VJFF – Page 2

Diverse and innovative films

A still from Amanda Kinsey’s documentary Jews of the Wild West, a series of vignettes that shines a light on a noteworthy and usually overlooked history.

The Wild West, Jews in Germany and a surprisingly vivacious Israeli seniors home feature among the diverse films at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival this year.

Somehow, we tend not to associate Jews with the legends that have built up around the development of the American West, a serious oversight that is in the crosshairs of filmmaker Amanda Kinsey’s documentary Jews of the Wild West.

The mythology of the Wild West is perhaps as much an invention of Hollywood as of history, so it is notable that the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, which introduced the genre of the cinematic Western, featured Gilbert “Broncho Billy” Anderson – né Max Aronson.

The myth of the West was no less inspiring to Jews than to other Americans and dreamers from around the world. Perhaps one of the most famous names in the lore was Wyatt Earp. The film introduces us to Josephine Marcus, who fled her family in San Francisco to become an actress and ended up being Earp’s wife. Earp himself is buried along with the Marcus family in a Jewish cemetery.

The gold rush drew Jewish peddlers and merchants to the West Coast in the late 19th century including, most famously, Levi Strauss, who left the Lower East Side and, via Panama, arrived in San Francisco. His brothers sent dry goods from New York and Levi sold them up and down the coast. When Jacob Davis, a tailor, was asked by a woman to construct pants that her husband wouldn’t burst out of, he imagined adding rivets. He took the idea to Strauss and the rest is American clothing history. As one historian notes, it was a Jew who invented “the most American of garments.”

The rapid industrialization in the mining sector is where the Guggenheim family got its start and so, while the name is now most associated with Fifth Avenue, the finest address in New York City, their start was in the gritty West of the 19th century.

We meet Ray Frank, the first woman said to have preached from a bimah. Called the “golden girl rabbi,” she was not ordained, but was apparently a phenomenon that drew crowds to her sermons.

Many people will know that Golda (Mabovitch/Meyerson) Meir spent formative years as an immigrant from Russia in Milwaukee and then Denver. This footnote to her history is often considered curious and interesting, but in this film it integrates the Jewish experience of the 20th century and its roots in the American West with the development of the Jewish state – the opening up of another frontier, one might say.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, seeing the poverty in the Lower East Side, actively encouraged migration to the West. The film introduces families who have worked the land for generations, some of whom have maintained their Jewish identity and at least one of whom was raised Methodist. But, it suggests, the thriving Jewish community of Denver owes much to the failed farmers of the West who made their way to the nearest metropolis to salvage their livelihoods.

The documentary is really a series of vignettes and at times the shift from one story to another is confusing but, as a whole, Jews of the Wild West successfully shines a light on a noteworthy and usually overlooked history.

* * *

The festival features two German films that complement each other in interesting ways.

In Masel Tov Cocktail, a short (about 30 minutes) film, high schooler Dima (Alexander Wertmann) welcomes viewers into his life just as he is suspended for a week as a result of punching a classmate in the face during an altercation in the washroom. The “victim,” Tobi (Mateo Wansing Lorrio), had taunted the Jewish Dima, graphically play-acting a victim in a gas chamber, a performance enhanced by the austere, sterile setting of the restroom’s porcelain-tiled walls. So begins an interplay of victim and perpetrator that is just one of several provocative themes weaving through this powerful short.

Dima’s family, it turns out, heralds from the former Soviet Union, like 90% of Jews in today’s Germany. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, the German government actively encouraged migration of Jews to revitalize Jewish life in the country. This fact, like other statistics and tidbits, is flashed across the screen.

Juxtapositions pack a punch, including Dima’s switching between a baseball cap and a kippa, perhaps reflecting his complex identities, as well as the schism in the identities of post-Holocaust Jews more broadly in a society that struggles to assimilate the idea of contemporary, living Jews in the context of the blood-soaked soil of their state. A shift from colour to black-and-white also evokes the stark break between the present and the past.

But the present and the past are themselves in conflict as Dima recounts how other Germans react when they learn he is Jewish. Why does he only meet Germans whose grandparents weren’t Nazis, he wonders. Statistic: a survey indicates that 29% of Germans think their ancestors helped Jews during the Holocaust, while the screen text helpfully informs us the number was more like 0.1%.

Dima’s teacher, who can’t utter the word Jew and struggles to get the word Shoah out of her mouth, wants Dima to share his family’s Holocaust story with the class. The film’s implication is that Dima’s family was largely spared the trauma of the Holocaust, but he decides to play along because, “There’s no business like Shoah business.”

Dima’s grandfather is taken in by the AfD, the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany party, convinced that their pro-Israel and anti-Muslim rhetoric means that they are defenders of the Jewish people. In a moment that confounds the AfD campaigner (and causes the viewer to reflect), Dima drags his grandfather away from the campaigner while yelling: “Don’t let foreigners take away your antisemitism.”

The film is kooky, funny and light, while also serious, dark and thoughtful throughout.

That description applies to the similarly named feature film Love and Mazel Tov, which features Anne, a non-Jewish bookstore owner who has Munich’s largest selection of Jewish titles and who herself is more than a little obsessed with all things Jewish – including potential romantic partners.

“Some are into fat. Some are into thin. Anne is into Jews,” a friend explains. This turns out to be more than a romantic or erotic attraction, perhaps a disordered response to national and family histories.

Thinking she has found not only a Jewish boyfriend but a doctor at that, Anna (Verena Altenberger) courts Daniel (Maxim Mehmet), who in typical cinematic fashion lets her believe what she wants to believe until the inevitable mix-up explodes in a farcical emotional explosion – though not before an excruciating family dinner.

Parts of the film exist on a spectrum between cringey and hilarious. The film features (at least) two fake Jews who don this identity for extremely different reasons, inviting reflections on passing, appropriation and the fine line between veneration and fetishization.

Both of these films use humour to excavate deeply troubling concepts of identity and addressing horrors of the past. They approach these challenging themes in truly innovative and entertaining ways.

* * *

Understated comedy is key to the success of Greener Pastures, an Israeli film in which Dov, a retired postal worker, has lost his home after a “pension fiasco” involving the privatization of the postal service.

He is a curmudgeonly old square when it comes to marijuana, which the government has decided should be available to anyone 75 and over, but he sees a moneymaking opportunity. Dov (Shlomo Bar-Aba) enlists a network of seniors to order medicinal cannabis and mail it to him so he can distribute it to his “connection,” who shops it around to younger consumers. This “kosher kush,” guaranteed “Grade A government-approved stuff” sold in tahini bottles, brings Dov into conflict with a two-bit drug kingpin in a wheelchair and, of course, a snooping police officer.

There is romance and suspense in this madcap caper, but there is also the theme of elder empowerment, along with the laughs.

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs online only March 3-13. For the full festival lineup and tickets, visit vjff.org.

Festival opener wows

A still of one of the humorous (and relatable) moments in Image of Victory, which is part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival opening night film is the epic Image of Victory, directed by Avi Nesher. It’s not with grandiosity that the movie leaves its mark, though there is some of that, but rather with the quiet moments of humanity it so movingly depicts.

Sombre piano music over which one can hear missiles flying, bombs exploding, wind blowing are heard as the initial credits are shown, modest white lettering on a black background, nothing showy. “There are moments when you try to make sense of your life,” begins the narrator, as black-and-white footage of a shot-out building appears, then a jeep, soldiers with rifles pointed, tanks. “You wonder if you made good use of the time God gave you on this earth. You seek someone to compare yourself to. Someone you think truly lived.”

For Egyptian journalist and filmmaker Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, that person is Mira Ben-Ari, though he doesn’t know her name or anything about her at the time. It is the image of her from decades ago that he cannot forget – battle-worn, staring down the Egyptian forces, she smiles, she takes out a gun and shoots. Cut to an older Hassanein, in his study, depressed and angry, watching the TV news about Israel and Egypt’s peace agreement, after decades of war. Was all the fighting and all the death it caused in vain? He blames himself for not having the courage to expose Egypt’s president as a traitor for making the peace deal. He idealizes Mira’s bravery and purpose, thinks back to when he was 24, and fearless – when he was assigned to document Egypt’s military operations against the soon-to-be-reestablished Jewish homeland.

Inspired by the Battle of Nitzanim in June 1948, in which the kibbutz was destroyed by Egypt, Image of Victory imagines what it might have been like on both sides of that conflict. Both Mira and Hassanein are based on real people, as are other characters in the film, and this movie is about a near-mythological event. The voiceover, the black-and-white footage, the fancy costumes of New Year’s Eve revellers in Cairo, idealistic kibbutzniks, zealous army commanders. Any one of these elements could have slipped into a larger-than-life portrayal, but director Avi Nesher shows restraint – and a valiant attempt at balance that has an air of realism, though the kibbutzniks are admittedly more developed entities.

The majority of the film takes place in chronological order, six months out from the battle. When we first see the kibbutzniks working the dusty land, they are doing so under occasional fire from the Egyptian farmers who were displaced after their landlord sold said land to the Jews. The rules of engagement are fascinating. After one altercation, the Egyptians yell to the kibbutzniks that they are all done on their side, and the Jews cease their fire so that both sides can safely collect their wounded and dead.

In the midst of the tension, life goes on in the kibbutz – there are broken hearts and newly starting relationships, there is joyous singing, dancing and piano playing, there is hard labour, there is frolicking on the beach. But underlying all the apparent normality is the hyper-reality of mortality, both because many of the residents and their recently arrived Haganah protectors are Holocaust survivors, as well as the threat of Egyptian attack. As one young soldier tells Mira, “You’d think it’s paradise if being here wasn’t risking death.”

After a brutal attack on a truck carrying supplies to the kibbutz, the Egyptian commander doesn’t want Hassanein to film the emptying of the truck of its supplies because it looks like they’re stealing. Perception is Hassanein’s constant battle – what he is being told to film and what he really wants to film. For example, during a lull in the fighting, he makes a film about two Arab villagers falling in love, which is trashed by the producer who hired him. People don’t want to watch that, yells the producer, they want war.

After the Egyptian forces are repelled by the newly declared state of Israel, Hassanein is ordered to film an Egyptian victory, so that King Farouk can save face. The enormity of the Egyptian army descends on Nitzanim, which Israel’s leaders – for ideological reasons encapsulated by the character of (real-life) commander Abba Kovner – have abandoned.

While the kibbutz’s children (including Mira’s young son) and some of the adults were evacuated or assigned to other defence tasks, the rest of the residents and soldiers were left to fend for themselves, vastly outnumbered. The real-life outcome is known: more than 30 kibbutz members and soldiers were killed, more than 100 taken prisoner. What Nesher’s film offers is an idea of the ambitions, the loves, the fears, and more, of some of those who were at the ground level, caught in a situation not entirely of their making.

The acting is phenomenal – adeptly showing the interplay of diverse characters, with their own senses of humour, their own past traumas, their own desires, their own measures of victory. The characters are more than stereotypes and the stories more nuanced than the ones we most often hear. Nesher wants us to be skeptical of national mythologies and of the media that help propel these misleading views, yet respectful of one another’s narratives, as complicated as they may be and no matter how divergent they may be from our own. It’s perhaps an impossible ask, but some ideals are worth dying for – or are they?

Image of Victory director Avi Nesher and producer Ehud Bleiberg participate in a live Q&A on March 6, 11 a.m. The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs March 3-13. For tickets: vjff.org.

A great diversity on screen

A still from the documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen.

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs March 3-13, and features more than 30 films, all of which will be available online for the duration of the festival. As always, there are shorts and features, fictional narratives and documentaries – presenting a great diversity of perspectives. This month, the JI offers readers a peek into the lineup.

Fifty years of Fiddler

Like a lot of people, Norman Jewison thought Norman Jewison was Jewish. When he was growing up in Toronto’s east end, other students would call out, “Hey Jewy!” Decades later, when he was one of Hollywood’s acclaimed filmmakers, it would come as a shock to many that someone with the word Jew as the root of their surname was, in fact, not Jewish. It hit Jewison earlier, when he tagged along to synagogue with one of the only actual Jewish kids in his school.

“When the melamed at the temple told me to leave, I thought, ‘What’s going on?’” he said. “Where do I belong?”

The feature-length documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen purports to tell the story of how the stage play based on Sholem Aleichem’s Anatevka tales turned into the cinematic blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof. It does that, but it is also very much a story of Jewison’s trajectory as an interpreter of historical and current events.

Jewison had already made a splash with his 1967 race-focused movie In the Heat of the Night when he conjured the idea of filming Fiddler. Friends and foes predicted failure. Too Jewish. Not a large enough potential audience. But Jewison forged ahead, certain that his version would universalize the story into “a film for everybody.” Arriving at a time of social upheaval in the United States and elsewhere, Fiddler’s underlying themes were relatable to many, Jewish or not.

Case in point: the film was huge in Japan. There may be next to no Jews in that country, but, in the early 1970s, when Fiddler was released, Japanese society, like many countries, was struggling to balance modernity and tradition.

The documentary Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen comes a half-century after Fiddler on the Roof’s screen debut. It interviews surviving contributors and actors, many of whom saw their early careers explode with the popularity of the movie. Rosalind Harris, now 75, played Tzeitel both on Broadway (after understudying for Bette Midler) and in the film. Her thrill at the film and her place in it is undiminished by time and she nearly steals the documentary.

The enthusiasm of Jewison himself seems equally undiminished. He tells of how he sought out Isaac Stern, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest violinist, to dub the music of the titular character. He dismissed Frank Sinatra’s entreaties to play Tevye and scored Topol, the Israeli actor (né Chaim Topol), who had played the lead in Israel and then in London, casting aside, in the process, Zero Mostel, Broadway’s longtime Tevye.

Diplomatic relations with the Soviet bloc at the time made it impossible to film in Ukraine, where Anatevka is set, so Jewison struck a deal with the “non-aligned” Yugoslavia and much of the filming took place in Lekenik (now in Croatia), in wooden buildings constructed based on historical architectural records. One commentator in the documentary notes the irony that the film about a disappeared community was filmed in what is now referred to as “the former Yugoslavia” – “another place that is no more.”

Jewison speaks emotionally about watching the film’s Israeli debut beside Golda Meir and a meeting he had with David Ben-Gurion, who told Jewison that whoever is crazy enough to choose to be a Jew is Jew.

“If I’m crazy enough to want to be Jewish, then I’m Jewish,” Jewison interprets Ben-Gurion’s words.

But when he received an Academy Award, he cheekily acknowledged the truth. “Not bad for a goy,” he joked.

Not bad for a Canuck, one might add.

The documentary’s director, Daniel Raim, will participate in a live Q&A on March 7, 7 p.m.

Shorts of all sizes

Since this year’s Jewish Film Festival is online and on demand, you can choose to view the numerous short films as a binge or watch one or two between features as a sort of visual amuse bouche.

At about 30 minutes, Paradise is on the long end of the “shorts” spectrum. It features Ala Dakka, who will be recognizable to Fauda fans, as the doe-eyed Palestinian boxer, Bashar. In real life, Dakka is an Arab Israeli who, in media interviews, has been open about his struggle with his identity. In this film, he plays Ali, who has just arrived at Eilat airport from his home in Berlin, to attend his sister’s wedding. After a fight over the phone with his father (it was cheaper to fly to Eilat than to Tel Aviv, so now he is going to miss the pre-wedding dinner), he decides to skip the festivities altogether and hitchhike to the Sinai. (This after a five-hour interrogation by border security at the airport, which doesn’t help either Ali’s frame of mind or his ability to make the celebratory banquet.)

Picked up by a group of Israeli partiers, Ali opts to introduce himself as Eli, and so begins a subtle and, of course, inevitable succession of miscues and small betrayals. It is a tightly told story of self-identity and the perceptions of others. Dakka is a rising star in Israeli film and he brings memorable depth to his character in this short, charming drama. A subtext of the film is the happy-go-lucky Israelis’ perceptions of Egypt (or perhaps the broader “other”) and a degree of paranoia that one of the party crowd acknowledges doesn’t require pot-smoking to ignite.

A slightly shorter film, at about 20 minutes, is Pops, which pits grieving siblings against each other, as they try to do what they each think their recently deceased father would have wanted regarding his burial. The uptight son and the hippy-ish daughter come to an unorthodox compromise.

image - A scene from the short film Pops, in which two siblings must compromise on their father’s burial plans — A scene from the short film Pops, in which two siblings must compromise on their father’s burial plans.

You’re Invited sees a rabbi’s daughter invite her friends to a funeral when she learns that the deceased has no kin. Charming in concept and cheesy in execution, with uneven acting and heavy-handed writing, the short film is sweet enough, although anyone who has been a pallbearer will recognize an empty box when they see one carried in a movie. Explicitly based on a true story, the 13-minute film is neither too long nor too short.

For a quick laugh, at seven minutes, The Shabbos Goy follows a religious woman as she deals with the unexpected activation of a personal electronic device – a very personal electronic device – during Shabbat lunch. She runs into the street to find a non-Jew who she can entice but, due to halachah, not overtly request to turn the humming device off before the men in the house discover the source of the noise. (The women of the house, notably, remain blasé.)

The Jew who defended Nazis

image - Ira Glasser, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, is the focus of the documentary feature Mighty Ira — Ira Glasser, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, is the focus of the documentary feature Mighty Ira.

Ira Glasser was the director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, a period when the organization exploded in size and relevance – and also when it took on some of the most contentious topics the country has ever faced.

Perhaps not a household name, Glasser and his contributions to civil liberties in particular and to American society more broadly are examined in the documentary feature Mighty Ira.

It is easy to admire Glasser in theory and to support his principles in principle. It is harder to swallow when he champions what Oliver Wendell Holmes termed “freedom for ideas we loathe.” This challenging conflict is at the heart of Glasser’s life’s work and the heart of the film.

Glasser’s vigilance for justice was born at Ebbets Field, the now-disappeared home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, which Glasser calls his cathedral. The Dodgers were gods to the kids in Glasser’s Flatbush neighbourhood, no less so when Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball, in 1947. At age 9, Glasser discovered that Robinson was forced to stay in hotels and eat at restaurants apart from his teammates while on road trips to parts of the country. That injustice stirred in young Ira a lifelong mission.

But devotion to racial equality can seem to come head-to-head with First Amendment rights to free expression, as when neo-Nazis sought to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., in 1977. The provocative plan to wear fascist regalia and parade through a town whose population was half Jewish – and which included one of the world’s largest communities of Holocaust survivors – was thwarted by town officials, who used a backdoor ordinance to prevent the event. (There was a 500-member B’nai B’rith chapter in town at the time, all of whose members were survivors.)

Glasser’s ACLU took up the case, and the backlash against the unpopular cause was enormous. It tested the mettle of the ACLU leadership – to say nothing of their fundraising department – and their commitment to free speech. But the leadership, which included a great many Jews, were almost unanimously steadfast.

The documentary shows how the ACLU’s relevance grew in the time of Glasser’s leadership, not solely because of his actions but also because the country was struggling with a range of social and moral conflicts. While the rights group had been at the forefront of issues like the Scopes “Monkey Trial” (addressing the place of religion in public education), the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War and Brown v. Board of Education (banning school segregation), the ACLU’s docket really filled up in the time Glasser was at the helm in large part because the country was confronting and struggling with so many divisive issues.

Mighty Ira is the story of a remarkable man, but it is also a history of American free speech in the second half of the 20th century.

Director Nico Perrino will be a guest at the March 9, 1 p.m., screening of the documentary.

More information about the festival will soon be available at vjff.org.

Wide range of films offered

Yehuda Barkan and Nitza Shaul co-star in the charming Love in Suspenders. (photo from homemcr.org/film/love-in-suspenders)

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival is set to go online March 4, and all the many offerings will be available until March 14. There are plenty of gems for viewers of varying tastes and ages, including a few Israeli films that seem to be nostalgic paeans to American comedies or kids’ movies of the 1960s and 1970s. But we start with romance.

The film Love in Suspenders opens with a wild car ride through Tel Aviv, as we are introduced to main character Tammy (Nitza Shaul) who drives like … well, an Israeli. When she backs into pedestrian Benno (Yehuda Barkan), this adorable slice-of-life gets rolling.

Her son Michael, a lawyer, warns that one more infraction will lead to the loss of her driver’s licence. Making nice with her victim (while continuing to argue it was his own carelessness that led to the mishap), Tammy begins what evolves into an innocent and unintentional courtship with Benno.

The luxurious seniors facility where Tammy lives is a hotbed of sexual tension – with lectures on the wonders of Viagra, a supporting character in the film that really should have received its own credit.

Tammy venerates her late husband Yoni in ways that probably exceed what would be considered normal grieving. Hanging on to her glorious past – Tammy and Yoni were a musical duo that toured Israel and abroad – versus facing an exciting but unnerving new romance is the conflict that drives her character.

Benno’s character is driven by all sorts of unnerving situations. Benno’s got his own problems with the next generation, but both he and Tammy handle their affairs like adults, despite being treated like children by their kids.

Michael’s horror at both his mother’s rekindled sex life and the uncertain provenance of the unkempt and possibly homeless Benno threatens to undermine the trajectory of their affection.

Kids aren’t the only interfering forces. The extravagant dining hall and luxurious hallways of the seniors home are brimming with prying eyes and wagging tongues. The roosters in the facility are put out that Tammy has scored a love interest from the outside, despite all their strutting and preening. The women in the building always seem to be nearby when Tammy’s male caller is coming or going from her apartment.

The title Love in Suspenders is a play on the phrase “Tuesdays in suspenders,” a program in which Israeli seniors get weekly discounts at venues like the cinema. The movie is an absolutely charming vignette of finding love at a later age and dealing with the impacts of a fresh future on a cherished past. It is a respectful treatment of older characters and their romantic explorations, which are topics too often treated shabbily by Hollywood and other depictions.

– PJ

***

Not one of us will be able to avoid death. Yet, despite its inevitability, few of us prepare for dying and most of us put the thought of it to the back of our minds, even as we mourn those who have died.

The hour-long documentary Dying Doesn’t Feel Like What I’m Doing is almost a must-see for anyone struggling with the reality of mortality. It is a caring portrait of Rachel Cowan’s 18-month journey from a cancer diagnosis (a brain tumour) to her passing. Along the way, we learn about how remarkable this human’s life was and how her impacts continue. However, while Cowan was successful by almost any measure, it is not only her accomplishments that are noteworthy, but her struggles and her finding of strength in love and gratitude at her most vulnerable, when she had every right to be bitter and selfish.

Cowan was a civil and women’s rights activist of some acclaim. She was married to Paul Cowan, a journalist for the The Village Voice, and theirs was a partnership that extended into work at times; she took incredible photographs for his stories, capturing on film the best and worst of humanity in a tumultuous era. The couple lived and fought for their beliefs and really did make the world a better place.

Paul died from leukemia in 1988, at 48 years old. Rachel had converted to Judaism earlier in their relationship, after his parents died in a horrific apartment fire. The tragedy spurred Paul to explore his Jewish roots and her to search for God and meaning, which led her to Judaism. She was studying to become a rabbi during the period that Paul was ill and she was ordained soon after his death. At that point, still deep in grief, she thought, “Now, what?” How possibly could she counsel others when she herself was so ungrounded. She decided, “Choose life.”

She not only chose life for herself, but for others. While working at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, she established the Jewish Healing Centre, after seeing how little Jewish community support Paul had had in palliative care. She also established other initiatives and wrote a book on wise aging. As the documentary begins, we see Rachel leading a meditation group, continuing her life’s work. The film’s title comes from a comment Rachel makes about nine months after her diagnosis: “I’m living my life. Dying doesn’t feel like what I’m doing.”

– CR

***

With a harrowing opening scene, A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto begins an historical back and forth between the terrible past and the present. The intertwined timeframes and eventual plot twists remind the viewer that the past is not really past.

Roman high schooler Sofia (Bianca Panconi) finds a Second World War-era letter and photograph hidden in the lining of a flea market suitcase. Her curiosity piqued, she begins a quest to uncover the story behind the mystery, which forms the narrative of the film.

Bringing the artifacts to her schoolmates, who enthusiastically join in the sleuthing, Sofia and pals then recruit students from the neighbouring Jewish high school to join in the mystery-solving.

There is charm in the cross-cultural friendships and some minimal tension when the teens meet obstruction from their parents and teachers. But the film is generally simplistic, too often cutesy and frequently hammy.

Before they have even tracked down the basics of the historical mystery, the students decide to turn their quest into a play. The movie itself has the feel of a high school production, and the fresh-faced, upbeat teen spirit seems incongruous with the Holocaust narrative at the heart of both the theatre production and the film. Impediments are too easily overcome. Archival research eurekas far too effortlessly and speedily fall into place. (The way the characters manhandle historical documents would make an archivist recoil.) An ostensible Montague/Capulet hurdle to a pair of star-crossed lovers is resolved in the most facile manner imaginable. The ending is unbelievably tidy – unbelievable being the operative term.

Continuity and fidelity to peoplehood and identity are core themes, but even these are handled poorly. For example, a Jewish boy gives Sofia a convincing explanation for why he must date and marry only a Jewish girl, but the next day he apologizes, apparently deciding that maybe continuity isn’t as sacred as a little amorousness after all.

The resolution to the larger mystery falls very close to home for Sofia, whose own life is altered by her discovery. This outcome provides some justification for the girl’s otherwise inexplicably dogged devotion to unraveling the mystery. But the whole thing has more of a Scooby-Doo vibe than the solemn drama the film probably set out to create.

There is some eye candy in the form of Roman architecture, including parts of the city’s Jewish quarter, but it is perhaps a thwarted COVID-era wanderlust to blame for finding fault that the film is not more of a visual celebration of the eternal city.

There is some decent acting and there are enjoyable components to A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto, but it is hard to sustain the premise of an historical mystery when every twist and turn is foreseeable long before the ostensibly bright students clue in.

– PJ

***

Fans of Airplane, Naked Gun and Austin Powers will settle right in with the ridiculous Israeli comedy Mossad. Upending the perception of the Israeli intelligence agency as one of the world’s greatest, the film centres on what must be Mossad’s most moronic agent.

The action begins with the kidnapping of the world’s foremost tech magnate, Jack Saterberg, while he visits Israel. (One doesn’t have to stretch the imagination much to conjure a mashup of Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg). It falls to Mossad operative Guy Moran (Tsahi Halevi) to team up with CIA agent Linda Harris (Efrat Dor) to confront the bad guys.

When Mossad hit Israeli theatres in 2019, it saw a box office-smashing open. It is an all-ages bit of entertainment, with slapstick buffoonery and sight gags – and not really a lot more. There is certainly plenty of violence, but it is exclusively of the cartoonish variety.

In addition to sight gags, smartass dialogue drives what there is of a direction to the story. “I’m a Mossad agent. Here’s my card,” Moran says. “It’s blank,” replies the recipient. “I’m a secret agent,” he says. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

The kidnappers threaten to stop all cellphone service worldwide. When they offer a two-minute taste of the threat, global mayhem and violence ensue, underscoring the urgency of preventing the calamity. Suffice to say the only real tension in the 90 or so minutes comes from bracing for the next corny gag.

All the predictable scenarios are packed in – like a countdown clock to doomsday and other tenets of the genre – but in the most outlandish forms. Romance also figures, with Israeli-Israeli, Israeli-American and human-machine flirting adding spice and disorientation befitting a script that seems to view no joke as too absurd if there’s a chance of a laugh.

For a harmless multigenerational movie night, Mossad will deliver a few side-splitters and a lot of snickers.

– PJ

***

photo - Hila Natanzon and Amir Tessler rebuild a derelict airplane in Sky Raiders — Hila Natanzon and Amir Tessler rebuild a derelict airplane in Sky Raiders.

Sky Raiders is pure family fun. In Hebrew with English subtitles, the audience needs to be old enough to read, but not even that well, as the action is pretty easy to follow. For the parents who may have watched The Love Bug when they were a kid, there will be a comforting sense of familiarity with Sky Raiders, though the historic plane that gets rebuilt in this movie isn’t anthropomorphized and the love story in this case is between the teens.

Yotam (Amir Tessler) is the new kid at school and has trouble fitting in. When he spots Noa (Hila Natanzon) playing soccer with a group of boys, and holding her own, he is smitten. He joins the game but soon requires medical attention for an asthma attack, having left his inhaler at home, despite his over-protective mother’s multiple reminders for him to take it with him; his father, a pilot, died a few years earlier in a plane crash. Noa has her own parental problems – her father, also a pilot, has dismissed her as, basically, “just a girl” – and her older brother bullies her.

The two teens share both the love of all things planes and flying, as well as parents who actively try to dissuade them from these loves. They find their father figure in the grumpy old man dubbed “Mad Morris” by the local kids, who, surprise, is a really nice guy, just sad and lonely.

When Yotam and Noa discover a Messerschmitt that had been left to rot in a plane cemetery, the two – with Morris’s help – set to restore it. And, not only to restore it so that it can sit in a museum, but so that it can actually be flown in the upcoming annual Yom Ha’atzmaut airshow.

With some cheesy CGI, young love conquering all, bullies put in their place, the ostracized taking front-stage, and happy parent-child reconciliations, Sky Raiders is Disney-esque and charming. Cue the music to swell, as the credits begin.

– CR

For tickets to the film festival, visit vjff.org.

From baseball player to spy

Moe Berg as a catcher during his time in Major League Baseball. (photo from Irwin Berg)

Near the end of John Ford’s essential 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor coins the credo, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The fact, as we all know, is that Americans are all-star myth-makers and myth-lovers. Many American Jewish boys caught the bug via the improbable immigrant saga of Moe Berg, a paradoxically brilliant professional athlete who led a secret second life as a spy for the U.S. government. How much of Berg’s story is true, though, and how much was legend passed among kvelling kids in the schoolyard?

Aviva Kempner, who hit a home run with her 1998 documentary about another Jewish ballplayer, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, was the obvious, natural and best-equipped filmmaker to take on the mid-20th-century mysteries at the heart of Berg’s minor celebrity.

The Spy Behind Home Plate, which screens at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival March 8 at the Rothstein Theatre, is a testament to Kempner’s determination and persistence. Chock full of dozens of contemporary and archival interviews, and packed with rare photos and even rarer film footage, The Spy Behind Home Plate is a definitive record of Berg’s achievements.

Although it’s an effective way to impart information, the dogged, dog-eared marriage of talking heads, vintage visuals and period music can’t fully evoke the shadowy stealth and deadly risks of Berg’s wartime activities. Hamstrung by her budget, Kempner wasn’t able to stage reenactments or employ other strategies to illustrate the unfilmed and unrecorded liaisons and conversations that Berg had in Europe in 1944 and 1945. The Spy Behind Home Plate, therefore, is like the steady everyday player who notches the occasional three-hit game but never achieves the transcendent grace and power of a superstar.

Morris (Moe) Berg, international man of mystery, was born in New York in 1902. His father had fled a Ukrainian shtetl for the Lower East Side, where he started a laundry before buying a drugstore in Newark.

The family moved to New Jersey when Moe was a boy, and he grew into an excellent student and a terrific baseball player. After a year at New York University, he transferred to Princeton, where he was a star shortstop (back when the Ivy League was the top, if not the only, sports conference) and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

While his older brother Sam fulfilled Dad’s wishes and went to medical school, Moe signed a contract to play pro ball. He acceded to his father’s demands up to a point by attending Columbia Law School in the off-seasons, earning his degree and passing the New York bar in 1929.

It was a false bargain: Moe despised the idea of being a lawyer, while Bernard Berg never accepted a baseball career as a legitimate pursuit. In fact, the old man refused to go to the park and see his son play.

From an athletics standpoint, his dad wasn’t missing much. A knee injury early in Moe’s career, compounded by primitive diagnosis and treatment, severely slowed him. Over 15 years as a backup catcher, Berg notched exactly 441 hits in 663 games.

What set Moe apart was his charm, charisma and erudition. He studied Sanskrit at the Sorbonne one off-season, and read multiple newspapers every day. When he went to Japan on a barnstorming tour with Babe Ruth and other Major League stars, he learned Japanese.

Berg carried a camera everywhere on that trip, and made a point of checking out the roof of a tall Tokyo hotel in order to shoot a 360-degree panorama of the city. It’s not altogether clear if he was already working officially (albeit surreptitiously) for the U.S. government, but his film was of significant help when the United States went to war with Japan after Pearl Harbor.

In fact, in early 1942, Berg recorded a radio segment in Japanese that was broadcast in Japan and drew on the goodwill he’d accumulated over two prewar visits.

photo - Moe Berg in a military jeep in California with his brother Sam during the war, July 1942 — Moe Berg in a military jeep in California with his brother Sam during the war, July 1942. *(photo from Irwin Berg)*

Berg had been sent on research missions to South America, but that was too far from the real action. It appears he found a home in 1943 in the newly created Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence branch that evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency after the war.

His primary and crucial assignment was to ascertain how close the Germans were to having a nuclear weapon, and to sway Italian scientists from the Axis to the Allies. To successfully carry off his cover story, Berg was briefed on the science and strategy of the Manhattan Project.

One biographer recounts, “The OSS had given the Manhattan Project its own spy, in effect, its own field agent to pursue questions of interest wherever he could in Europe. And that was Moe Berg.”

Kempner accords a great deal of screen time to this episode in Berg’s clandestine career as a professional spook. It’s a great story, in which the solidly built former catcher is assigned to attend a conference in Switzerland and determine – from the keynote speech by a visiting German scientist, Werner Heisenberg – if the Nazis are within reach of perfecting the bomb.

Berg carries a pistol to the symposium, with orders to use it on Heisenberg if he deems it necessary. It would be churlish of me to recount the outcome of Berg’s suicide mission except to say that the catcher-turned-spy who spoke seven languages lived unhappily ever after the war.

Kempner leaves us wanting to know more about Berg’s later years. By the weirdest of coincidences, Sam Berg headed a group of doctors sent to Nagasaki to study the effects of radiation poisoning. Incredibly, Moe and Sam never knew about each other’s exploits. This lone fact reveals that there’s still more to know about Moe Berg’s story.

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs until March 8. For tickets and the movie schedule, visit vjff.org.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Question that won’t die

“How does a housewife decide between generals?” asks Golda Meir (played by Tovah Feldshuh) in Golda’s Balcony. In this instance, she must decide between the counsel of David (Dado) Elazar, her chief of staff, left, and Moshe Dayan, her minister of defence. (production still)

Tovah Feldshuh is incredible to watch in Golda’s Balcony, The Film. Not just in her passionate and sympathetic portrayal of Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974, but in her depiction of all 45 characters in William Gibson’s one-woman play. She’s Meir, David Ben-Gurion, David (Dado) Elazar, her husband Morris, Holocaust survivors and Israeli soldiers, among many others. She moves as easily between the personalities as a child raised in a multilingual household moves between languages. And with powerful effect.

Golda’s Balcony, The Film has two screenings at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival – March 1, 1 p.m., and March 2, 3:30 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas. See it. You will have a more nuanced understanding of Meir, as well as of Israel, its origins and the struggles it has faced and will face. Gibson’s text is superb; it is engaging and insightful, with enough humour along the way that you’ll be able to breathe on occasion, as Meir deals with the existential crisis of the Yom Kippur War. Fluidly switching from wartime to other parts of her life, the play depicts, if nothing else, the stressful, heart-wrenching, thankless job that is being prime minister of a country that is constantly under threat.

The film is a recording of the play’s soldout Off-Broadway première on May 4, 2003, at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, presented by Issembert Productions. After a four-month soldout run at MET, the show moved to Broadway, and the Helen Hayes Theatre, where it ran for 15 months, making it, apparently, the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. It has won countless awards.

The set is relatively simple. A table with a couple of chairs on a tile floor. On the table, a dial telephone, a pitcher and water glass, an ashtray, cigarettes. Light shines on the table from the right, as if from a window. The backdrop is a wall of reddish stone or metal slabs of varying sizes that protrude outward. Images are projected onto the wall or chairs when relevant, giving the audience a visual of the person Meir is talking about, or that Feldshuh is portraying – though it is hard to see these images in the film version. To the side and a step down is a small piece of stage covered in dirt, with a few rocks, which acts as refugee camps in Cyprus, the kibbutz on which Meir lived for a time, Russia when Meir visits on a diplomatic tour, etc. The focal point for the entire production is Feldshuh.

The play begins in darkness, a man chants a prayer, the words “Golda’s Balcony” appear briefly on the wall. Thunder claps, lightning flashes, gunshots ring out, then darkness again, but the sound continues: guns firing, bombs exploding, planes overhead. A housecoat-garbed Golda, sitting at the head of the table, strikes a match and lights a cigarette; the lights rise a bit and calmer music prevails.

“I’m at the end of my story,” says Golda. “I’m old. I’m tired. I’m sick. Dying, the doctors tell me. The picture you have of me as Mamaleh Golde, who makes chicken soup for her soldiers, it’s a nice picture. And I do make chicken soup. But let’s empty it all out for keeps right now because, at the bottom of the pot, is blood. At the bottom of the pot is the question that won’t die. I can do without that music!” she yells. It stops. The lights come on more fully, as Golda then starts to relate the story of her first voyage to Palestine, with her husband, in 1921 – 52 years later, she would become prime minister.

“I remember, starting with a phone call, that woke me up at four o’clock in the morning. Saturday, Yom Kippur, 1973,” she says, as she closes her eyes, looking exhausted, her right arm holding up her head, the left one sliding off the table. The phone rings. Startled, she answers it, hearing the news that Egypt and Syria have attacked Israel. As she takes off the housecoat, Golda is in her familiar muted woolen skirt suit; energy, anger and fear all come to the surface as she relates her generals’ differing views as to what Israel needs to do. Dado: attack! Moshe Dayan: don’t be seen as the aggressor! “How does a housewife decide between generals?” she asks.

Of course, she does decide. But the agonizing and tension-filled process leads her – and Israel – down some very dark paths and the play masterfully depicts her sadness, anxiety and frustration; the sacrifices to her family, her health, as well as to others. Throughout the many narratives, it is the story of the Dimona nuclear facility to which she will get, the story that haunts her, that took her to hell; the story she needs to gather the strength to tell.

Thunder, lightning and gunfire divide the scenes in the whirlwind of action that Golda describes, her domestic life almost as tumultuous as her political life. We see her humanity, but also her toughness. Luckily, she never had to answer the question that “won’t die”: if Israeli forces hadn’t been able to cross the Suez Canal and if the United States had not come through with the needed military aid, would she have ordered the dropping of the nuclear bombs with which she had armed Israel’s planes?

Golda’s Balcony is a must-see in a festival with many excellent films. For the full schedule, visit vjff.org.

Chasing elusive photo

Picture of His Life follows Amos Nachoum to the Canadian Arctic, where he hopes to fulfil his dream of photographing polar bears underwater. (photo from Hey Jude Productions)

The ocean, in its vastness, suits Amos Nachoum perfectly. It’s big enough for him to hide. Not from the great white sharks, orcas, manta rays and other large sea creatures he has obsessively sought out and photographed for four decades. But from his traumatic memories of the Yom Kippur War, and from his father’s impossible expectations.

“Amos has made a decision to put the war behind him, to put violence behind him, and to use the camera to tell a different story, a beautiful story, about men and nature,” Israeli documentary filmmaker Yonatan Nir said in a phone interview while his family frolicked nearby in the kibbutz pool. “I think, in a way, he’s reframing his life with his camera.”

Nachoum’s complicated saga is rendered with gravity and grace in Nir and Dani Menkin’s Picture of His Life, which screens in the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival March 3, 8:45 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

Picture of His Life is structured around Nachoum’s summer 2015 expedition to the Canadian Arctic, more than 3,000 miles from his Pacific Grove, Calif., home, to try and fulfil his ultimate dream of photographing polar bears underwater. (Hence, the second meaning of the film’s title.)

The epic documentary’s executive producer is Nancy Spielberg, a nice bit of irony given that her brother made a flick called Jaws many years ago that spawned a widespread, irrational fear of sharks.

Nir and Menkin originally wanted to make a documentary about Nachoum diving in Tonga a decade ago, but that undertaking proved too expensive. Instead, they made Dolphin Boy, a redemptive portrait of a traumatized young Arab healed by swimming with dolphins in the Red Sea, which earned worldwide acclaim.

As it turned out, the extra years were essential, and not just to raise the funds for four Jews (Nachoum, the directors, and veteran underwater cinematographer Adam Ravetch) and six Inuit to trek to and film at remote Baker Lake. The filmmakers’ taciturn and enigmatic subject had to reach a point where he was willing to confide his deeply hidden feelings and memories.

“He really didn’t talk until we got to the Arctic,” Menkin recalled on the phone from his car in Los Angeles, “and that’s when he started to open up.” Nir added, “Amos needed time to open up and to be able, finally, to let us deep into his soul and to tell it for the first time.”

After the Arctic trip, Nachoum gave surprisingly candid interviews to the Israeli press about both his postwar trauma and his father, who had fought in the War of Independence. His way of dealing with his past continued – and continues – to expand.

There’s no question that the process of making Picture of His Life contributed to Nachoum’s evolution. Nir and Menkin visited his father in the hospital near the end of his life, capturing a raw, powerful moment. They subsequently showed the footage to Nachoum with the understanding that they would include it in the film only if he gave his consent.

Nachoum was touched by the scene and agreed to its inclusion. He even enacted an onscreen form of reciprocation to complete the circle.

“We were able to create this closure between the father and the son, but only through the film,” Nir said. “It never really happened face to face.”

The personal story in Picture of His Life is wrenching, but the environmental component is pretty potent, too. “I see myself as a soldier for Mother Nature,” Nachoum declares in the film, but his desperate, late-career pursuit of the polar bear goes even deeper.

“At the end of the day, Amos was looking for his family,” Menkin said. “His family is the universe. It’s Mother Nature. He found his family and lives with it in harmony, and that’s what he wants us to do.”

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

A soap-opera comedy

Yaniv Biton as Assi, left, and Kais Nashif as Salam in Tel Aviv on Fire, which screens Feb. 28 as part of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. (photo from Cohen Media Group)

Palestinian writer-director Sameh Zoabi achieves something altogether remarkable with his second feature film, particularly at this moment in time: he finds humour in the tattered relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.

“The whole idea of Tel Aviv on Fire is that we have more in common than we want to admit,” Zoabi said in an interview before his movie screened in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last year. It screens on Feb. 28, 1 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas, as part of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which runs Feb. 7-March 8.

“We have to break these stereotypes and talk about what’s in common between us and not what divides us,” he said. “Let’s remind people how humanity can prevail in times where the politics of post-Oslo is, ‘Let’s dehumanize the other to be able to survive.’ I want to do the opposite.”

A sharp, insightful and winning comedy that juxtaposes the delicious absurdity of melodrama with the real-life absurdity of the occupation, Tel Aviv on Fire centres on an underachiever, Salam, who works as a gofer on his uncle’s hit Palestinian soap opera. Through a barely plausible combination of chance, chutzpah and desperation, the shlemiel is elevated to writer. Then he runs afoul of the Israeli commander of the checkpoint he crosses every day, whose wife is a loyal fan of the show.

Salam has to use every iota of guile and cleverness to navigate the opposing agendas that he’s caught between – and to win back the heart of a woman he had dumped. (Even while he’s landing political japes, Zoabi cheerfully seizes every opportunity to lampoon the conventions of both soap operas and movies.)

One of nine children, Zoabi grew up in a village outside of Nazareth, where people went to his grandfather’s barbershop for his humorous stories as much as for a haircut.

“In general, my village is very funny,” Zoabi related. “That’s maybe why comedy has become very easy for me, because I grew up in a place where they don’t take anything seriously.”

Zoabi studied at Tel Aviv University and then at Columbia University in New York, where he discovered the need for Palestinian stories. Returning to Israel, he made a short film, Be Quiet, in 2005 and his feature debut, Man Without a Cell Phone, in 2010. Zoabi’s experience of receiving government funding was the genesis of Tel Aviv on Fire (2018).

“You take money from the Israelis, so suddenly you are watched immediately,” he explained. “Israelis are making sure you are not becoming too Palestinian for them. And the Palestinians are watching, ‘He took money, maybe he’s a sellout, he’s doing a comedy.’”

After presenting Tel Aviv on Fire at several international festivals, Zoabi debuted the film in Haifa and in Nazareth. It was equally well received by both audiences, which didn’t surprise him. But he did have an epiphany.

“All the screenings led to this moment,” Zoabi declared. “Finally I understood – people are fed up. People are fed up of the reality that exists, which is managing the occupation.

“[The film] reminds people of the possibility that used to exist, the feeling that we can be normal people and just get along. I think that’s a fantasy that existed among the Israelis, that we can eat hummus together in Damascus one day. But they aren’t able to see the occupation as a major reason for that not to happen.”

It’s a measure of Zoabi’s skill that the current-events commentary in Tel Aviv on Fire goes down easily for viewers across the political spectrum. The means to that success, in large measure, is Salam’s evolution of necessity from hapless underdog to diplomatic savant.

“I’m attracted to people who don’t wake up knowing what they really want,” Zoabi said. “I think they’re more inspirational for me than black-and-white [characters]. Actually, people who know exactly what they want terrify me. You can’t be so certain all the time.”

For his part, Zoabi grew up in a milieu of group interaction and lots of soap operas, because those were the only two channels the family had. He wasn’t exposed to art, theatre and film until his late teens.

“I always say I’m not an artist, really,” he confessed. “I’m probably a barber of a new era in my family.”

Tel Aviv on Fire is in Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.

For the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival schedule, visit vjff.com.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Jewish film festival moves

Robert Albanese, executive and artistic director of the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre. (photo from Vancouver Jewish Film Centre)

Community members who associate November with grey skies, falling leaves, American Thanksgiving and, in recent memory, the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, can now cross the last item off the list. In 2020, the VJFF will be presenting films from Feb. 27 to March 8 instead.

The VJFF, the longest-running Jewish film festival in Canada and one of the longest-running film festivals in North America, will feature a collection of 32 offerings from 14 countries – including many Canadian premières – addressing current, varied and sometimes controversial subjects.

This new annual time period is the most popular season for Jewish film festivals. Of the more than 200 international Jewish film festivals, the majority present films in March. In Vancouver, this will mean warmer weather and less rain.

The move to March also permits the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre (VJFC), the society which oversees the festival, to raise funds at the beginning of the calendar year. Moreover, members of the festival staff believe they will have an opportunity to select from an even wider pool of relevant and available films.

Robert Albanese, who was brought in as executive and artistic director of the VJFC in 2010, highlights the past decade of growth the festival has had in the community, and its impact. He is adamant when it comes to the relevance of film and motion pictures in modern culture.

“Film is the most engaging art form of our era … film accesses and engages the broadest community,” he told the Independent.

“We provide Jewish continuity and an awareness of Israel beyond the front page through storytelling in today’s visually oriented world. It is vastly important to have a visible presence of our culture out in this media-centric world,” he added.

Albanese stresses that the VJFF seeks to engage with the broader community by offering the very best film stories it can find. Three of the international films scheduled to screen in March have been submitted by their respective countries to vie for the Best Foreign Film Award at the 2020 Oscars. In spite of Vancouver’s relatively smaller population, the VJFF has consistently been ranked as one of the top 10 Jewish film festivals for the past several years.

Albanese’s name has been ensconced in the minds of local film aficionados for more than three decades. Before coming to the VJFC, he was a general manager for Cineplex Entertainment for 15 years and served as director of exhibitions for the Vancouver International Film Festival for 10 years. Albanese also helps in the selection process for other Jewish film festivals, such as the one held in Victoria in early November.

According to Albanese, the VJFF aims “to showcase the diversity of Jewish culture, heritage and identity through film.” This can be seen in a quick glance at last year’s program which, as festival-goers might recall, included films on an array of topics, such as The Syrian Patient, about wounded Syrians brought to Israel for treatment; Heading Home, a documentary on the Israeli national baseball team; and Chewdaism, a full-length film on Jewish Montreal and its eateries from internet stars Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion of YidLife Crisis fame.

In addition to the annual festival and other events, the VJFF presents films on the last Tuesday of every month. The November film – on Nov. 26 at 1 p.m. – will be The Invisibles, a 2017 German docudrama following the lives of four Holocaust survivors. The monthly screenings take place at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, where the VJFC office is located, and admission is by donation.

The 2020 festival’s opening film will be held on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 27, at the Rothstein Theatre in the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, and will be followed by a hosted reception in the centre’s Wosk Auditorium. The festival then moves to Fifth Avenue Cinemas, screening films from Feb. 28 to March 5. For its conclusion, the festival returns to the Rothstein Theatre, with films March 6-8 and special closing day celebrations March 8.

There are presently openings at the VJFC for volunteers to help with film research and selection, event planning, distribution of promotional materials and assistance at the festival, among other tasks. Volunteers receive complimentary tickets based on the number of shifts worked.

The full list of 2020 films will be available in early January on the VJFF website (vjff.org) and elsewhere. The 2020 festival is rolling back admission prices, with passes for $144 for all films, a five-film package of $60 for adults ($50 for students and seniors) and individual tickets at $15 for adults ($12 students/seniors). Tickets for gala events are $25 and an annual VJFF membership card is $2.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Spotlight on Israeli culture

Shira Geffen shares how she met her husband, Etgar Keret, in the film Etgar Keret: Based on a True Story, which screens Nov. 14. (photo from facebook.com/etgarkeretfilm)

“I want to write stories so the readers will like mankind a little bit more,” says Israeli writer Etgar Keret in the documentary Etgar Keret: Based on a True Story. Similarly, as depicted in another film, the Israel Museum aims to uplift and educate visitors with its artistic, cultural and historical displays, and The Museum offers a glimpse into the breadth of its collections and the diversity (and quirkiness) of its employees. Both of these award-winning films screen during the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which started this week.

Danish filmmakers Stephane Kaas (director) and Rutger Lemm (writer) do an excellent job of introducing viewers to what makes Keret tick. They do so using a creative mix of interviews with Keret and his family, friends and colleagues; reenactments of sorts of a few key points in Keret’s life; and a few of Keret’s stories, the portrayal of which is mainly done in animation. Not surprisingly for anyone who has read Keret’s short stories, there are several laugh-out-loud moments in Etgar Keret: Based on a True Story, but there are also sombre elements, as we learn about how Keret has been impacted by tragedy, including the suicide of one of his best friends.

One of the funniest scenes is when Keret shares his first story with his brother, Rodi (Nimrod). Rodi brings his dog along for the walk and, after he finishes reading Keret’s story and praises it, he asks whether the typed copy he’s holding is the only copy. When Keret says no, Rodi uses the paper to pick up his dog’s poo. Perhaps a lesson in humility, Keret explains that it was at this moment he realized that a story is not in the piece of paper on which it has been written or typed – once a story has been read, it is in the mind of the reader. Keret calls this ability of a writer to transfer their ideas to another person a “super power.”

While many of Keret’s stories have gloomy aspects to them, the stories as a whole generally leave readers feeling good. He describes his stories as “an advertisement for life,” saying that he writes to answer the question of why he wants to live.

“I think the need to tell stories is, basically, the need to put a structure to the reality around you. And I feel that the more chaotic and the less sense it makes, the stronger the need I have to tell a story about it,” he explains in the film.

Etgar Keret: Based on a True Story screens Nov. 14, 8:45 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas (19+), following the 22-minute short Large Soldier, directed by Noa Guskov. “It’s 1973 and all that Sherry, a 15-year-old Israeli girl, wants is a boyfriend,” reads the synopsis of the film, which is in Hebrew with English subtitles. “A letter exchange with an unknown soldier makes her believe that it’s going to be her first love. But what will happen when the imaginary soldier becomes real?”

* * *

photo - A scene from The Museum, which screens Nov. 17 — A scene from *The Museum*, which screens Nov. 17. (photo from goelevent.com)

The opening of Ran Tal’s documentary The Museum grabs viewers’ attention: a black screen, the sound of footsteps, some shuffling about, then a woman asks a man, “What do we have?” “That’s a huge painting,” he begins. When the scene is revealed, we see the man and woman sitting on a bench, looking at the painting, but the woman seeing it only through his eyes, as she is blind. Later in the film, this woman is part of a group of blind people visiting the museum – she and others touch various sculptures, feeling how the works are made.

The Museum makes clear the enormous responsibility and privilege of caring for, handling and presenting art and artifacts. Over a period of one-and-a-half years, Tal interviewed several museum staff – including a security guard who is also a cantor; the institution’s kashrut inspector, who notes that “a museum doesn’t replace spirituality”; and the then-museum director, who sadly had to miss his mother’s funeral because it took place on the day the museum reopened after an extensive renovation. Tal also films visitor interactions over that time, and highlights a 50th anniversary event (in 2015) featuring Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and members of his government. Netanyahu remarks that the museum shows three things: “One is our bond to this land in a very dramatic display, and one of humanity’s most significant archeological finds, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Another is the great cultural treasure of the Jewish people in Israel and the world over, which symbolizes our contribution to humanity.”

Admittedly, The Museum only touches upon more serious concerns – there is a scene where a group of museum staff discusses a collection of traditional Palestinian clothing that is in storage, and the potential impacts of displaying (and not displaying) them – but it at least does bring up such issues, which will hopefully open the door for more in-depth discussion.

The Museum screens on Nov. 17, 6:45 p.m., at the Rothstein Theatre. For the full festival schedule and tickets, visit vjff.org.