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March 4, 2011

Seattle film festival nears

A Montreal-made music video will help launch the event.
DAVID J. LITVAK

The American Jewish Committee’s Seattle Jewish Film Festival celebrates its Sweet Sixteen this year with 30 Jewish films from around the world, panel discussions, special events and  “Sweet Treat” screenings sponsored by local sweets vendors.  In addition, this year’s event has a distinct Canadian flavor, as (Rock the) Belz, a Canadian short film, helped kick off the Red Carpet Launch Party on March 3.

(Rock the) Belz is directed by Kaveh Nabatian, an award-winning filmmaker from Montreal, who is also a trumpet player with the avant garde, twice-Juno-nominated Bell Orchestra. A music video, it features Montreal rappers Socalled and Sans Pression with Theodore Bikel (most famous for his role as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof). In English, Yiddish and French, it takes viewers from North American suburbia to the Congo to a shtetl in Ukraine using puppets created by Clea Minaker, a designer and performer who also lives in Montreal.

(Rock the) Belz is one of six shorts that will be screened at the launch party, and two other Canadian films (The Trotsky and Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story) will also be part of this year’s festival, which will showcase an array of films from Israel, China, Uganda, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, France, Mexico and the United States the week of March 12-20.

According to Pamela Lavitt, a New York native who has been director of the Seattle festival since 2006, the AJC Seattle Jewish Film Festival (one of the largest in North America) is about more than films.

“We really focus on building bridges of mutual understanding within the Jewish community and between the diverse communities of the Puget Sound,” she noted. This bridge building is apparent from the festival’s 40 community partners. For example, the Floyd and Delores Jones Cancer Institute at the Virginia Medical Centre is sponsoring a panel discussion about Genetics, Faith and Family after the film In the Family, a documentary by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, who has tested positive for the BCRA mutation that puts her at a higher risk for cancer. Lavitt feels that this panel discussion will be “the sleeper panel” of the festival because it will mean a lot to women, cancer survivors and Jewish families, and it features panelists like Dr. Mary-Claire King, who, according to Lavitt, “is a rock star of research and a guru of genetics, who discovered that the Jewish cancer gene for breast and ovarian cancer is inherited.”

Other notable events include the festival’s opening night tribute to Israeli filmmaker Eran Rikilis (Syrian Bride, The Lemon Tree), who will receive the Reel Film Award and discuss his new film, The Human Resources Manager, after it screens; and the debut of the AJC’s Bridge Series, featuring socially conscious films like Precious Life, Delicious Peace Grows in a Ugandan Coffee Bean, The Round Up and 100Voices:A Journey Home, the closing night film, which celebrates the return of a group of the world’s finest cantors to Poland for a once-in-a-lifetime concert (the night also features a live performance by Cantor Nathan Lam).

The American Jewish Committee is not only the umbrella organization for the festival and the initiator of the Bridge Series, it is also an international think thank and advocacy organization whose mission is to protect Jewish populations in danger and, among other things, it focuses on strengthening Jewish life, combating antisemitism and all forms of bigotry, supporting Israel’s quest for peace and security and promoting the concepts of pluralism and shared democratic values in countries throughout the world.

According to Lavitt, an important objective of AJC and the festival is “to promote a greater understanding of Israel through film.” In the past, she noted, the festival has featured films about Druze, Arab Israelis and Palestinians. The goal, she said, “is to be able to embrace Israel for all its complexity and diversity.” This year, the festival hopes to achieve that goal by screening documentaries like Precious Life, which focuses on the life and death struggle of Mohammed, a four-month-old Gazan resident who is need of a bone-marrow transplant that only a nearby Israeli hospital can perform.

A relatively new goal for the festival for this year, according to Lavitt, “is to attract movie-goers from Vancouver.” She pointed out that one of AJC’s directors is from Montreal and her daughter is in film school in Vancouver. She added that, for Vancouverites considering the trip, two Seattle hotels, the Maxwell and Pan Pacific, are offering special deals to festival-goers visiting Seattle if they ask for the festival insider rate when they book their rooms.

For more information or to purchase tickets for this year’s festival, visit seattlejewishfilmfestival.org or call the ticket hotline at 1-206-324-9996.

David J. Litvak is a freelance writer and publicist living in Vancouver.

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