastern culture, but a friend of mine from Corsica, a Christian, told me a short while ago: ‘It’s crazy, it’s like home.’ I believe that we humans are much more alike than we imagine.”
This notion pretty much encapsulates the film No Name Restaurant as well. Written and directed by Stefan Sarazin and Peter Keller, the idea for the story apparently came from Sarazin’s “numerous travels to the Middle East” and was “inspired by an abandoned boat in the desert and the friendship to an elderly Bedouin.”
Ben, an ultra-Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, has yet to marry. Within hours of arriving in Jerusalem, both to visit family but mostly to meet the matchmaker – who he purposefully misses by taking his time to get to his uncle’s shop from the airport – Ben eagerly agrees to Uncle Yechiel’s request to head right back to the airport to catch a flight to Egypt.
The Jewish community of Alexandria, the president of which is Yechiel’s brother-in-law, needs a 10th man to form a minyan before Passover. If they can’t observe the holiday, according to some written agreement, all the community’s property and possessions will have to be turned over to the state.
Ben seizes the chance to save the ages-old synagogue, but misses his plane and then is kicked off the bus to Alexandria by fellow passengers, putting the whole plan in jeopardy. Luckily, he is picked up in the Sinai Desert by Adel, a Bedouin searching for his lost camel. Unluckily, Adel’s truck breaks down and the two men must head out on foot. Short on water – much of which had been used by Ben for ritual handwashings along the way – and going only on Adel’s memory of a well his family had frequented when he was a kid, the journey is fraught with existential concerns, including what other Arabs might do to a Jew in their midst and to the Bedouin who is helping him.
No Name Restaurant is a buddy movie that delivers all that one would expect from such a movie and more. With respect and humour, it brings together Jews, Muslims and Christians in a novel way to optimistic effect.
For the full Vancouver Jewish Film Festival lineup, go to vjff.org.