Blue Rodeo founders Greg Keelor, left, and Jim Cuddy at the Whistler Film Festival. (photo from the festival)
The music documentary Blue Rodeo: Lost Together by director Dale Heslip was named winner of the 2024 Audience Award for a feature-length film at the Whistler Film Festival last week.
“The Audience Awards are a fun, yet important, way for our guests to have their say in the programming we put together at the Whistler Film Festival,” said director of film programming Robin Smith.
The world premiere of Blue Rodeo: Lost Together was attended by band founders Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy, along with Heslip and producer Corey Russell. Francine Dibacco is also billed as a producer on the project. A Q&A with Keelor, Cuddy and Heslip was moderated by media personality and MuchMusic veteran George Stroumboulopoulos, also featured in the film.
“We were completely thrilled with having our world premiere at the Whistler Film Festival and the magical night we shared with the audience,” said Russell. “This award means so much and we want to thank the fans who took the time to see our film.”
Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum opens at VIFF Centre June 14.
Jacob Appelbaum was an influential internet freedom, privacy and free speech activist. He collaborated with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which Assange founded in 2006 to publish leaked documents and information. He helped the journalists with whom whistleblower Edward Snowden shared documents make the stories public. And he was prominent in the TOR Project (aka “the dark web”). Then, suddenly, Appelbaum took himself out of the spotlight.
Writer, director and producer Jamie Kastner wanted to know why. He also wanted to know more about this well-known yet little-known “hacktivist” and the subculture in which Appelbaum operated. The result is the documentary Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum, which screens at VIFF Centre June 14-17 and June 20.
“I first saw Appelbaum in another documentary about WikiLeaks, in which he was playing a supporting role,” Kastner told the Independent. “He jumped off the screen both for his charisma and his clear-eyed and apparently fearless political commitment. I learned about the broad strokes of the scandal in which he was later involved, became intrigued not only by what had happened with him, but by this whole activist community about which I had known little.”
After being accused of sexual abuse in 2016, Appelbaum left the United States for Germany. It is there, reads the documentary’s PR material, that Kastner “finds him, adamant that he is the victim of government black ops, ‘canceled’ without legal process or recourse, punished for who he is, and for what he represents.”
“Though I’m sure even he would not claim that all the work he has done has been flawless,” said Kastner, “to me there remains at least an aspect to the work he’s done, regardless of what may or may not have come later, that represents a fearless standing up to authority, taking significant personal risks to expose abuses of power and to help improve people’s lives by making them better informed about governments and surveillance.”
He continued, “As lawyer Margaret Ratner Kunstler explains in the film, in an era in which journalism has shrunk and become ever more controlled by government and/or large corporations, the significance of so-called leakers and hackers has grown to become one of our last sources of unfiltered news and information.”
Kastner gave the examples of WikiLeaks having “released Chelsea Manning’s leaks, including the ‘Collateral Murder’ video of American drones killing civilians and journalists in Iraq in 2007, and a trove of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016, among many other controversial releases.”
In 2013, Snowden, “a former contractor for the National Security Agency, America’s cyber-intelligence gathering service … leaked a vast trove of documents revealing the information gathering practices of the US and its ‘Five Eyes’ allies countries, including how data was gathered covertly on their own citizens,” said Kastner.
With Snowden, the filmmaker added, Appelbaum “helped the journalists to whom Snowden leaked his documents both manage the technology involved, and investigate and disseminate stories arising from Snowden’s leaks, including penning a cover story in German newsmagazine Der Speigel revealing that the US was spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.”
Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum was about five years in the making.
“It was a slow and wary process, once contact was made, of gaining access to Appelbaum and establishing trust on both sides,” explained Kastner. “I knew he was a controversial, brilliant and at times troubled figure, but I approached the story with an open mind. It struck me as a fascinating story in which one person’s trajectory tracked the rise and fall of a movement that, for a time, was rocking the world.
“I worked with a team of researchers to gain necessary context and try to build relationships within this very wary community. I worked extensively – features, in my experience, take six months or so in editing – with my collaborator Michael Hannan in the edit suite, to try to craft a film that would make the audience experience the real-life spy quality I experienced in entering into Appelbaum’s world, in which things, at times, seem too fantastical to be true – but sufficient evidence is there to suggest they are not false.”
Kastner’s many credits – through his and wife Laura Baron Kastner’s Cave 7 Productions – include The Skyjacker’s Tale (2016), There Are No Fakes (2019) and Charlotte’s Castle (2023). Cave 7 documentaries have not only garnered award recognition but inspired action. There Are No Fakes, for example, helped launch “a criminal investigation into widespread fraudulent production of and distribution of Indigenous art,” leading to “eight arrests, 40 charges laid and 1,000 paintings seized,” notes the company.
As a documentarian, Kastner is especially aware of the evasiveness of “the truth” and its often-subjective nature. While he said, “I still admire the same qualities about Appelbaum that first drew me to the subject, his political spirit and work,” the making of the documentary took him to all sorts of places he hadn’t expected.
“Learning about the community from which he and Assange sprung made me realize the film was about a larger story, larger issues which the narrative of Appelbaum’s life raises,” said Kastner. “You don’t have to like him, the film is not an apologia or a hagiography. I investigate the accusations as extensively as possible. Ultimately, as the title suggests, the film equally became about the people who don’t want to talk about him, and the many reasons for that. I don’t think I had fixed ideas about the ‘truth’ going into this film. I don’t pretend the film leaves with any one conclusion, but rather hopefully, is the jumping-off point for further discussion.”
Little Richard, left, and Jackie Shane. A still from the film Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, which closes the DOXA Documentary Film Festival on May 11. (image from NFB and Banger Films)
An incredible voice, a charismatic performer, a unique human being. Yet, most of us have never heard of Jackie Shane, a rising R&B star in the 1950s and ’60s, who appeared to disappear in 1971.
Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s feature-length documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story closes the DOXA Documentary Film Festival on May 11 at Simon Fraser University’s Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema. In addition to Toronto Jewish community member Rosenberg-Lee, who may attend the festival, Winnipeg Jewish community member Toby Gillies is coming to Vancouver with co-director Natalie Baird for the May 10 screening of their short, Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying, which also takes place at SFU’s Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema.
An R&B legend
A Banger Films and National Film Board of Canada co-production, Any Other Way mixes animation and real-life footage, using Shane’s music, recorded phone conversations between Mabbott and Shane, as well as other interviews, photos and the sole recorded performance of Shane to tell the transgender artist’s story. And it’s a fascinating story, from her leaving her home of Nashville, because of safety concerns, as a queer person, to being a musician in a traveling carnival, to leaving the carnival for Montreal, then leaving Montreal for Toronto, where she immediately felt at home.
By 1963, Shane was a sensation. Her recording of “Any Other Way” was a hit, even though radio stations in Toronto at the time generally did not play Black music – people called CHUM Radio so much they had to play the song and it rose to #2. Shane was invited onto The Ed Sullivan Show but turned them down because they wouldn’t let her perform with makeup, dressed as she wanted; she didn’t do American Bandstand, saying it was a racist show. Shane chose not to do other shows or tour. She recorded her one live album in Toronto.
But not being able to be her true self took its toll and Shane walked away from her success in 1971, changed her name and moved. “I chose Los Angeles because I wanted to feel something else,” she says in the film.
For family reasons, she eventually had to return to Nashville, where she became a recluse, only emerging in 2016 for a reissue of her songs. Nominated for a Grammy in 2018, she was ready to tour, but died in 2019, before that could happen.
Among the treasures found in Shane’s storage unit was an autobiography she had handwritten, as well as unreleased recordings.
“Those discoveries … were incredible,” said Mabbott in an interview on the NFB website. “After Jackie passed away, we started working with her family, who didn’t know that Jackie existed, and then inherited her incredible archive. As they were discovering who Jackie was, we were understanding her through her jewelry and tapes. What was also born out of that is the family’s story, which was a slightly unexpected creative approach.
“Hearing the family talk about her, learn about her legacy and describe what it meant to them was obviously very personal but also really universal. This is a family that lived blocks away from her, didn’t know she was there and missed out on having her. I think that a lot of us feel that loss and that translates in all sorts of ways.”
Happy imaginings
A still from the short Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying, co-directed by Toby Gillies and Natalie Baird, which screens May 10 at SFU’s Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, as part of this year’s DOXA festival. (image from NFB)
The NFB short film Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying also explores loss. The PR material describes the seven-minute work as a “meditation on love, grief and imagination,” which “celebrates life and the transformative ability of art to elevate and transcend us.”
Featuring Edith Almadi, the short uses Almadi’s artwork and words to spur contemplation of the bonds people form, and what it’s like to lose a loved one. In this case, Almadi is recalling her son, who recently died.
“I fly with him,” she says, and she feels happiness. In the animation of Almadi’s artwork, we see her son fly to the moon and beyond, with fairies, butterflies and other creatures. Not only is she with her son in her art, but also with everyone she loves. In her imagination, she is totally free.
“Our initial motivation for interviewing Edith was to save memories for ourselves – we find the way she speaks fascinating and poetic,” write Gillies and Baird in a directors’ statement. “When Edith looks at her drawings, she sees her memories and fantasies. She is able to escape her physical circumstance, through entering her marker and watercolour worlds.”
Gillies and Baird have led an art program at Winnipeg’s Misericordia Health Centre since 2014, and that’s where they met Almadi, a Hungarian immigrant in her late 80s, who uses a wheelchair.
“In our time knowing Edith, she has always loved sharing her outlook publicly,” the directors write. “As we have developed the film, we have shown Edith our progress along the way. She says, ‘That’s me’ and ‘That’s all I have to give’ proudly. Facilitating art-making in this personal care home has allowed us to meaningfully connect with many people in their last stages of life. As directors, this film gives us the opportunity to share this one particular experience of intimacy found through collaborative art-making.”
DOXA runs May 2-12. For tickets and the full festival lineup, visit doxafestival.ca.
Yoav Brill’s documentary Apples and Oranges, about a moment in the history of the kibbutz movement, is mesmerizing. (photo by Avraham Eilat)
The 2024 Vancouver Jewish Film Festival takes place in person April 4-14 and online April 15-19. As usual, a diversity of offerings is included in this year’s festival and the Independent will review several films in this and upcoming issues. The Vancouver Jewish Film Centre also sponsors events throughout the year and some screenings take place before the annual festival begins. Full festival details will be online at vjff.org as April approaches.
Idealism remembered
Amid the euphoric aftermath of the 1967 war and the enduring popularity of the 1958 Leon Uris book Exodus (and its 1960 film incarnation), thousands of Jews and non-Jews descended on Israel to volunteer on kibbutzim.
They came to experience and emulate “the embodiment of man’s highest ideals – the kibbutznik,” as an apparently promotional film clip declares in Yoav Brill’s mesmerizing documentary Apples and Oranges. In just one particular spurt, 7,000 volunteers arrived in Israel en masse from around the world.
Through the recollections of aging Scandinavians, Brits, South Africans and others, and with nostalgia-inducing archival footage, the documentary shines a light on the socialist idealism and hippie adventurism that motivated these people to travel to the farming communities of rural Israel. Many returned, to Sweden, Denmark, wherever, and formed associations to support the kibbutzim and drum up more volunteers. So successful were they that the supply exceeded the demand. One group chartered a jumbo jet to go from Stockholm to Tel Aviv but the Israelis had to admit they had no use for 340 volunteers.
Generally, the spirit of the overseas visitors was welcomed, though the social impacts were not negligible. The temporary nature of their visits was disrupting. A middle-aged man reflects on his perspective as a kid on a kibbutz, welcoming all the strangers who became like big brothers and sisters, only to have his heart broken every time the groups departed from what he calls “the kibbutz fantasy.”
Strangers from another world – blond, exotic, sophisticated and drinking milk with their meals – descended on a cloistered society where all the teens had been together since kindergarten, introducing predictable social and hormonal disruptions. For their parts, many of the volunteers soon discovered they had no aptitude for the tasks to which they were set, although at least one Brit made use of his talents performing Shakespeare for an audience of cattle.
Many of the overseas youngsters were unabashedly out for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. As one woman interviewed in the documentary says, “If there weren’t female volunteers at [Kibbutz] Mishmar HaSharon, many of our boys would still be virgins.”
In one incident that apparently caused national outrage, a group distributed hashish-laden brownies to an entire community, including at least one 8-year-old child, a crime that is not the least bit funny – but, of course, is hilarious when recounted by octogenarians who experienced it.
With their Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan LPs, the foreigners brought a little bit of Woodstock with them, and took away some Israeli dance routines. But the adventure, as the viewer knows more than do the figures in the old footage, would not end well. Terrorism, including a highly publicized attack in which a volunteer was murdered, would strangle the flow of future volunteers.
The documentary is a masterpiece of the genre, capturing the joy and exuberance of the experience for both Israelis and the visitors, but addressing the serious problems the interactions raised. The clash of cultures introduced existential issues, including around conversion, mixed marriages, secularization and, of course, the collapse of the traditional kibbutz.
The apples and oranges of the title, we are to understand, are the people who came together on the kibbutzim, as much as the produce they harvested.
Critics of the volunteer phenomenon seem to place some of the blame for the collapse of the kibbutz system on the labour underclass they represented, which undermined the egalitarian foundations of the movement.
The kibbutz network has largely petered out, almost entirely in spirit if not completely in form, and some of the Jews and non-Jews who came during the heyday have remained and integrated to varying degrees in the society that Israel has become. In one instance, an aging, bearded former volunteer actualizes his idealism by leading a ukulele orchestra.
The collapse of the idealistic experiment that the end of the film documents is expected but no less depressing for that. The slice of history and the magnificence of the story, so vividly told in the film, will stay with the viewer.
Transcendence of song
In Less than Kosher, the real star is the voice of Shaina Silver-Baird as Viv, an atheist turned cantor. (photo from Menemsha Films)
In Less than Kosher, a number of fairly two-dimensional character sketches come together – but with a redeeming twist.
A feature film that began its life as serialized online videos has the feel of excellent amateurism. Wayward Jewish girl meets rabbi’s bad boy son. Overbearing Jewish mother, well-intentioned buffoonish rabbi, go-along-to-get-along intermarried stepdad and hyper-chatty high school friend flesh out the cast.
Sitcom-like circumstances turn the atheist young woman into unlikely cantor. But the outstanding component of the film, the real star, is the voice of Shaina Silver-Baird, the lead actor and co-producer (with Michael Goldlist) of this cute confection.
The unlikely cantor Viv, whose once-promising pop music career is on the skids, has the voice of an angel and the story is less about her family or her romance with the (married) rabbi’s son than about the transcendent power of song. When she opens her lungs, Viv ushers in a changed world – and Silver-Baird’s voice invites the viewer into it. Music video-style segments, which Viv is dismayed to have dubbed “Judeopop,” raise the film to a different level. Liturgical music goes Broadway. Amy Winehouse does “Shalom Aleichem.”
A tiki-themed shiva is truly the icing on the sheet cake.
Mysterious case
The Goldman Case is a dramatic reenactment of the case of Pierre Goldman. (photo from Menemsha Films)
He was guilty of much, but was he guilty of murder? Pierre Goldman maintained he was innocent of the latter charges and a based-on-a-true-story film explores not only a man’s possible guilt but the intergenerational impacts of Polish-French Jewish life in the mid-20th century and their potential explanations for some unusual behaviours.
The Goldman Case is a dramatic reenactment of a famous (in France, at least) case of the Jewish son of Polish resistance heroes, whose own life was impacted by an apparent need to fill the giant shoes of his parents. The son wanted to be “a Jewish warrior” and so became a communist revolutionary, traveling to Latin America, Prague and elsewhere in search of opportunities for valour.
Charged with a series of crimes, including the murder during a holdup of two pharmacists, Goldman was convicted in 1974 and sentenced to life imprisonment, though he maintained he was innocent in the two deaths. Following the 1975 publication of his memoirs, the judicial system reconsidered his case and major French voices, including Jean-Paul Sartre, took up his cause. This film is a (massively condensed) court procedural of that retrial.
Goldman’s Jewishness was not on trial but, interestingly, his defence team built their case partly around his family’s experiences.
The case – and the film – end with a new verdict. But the dramatic story would continue. Audiences will no doubt race to Google more about Goldman and his crimes and punishments. Enduring mysteries, though, will make the search necessarily unsatisfying. This cannot be said of the film, though, which is a gripping enactment, enlivened by the extremely animated courtroom drama, which suggests the French judicial system tolerates a great deal more outbursts than we expect in Hollywood depictions of North American judicial proceedings.
Adam is one of the potential converts interviewed in the documentary Converts: The Journey of Becoming Jewish, directed by Rebecca Shore and Oren Rosenfeld, which is part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. (photo from convertsmovie.com)
A religion that encourages questions, one in which people can speak directly with God. A religion that’s thousands of years old, which so many have attempted to wipe out, yet still flourishes. A religion that’s intellectual and communal, which involves both the head and the heart.
Danya (photo from convertsmovie.com)
These are just some of the aspects of Judaism highlighted in Converts: The Journey of Becoming Jewish, directed by Rebecca Shore and Oren Rosenfeld. The 70-minute documentary is part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which runs April 4-14 in theatres and April 15-19 online.
Converts follows Adam, Danya and Bianka as they go through the conversion process. Each have their own reasons for wanting to become Jewish.
Adam, a student at York University when we meet him, grew up in a violence-filled neighbourhood in Toronto. His father used the family’s savings – that could have gone into moving the family elsewhere –to establish a church, which failed. Adam was attracted to Judaism because, unlike the Christianity he grew up with, Judaism gave him the space to ask questions and to speak with God directly, though giving up belief in Jesus was hard, he admits.
Danya, a businesswoman from Costa Rica, found out in high school that she has Spanish-Portuguese Jewish roots, that her ancestors were forced to convert to Catholicism from Judaism centuries ago. She feels that ancestral pull and uproots her life, traveling to Israel with her daughter in the hope of converting and living there.
Bianka (photo from convertsmovie.com)
Bianka, a PhD student in chemistry at the University of Warsaw, lives in Radom, Poland. She immerses herself in a few other religions before finding comfort in what she considers Judaism’s scientific approach, but also in the warmth of the Jewish community, which she discovers by attending synagogue and holiday events.
Well-constructed and well-paced, Converts is a fascinating look at identity, family, community, religion, the search for meaning and the possibilities of change and self-actualization.
A still from the documentary Resistance: They Fought Back. (theyfoughtback.com)
Resistance: They Fought Back screens March 3, 2pm, at Rothstein Theatre. Presented by the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre, special guest at the screening will be director Paula S. Apsell.
The film’s synopsis reads: “We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed ‘Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.’ Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel and the U.S., Resistance: They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis.”
For tickets ($10) to the screening, visit vjff.org.
Actor Catherine O’Hara in a still from the four-minute video All of Us Shine by Jewish community member Hart Snider. (See jewishindependent.ca/revisiting-shop-class-misery.) For the 12th year, the NFB brought together acclaimed filmmakers to create short cinematic tributes to Canadian performing arts legends, as the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards honoured laureates with two televised specials last month, one on CBC and one on Radio-Canada. All the short films are now available to watch (for free) at nfb.ca.
Also released early last month, marking Transgender Awareness Week, was the feature-length documentary Beauty by Christina Willings (jewishindependent.ca/liked-beauty-not-wall). It and more than 40 other related short and feature-length documentary and animated films can be accessed at nfb.ca/channels/lgbtq2.
Esther Turan has produced an eclectic range of work. (photo from Moviebar Productions)
There is a Hungarian expression that translates roughly as “you are as many people as the number of languages that you speak.” This aptly describes the versatility of Budapest-born director and producer Esther Turan.
Turan, who spoke to the Independent from her home in Los Angeles, has melded eclectic cinematic styles into a considerable body of work. And she has done so within both a society and an industry frequently faulted for their limited opportunities for women. Among her credentials are director of documentaries about Budapest’s underground music scene; co-producer of an adaptation of G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday; producer of In the Same Garden, a Bosnian film about Turkish-Armenian relations; and creator of commercials for dozens of internationally recognized companies.
Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Budapest’s rich architecture and comparatively low production costs have made the city an attractive film location. Turan was barely out of her teens when, as a student at Hungary’s University of Drama and Film, her proficiency in English won her assignments as a casting director for several films shot in Budapest in the early 2000s, including Den of Lions, with Bob Hoskins.
In 2004, she became a founding member of Moviebar Productions, a full-service production company with offices in Budapest and – as of 2017 – Los Angeles. “I teamed up with a woman named Viktoria Tepper and we started producing television commercials,” explained Turan. “Soon our clientele grew, and we took on more projects for international companies.”
To date, Moviebar has produced 30 films and TV productions, in addition to more than 500 television commercials for brands such as BMW, Vogue and Nike.
“I have around 20 projects, in differing stages of development, underway at both the Budapest and Los Angeles offices,” Turan said. “One of my goals as a filmmaker is to tell stories that could inspire other women. My first TV series idea is about an exceptional woman who created a revolution and was a rebel herself. It’s also important for me to collaborate with other female filmmakers from all over the world and to share our visions. I would love to be involved in more projects, both with European and American female filmmakers.”
Currently, Turan is working on a miniseries about fashion designer Klara Rotschild, the “Coco Chanel of the East,” and contemplating a documentary about her grandfather, famed mathematician Paul Turan. His friendship and collaboration with eccentric mathematical icon Paul Erdos, known as “the oddball’s oddball,” would figure prominently in the film. Erdos was renowned for traveling from math conference to math conference around the globe, with a suitcase containing all his worldly goods.
Turan, too, has traveled to pursue her passions and her heritage. She studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for example, to perfect her Hebrew. “Because of the fondness I had for it from earlier trips, I found myself missing Israel,” she recalled.
One of her latest projects is the anticipated The Reckoning, a horror film about a witch hunt set in 1665 New England that stars Charlotte Kirk (Vice), Joe Anderson (The Crazies) and Steven Waddington (The Imitation Game). Coincidentally, the movie is set against the backdrop of the Great Plague, and portrays the witch hunts conducted in its wake. Protagonist Grace Haverstock (Kirk) grapples with the tragic death of her husband, Joseph (Anderson), in a society consumed by fear and death. Later, in retaliation for having rejected the advances of her landlord, Squire Pendleton (Waddington), Grace is falsely accused of being a witch, and is imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit.
In addition to The Reckoning, the third instalment of Turan’s documentary series Budapest Underground was just released. In it, in collaboration with co-director Anna Koltay, she explores Budapest’s musical subcultures in the late 1990s. This latest instalment focuses on electronic music. Accompanied by selected archival footage, it examines the genre’s emergence and growth, its key players, styles and sub-genres. The previous episodes delved into hardcore punk and hip-hop.
As Eastern Europe emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s from several decades of communist rule, Budapest’s nascent underground music scene flourished, a blend of Western influences combined with a distinctively Magyar flavour. “I was into all this new music happening in Budapest at the time, especially rock and hip-hop,” said Turan. “It was really a great time.”
A fourth instalment in the series will be about underground rock and is currently in production.
Mike Wallace is Here is one of the smartest and best documentaries of 2019. (photo from Cinando)
In the streaming universe, as with all entertainment, there’s the stuff that everyone watches and talks about. But that’s just the tip of a vast catalogue, a lot of it quite good, that doesn’t get the hype and the buzz. Here’s an eclectic list of accessible Jewish-themed movies that received some hosannas on their initial release. The more obscure (and great) Jewish films of recent years will be on a future list, since, alas, it appears we’ll have ample time to watch more after catching up with these.
The Zigzag Kid (j-flix): The Toronto Jewish Film Foundation has launched a free streaming platform, j-flix, with dozens of terrific recent fiction and documentary features and shorts. You could get lost there for weeks. I suggest you start with this irresistible, action-packed, family-friendly adventure about a precocious Dutch boy, adapted in 2011 by a Belgian director from Israeli author David Grossman’s novel.
The Women’s Balcony (Chai Flicks): Menemsha Films, the venerable U.S. distributor of Jewish-themed films from around the world, offers a free 30-day trial of their streaming platform. (A subscription will then run you $5.99 US a month.) Israeli director Emil Ben-Shimon and screenwriter Shlomit Nehama set their warm and wonderful romp in a small Orthodox congregation dislocated by structural damage to the shul.
Tel Aviv on Fire (Amazon Prime): Sameh Zoabi’s clever comedy about a Palestinian soap-opera writer trying to navigate the demands of both his bosses and an Israeli checkpoint commander will lift your spirits without insulting your IQ. Make a batch of hummus first.
1945 (Amazon Prime): This extraordinary black-and-white Hungarian film parlays the postwar arrival of two exhausted Jews at a small village into an exposé of guilt, betrayal, corruption and murder. One of the most acclaimed European films of 2017, 1945 is a gripping and haunting reckoning with dark history.
Mike Wallace is Here (Hulu): One of the smartest and best documentaries of 2019 examines, entirely through archival television footage, the ambitious journalist who made 60 Minutes essential viewing. Not a Jewish film, oddly enough, but a riveting one.
Disobedience (Amazon Prime): Sebastian Lelio’s taut, understated 2017 drama, adapted from Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s novel, is a remarkably nonjudgmental story that follows a volatile, adrift woman’s (Rachel Weisz) return to London after the death of her estranged father, an Orthodox rabbi. Community, identity, responsibility, sexuality – everything is on the table.
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz (Netflix): The last surviving U.S. attorney from the Nuremberg trials has an impeccable memory, a spotless moral compass and enormous gravitas. If your fortitude is at a low ebb, Ben Ferencz will give you the strength to persevere.
A Serious Man (Netflix): The Coen Brothers’ most personal and most Jewish film, filmed in and around their childhood stomping grounds of Minneapolis-St. Paul, is a painfully hilarious moral fable guaranteed to provoke a cross-generational dinner table conversation. One politically incorrect question that this devious 2009 movie poses: Are Jews our own worst enemies?
Michael Foxis a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.
The National Film Board of Canada (nfb.ca) offers a selection of some 4,000 short and feature-length films, whether you’re looking for animation, documentary or fiction. Explore the Cartoons for Kids section for the latest releases.
Enjoy searching the many choices available from the NFB, Jewish-related or not. Recently added titles include Where the Land Ends, a documentary feature by Loïc Darses, about the places that created Quebec, exploring the historical narrative, as a group of young people who were not old enough to vote in the 1995 referendum express their views; Ice Breakers, a documentary short by Sandi Rankaduwa on the Black athletes who helped pioneer modern hockey, through the story of Josh Crooks, an African-Canadian player; and The Great List of Everything, an animated webseries by comic book artists Cathon and Iris Boudreau, as well as Francis Papillon.
New films are being added to nfb.ca all the time, and they’re always free to view.
