VIFF documentaries impress

BASYA LAYE

The weather has cooled, leaves are turning brown and the High Holidays are behind us. Time to head inside to the city’s movie theatres to take in this year’s offerings at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Sept. 27-Oct. 12. There are several films with Jewish interest at the festival, four of which are reviewed below.

HaDira (The Flat), Israeli filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger’s second feature-length documentary, has been racking up the awards in Israel and beyond, and for good reason. The film begins casually, with a familiar event – cleaning out the home of a recently deceased grandparent. As the Goldfinger family pitches in to go through the grandmother’s belongings, the filmmaker discovers, while looking through an old stack of papers, that his grandparents were good friends – before and after the war – with a high-ranking Nazi propaganda minister and his wife, a relationship that developed after a trip the Nazi couple took to Palestine in 1933 to investigate Zionism and the “Jewish Question.” The shocking and distressing discovery leads Goldfinger to dig deeper, locating a trove of old correspondence between the couples and, finally, making trips to Germany to meet with the Nazi couple’s daughter. On his second trip to Germany, he invites his mother – who has been resistant to learning more about her parents’ lives, even about her own early life – to join him.

HaDira is as much about family – what we think we know about each other and the psychology of living in denial – as it is a fascinating historical record of a confounding and, frankly, repugnant relationship. With the help of historians who shed light on the family’s unusual story, Goldfinger humanizes, but doesn’t excuse, those involved. This is a film whose unvarnished moral questions come back again and again after viewing.

HaDira screens Sept. 27, 3:45 p.m., Sept. 30, 6:45 p.m., and Oct. 2, 3:15 p.m., at the Granville 7 Cinemas.

***

Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally is another film that centres on a long – and involved – search for the truth. It also celebrates the long arm of justice and the work of those involved in Holocaust restitution efforts.

In 1938, a Nazi steals the Egon Schiele painting “A Portrait of Wally” from Lea Bondi, a Jewish gallery owner who had received the painting as a gift from the artist. After the war, the small but striking 1912 painting ends up in Vienna’s Belvedere Museum and then in the hands of Schiele collector Rudolf Leopold, who has a surprising relationship with the painting’s original owner.

Almost 60 years later, at a fateful 1997 exhibition of Schiele’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the painting’s true provenance was finally determined. However, it would take the offices of the United States District Attorney, the New York State Attorney and the Department of Homeland Security to sort out the legalities and determine the future of the now nearly $20 million painting.

Portrait of Wally contains several twists and turns, and moves at a fast and suspenseful pace. This film is about a painting stolen by the Nazis, but it is also about who are the players and what’s at risk in the high-stakes, multi-billion dollar world of stolen art.

Portrait of Wally screens Sept. 30, 6:15 p.m., and Oct. 2, 3:15 p.m., at Granville 7 Cinemas, and Oct. 10, 10:45 a.m., at the Pacific Cinémathèque.

***

Hebreo: The Search for Salomone Rossi is a short film at 45 minutes but it contains a treasure trove of music and Jewish history. The film follows the members of Profeti della Quinta, an Israeli Renaissance and early Baroque vocal ensemble, as they arrive in Mantua, Italy, to visit the birthplace of Salomone Rossi Hebreo (the Jew). Rossi is the first known composer of Jewish music, though his work has largely been lost over time.

Composing in the late 1500s and early 1600s, Rossi cuts an elusive figure: there are no records of his birth or death. All that remains are 13 volumes of music, including the seminal collection Songs of Solomon, which contains 33 Hebrew songs and Jewish prayers set to music. It is in Songs of Solomon that the term musika Ivrit (Hebrew music) is used for the first time in recorded history, considered by one Rossi historian as “the point of no return for Jewish culture in Europe and, arguably, the world.”

Much can be gleaned about Rossi’s life by exploring the history of Mantua’s Jews, a community that lived in relative (though unequal) harmony for many years until violence erupts in the early days of the 1600s, and the Jews are eventually expelled in 1630.

The film follows Profeti della Quinta as they prepare for a concert of Rossi’s works in the Palazzo Te, where the works might have been originally performed. The music is sumptuous, and the interviews, particularly with the members of the vocal ensemble, are enlightening.

Hebreo screens Sept. 27, 3 p.m., Oct. 2, 6:30 p.m., and Oct. 3, 2:30 p.m., at the Granville 7 Cinemas.

***

Touted as the next Buena Vista Social Club, Safinez Bousbia’s El Gusto: The Casbah Blues is a delightful story of chaabi, a mostly forgotten style of Algerian popular music.
The film revolves around Bousbia’s attempt to locate and bring together the musicians who were once part of the thriving Algiers chaabi scene. A form of popular music that melds religious chants together with Berber and Andalusian melodies, chaabi took hold in the working-class Casbah neighborhood of Algiers in the 1940s and ’50s. The music was almost lost after the country gained independence in 1962 – a revolution that saw the mass exodus of the country’s Jews, including many central chaabi musicians.

The film traces the history of the music, including its famous bandleader, El Hadj Muhammed El Anka. It is a redemptive and joyful look at a long-awaited reunion of the orchestra, largely avoiding the politics of what transpired during the bloody battle for Algiers, where Jews, again, became caught up in somebody else’s revolution and paid a heavy price.

The film intersperses interviews with the original musicians, Jews living mostly in Paris and Marseille and Muslim players still in Algeria, with archival footage of the French occupation and the war of independence. It also has plenty of music, and that’s what makes El Gusto especially enjoyable.

While the film glosses over much of the politics of what happened between Jews and Muslims during the war for independence and the mass exile of Algeria’s Jewish population, perhaps that’s exactly the point: the joy of creating music together can transcend race, religion and politics. There is great pleasure in watching these gentlemen reconnect, laugh, drink and play, after nearly 50 years apart.

El Gusto is sponsored by the Jewish Independent. It screens at Oct. 2, 3:30 p.m., and Oct. 11, noon, at the Granville 7 Cinemas, and Oct. 10, 6:30 p.m., at the Vogue.

Other films with Jewish interest that are screening at VIFF include Gainsbourg by Gainsbourg: An Intimate Self-Portrait by Pierre-Henry Salfati (France), Off-white Lies by Maya Kenig (Israel), Inch’allah by Anais Barbeau-Lavalette (Canada), When Day Breaks by Goran Paskaljevic (Serbia/France/Macedonia), Lore by Cate Shortland (Australia/Germany), Re:Generation Music Project by Amir Bar-Lev (United States) and A Late Quartet by Yaron Zilberman (United States).

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