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Nov. 2, 2012

Finding new meaning in life

Vancouver Jewish Film Festival offers an impressive selection.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The movies and documentaries comprising the 24th annual Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which takes place Nov. 7-15, will be some of the last to screen at the Ridge Theatre. But nostalgia is the least of the reasons to attend the festival. The selection of films is impressive in its diversity and almost universally high quality.

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Opening the festival is a Canada-Israel collaboration, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une Bouteille à la Mer). In it, 17-year-old Tal, a recent immigrant to Jerusalem with her parents and older brother from a Paris suburb, is greatly affected by the bombing of a café in her neighborhood – among the dead was a bride-to-be of her age.

Tal puts a message in a bottle that she gets her brother, an Israeli soldier, to throw into the Gaza Sea, in the hope that it will be found by a Palestinian who will answer her questions about what would motivate someone to be a suicide bomber. Eventually, the bottle does get found, by a group of Palestinian men/boys, one of whom – 20-year-old Naim – responds to the e-mail address she includes in her message. His initial e-mails are hostile; he uses the handle Gazaman and one of his first correspondences claims that he is 15-year-old Mohammed Ben Laden, who watches goats by day and makes bombs at night. Their exchanges slowly get beyond the anger and the stereotypes they each hold, and their friendship develops quite realistically, both gaining insight into each other’s, and their own, lives.

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea manages to avoid melodrama, though bringing some Kleenex might be a good idea. The story is compelling, the performances are strong and it is an excellent choice to launch the festival.

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Among the documentaries being presented at the festival is Return to Byzantium: The Art and Life of Lilian Broca, and director Adelina Suvagau and local artist Lilian Broca will attend its screening.

Return to Byzantium follows Broca’s emotional return to Romania for the first time in 52 years, as well as offers a glimpse into her life as an artist, in particular, her work on the mosaics that form the magnificent Queen Esther series. It begins with Broca – and a child actor portraying the artist when she was a young girl – exploring the remains of an old building the significance of which later becomes clear; it is an effective technique of making Broca’s memories tangible. Broca narrates, explaining that her memories of childhood, of Romania, are always in black and white: Romania of the 1950s was a very sad decade and the country was bled dry, she explains, but when she first saw Byzantine art as a child, it was “a revelation and a love at first sight. The only good memories, the only colorful memories, are of those icons.”

Broca speaks of the vital importance of mythology, including personal myths, or roots. Born to Jewish parents, who never told her she was Jewish, she says she has two roots: Jewish and Romanian. The family left Romania in the middle of the night in 1958, eventually settling in Canada.

As befits a film about an artist, Return to Byzantium features incredible images. There are archival photos of Broca and her family, of the artist at work and of the artwork itself: sketches, paintings, mosaics. Broca explains how women’s issues and the human condition have been at the forefront of the themes she explores through her work. And what painstaking – and sometimes painful – work. The Esther mosaics are especially detailed, creating the drawings of each panel, every glass/stone (tesserae) being out into place, Broca’s fingers getting caught in the grinder, yet she continues.

Art historians, art critics, fellow artists, her husband, David Goodman, and the buyers of the Esther series, Horatio and Jackie Kemeny, are all interviewed, as is her sister, Aimee Gabor, and a few others. The film also follows Broca’s 10-day trip to Athens to give a presentation on mosaics, and to visit some old churches and a Byzantine museum. She meets and takes lessons with Luciana Notturni, founder of the Mosaic Art School of Ravenna.

As well, Broca returns to Bucharest: to the place where she grew up. Her grandfather built the building in 1923 – he signed his name in the attic, which Broca finds. She takes viewers to St. Catherine’s Church, near her home, where she used to come because she fell in love with the paintings: whereas there was so much darkness in those times, “here, inside, it was all light.”

As the documentary was being filmed, Broca was in the process of creating the book The Hidden and the Revealed: The Queen Esther Mosaics of Lilian Broca (Gefen Publishing House Ltd., 2011). For more about it, see “Contemporary ancient art.”

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Based on the bestselling novel by Edna Mazya, the Israeli film Naomi (Hitpartzut X) is a love story of the creepy kind. The opening scene sets the tone: astrophysics professor Ilan Ben-Natan is explaining to his bored classroom what happens when an older star sucks matter out of a younger one. The well-known, top-of-his-field academic, who is in his 60s, is married to 28-year-old Naomi, who his mother refers to as “eye candy.” While Naomi still has tender feelings for her husband, she has taken a lover who is closer to her in age.

Ilan discovers his wife’s deceit when he follows her to her lover’s seaside apartment, where he witnesses her infidelity through a window. That Ilan immediately travels to his mother’s house reveals a not-so-healthy mother-son bond, and only hints at the lengths this mother will go to protect her man-child.

While a bit slow in pace, Naomi is an entertaining thriller that will make viewers squirm in Hitchcockian style.

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Lia van Leer and her husband, Wim, founded the Israeli Film Archive and the Jerusalem International Film Festival, as well as cinémathèques in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Her fascinating life story, centring around these and other notable film-related initiatives, is the subject of the Israeli documentary Lia.

Born in 1924 in what is now Moldavia, van Leer was sent to Israel by her parents to live with her sister, where she survived the Second World War, but never saw her parents again. The documentary doesn’t begin with this aspect, however, rather focusing on van Leer’s love of cinema, which began, she says, the first time she saw a Marcel Carne film, Children of Paradise: she came out of the theatre and couldn’t believe there was another world.

Van Leer and her husband traveled a lot. In 1952, while in France, they went to a cinémathèque and watched a Japanese film without subtitles and other films that never came to Israel – experimental films never came to the country, she explains, so her husband suggested, “We must start up something like that [the French Cinémathèque] in Israel.”

Lia features interviews with friends who would come to the van Leers’ for dinner every week; afterward, they would watch films in the couple’s screening room. Wim van Leer’s father had given them a 16-millimetre projector, and they’d buy films, not generally of high production value (the black and white were more grey and white, says Lia van Leer). The couple bought one or two movies every time they went abroad. Wim van Leer had a small plane and they flew across Israel to screen films. His wife credits him with starting the film clubs, then pushing her to take them over. Back then, they had 130 films that she kept under the guest room bed – now there are 40,000 in the Israeli Film Archives, including many films from prewar eastern Europe and Holocaust footage that can’t be seen anywhere else.

Between the interviews, including with Lia van Leer (her husband has died), friends and colleagues, and the archival photos and film clips, Lia is as compelling as the documentary’s promotional material says it is. Van Leer understood that films are a cultural asset, says one interviewee. And she is still involved in protecting and proliferating those assets. As she states in the documentary, “What would I do otherwise?”

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Also from Israel, My Lovely Sister (Ahoti Ha’Yaffah) is described as “a modern Moroccan-Jewish legend,” “a love triangle between the primitively superstitious Rahma, her rude husband Robert, and the ghost of Rahma’s beautiful sister Marie, who died from the pain of banishment.”

Rahma is not only superstitious but highly judgmental, stubborn and racist, having banished her sister for marrying an Arab, who, by all appearances, seems like a very sweet and caring man. Robert is more than rude, but rather a disgusting philanderer who has eyes for Marie, which is more likely the reason for Marie’s banishment than her marriage to Ali. Marie is the main victim, but Robert and Rahma’s adult son and daughter must also deal with the damage inflicted upon them by their parents’ dysfunction.

It’s a testament to the acting that the characters in My Lovely Sister evoke a visceral reaction. Rahma and particularly Robert are hard to like, as are even their children. In addition to the difficulty of empathizing with most of the family, the film’s slow pacing makes it hard to enjoy fully. However, to prove that one person’s opinion is just that, My Lovely Sister has garnered praise, acting awards and nominations, including for best film and best director.

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Wonderful music and a touching story combine to make Iraq ’n’ Roll one of the festival’s must-see films. It opens with the unveiling of Al-Kuwaiti Brothers Street in Tel Aviv. The first shots are of happy people, including rock musician Dudu Tassa, then people in the crowd are interviewed, many of whom are upset: Who are these brothers? There was no consultation about the street name change. One man hopes that people don’t wreck the sign because it says Kuwait. Tassa looks dismayed, confused.

Jump to a clip from Iraqi Television, 2003: “Salah Al-Kuwaiti is the brother of composer Dauod Al-Kuwaiti. He played violin and Dauod Al-Kuwaiti played oud. Salah Al-Kuwaiti is the inventor of modern Iraqi music. You could say that Salah Al-Kuwaiti was the greatest composer Iraq birthed in the modern era.”

Carmella Tassa, Dauod Al-Kuwaiti’s daughter, is interviewed first, and she explains that her son, Dudu Tassa, was born six months after her father died. She is joined later by Tassa in a separate interview, and they discuss his grandfather, how he didn’t want his own kids to play instruments because it was no way to make a living. Tassa finds out that his mother loved the oud, wanted to learn to play it, and that she wanted to be a singer. She shares that she, too, is worried about her son being a musician – there’s no long-term security in music, she tells him after he assures he’s been earning an OK living at it for some 10 years already. There is a comfortable, tender rapport between mother and son.

Dudu Tassa wants to both learn more about his familial roots, as well as his musical ones, and he sets off on the mission of finding out more about the Al-Kuwaiti brothers and their music. He talks with Nahum Aharon, head of the Arabic Music Archive, from whom he secures recordings. Tassa notes that one was from 1960. He says, “To think my grandfather sang so many songs, and Salah wrote hundreds of songs. It’s so powerful! Even 70 years later, it works. It will last forever.”

Aharon plays one of the tapes. They talk about how musicians, especially Iraqis (singing in Arabic), weren’t respected in Israel at the time the brothers were trying to make a living – which they did from a housewares store, though they played weddings, bar mitzvahs and other concerts. Being musicians in Israel was a far cry from the fame and respect they received in Iraq before they immigrated in 1951 because of increasing antisemitism in Iraq; at one point, Shlomo Al-Kuwaiti, Salah’s son, shows Tassa a gold watch that was given to his father by King Razi – a present from a Muslim king to Jewish musicians, he notes.

Viewers meet members of the family, friends of the brothers, their fellow musicians and others; and see and hear clips of the brothers and their band in action. Tassa also speaks (and performs) with musician Yair Dalal, who has been keeping Tassa’s grandfather’s music alive for more than 20 years. Dalal is thrilled that Tassa has undertaken the revival of the music as well: he apparently called Tassa and said, “Let’s make some Iraq ’n’ roll. We’re both into it. The two complement each other. You provide the rock, and I’ll bring the Iraq. I think it’s an amazing project. One of the greatest projects I’ve ever done.”

There are several poignant scenes in this documentary, including Tassa helping his mother’s dream of becoming a singer come true, when he convinces her to sing his adaptation of his grandfather’s music on a recording and in concert. It ends with a quote from Salah Al-Kuwaiti, a recording of him saying it while the translation appears: “Music is a broad great art, it’s endless like the sea. Everyone takes a little water from the sea and it never runs out. No one can learn and achieve everything he wants, because art is greater. We’ve learned a lot but there’s always more and more....”

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea screens on Nov. 7, 7 p.m.; Return to Byzantium on Nov. 8, 7 p.m.; Naomi on Nov. 8, 9:15 p.m.; Lia on Nov. 9, 2 p.m.; My Lovely Sister on Nov. 12, 9:15 p.m.; and Iraq ’n’ Roll on Nov. 13, 4:30 p.m. For the full film festival program and to purchase tickets, visit vjff.org.

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