The films I saw at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival—the 34th annual edition, co-presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center—were, with one notably memorable exception, all based on real people and true stories, whether dramatized feature or documentary accounts.

 

 

The festival opener was Midas Man, a long-gestating biopic of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, directed by Joe Stepehenson and written by Brigit Grant. It hits the usual beats: managing his dad’s record store in Liverpool, Brian sees the Beatles at the Cavern Club, changing his and the band members’ lives, and he guides the lads to a record contract with Parlophone through producer George Martin and onto The Ed Sullivan Show and worldwide Beatlemania, all while his messy personal life is filled with drugs, alcohol and casual sex with other men. While this familiar tale is told in a familiar way, there are compensations. With no Beatles songs on the soundtrack, only covers (it’s cheaper, obviously), someone else is at the center of their universe; Jacob Fortune-Lloyd is a charismatic Brian, even selling the hoary device of speaking directly to the camera. The actors playing the Fab Four are decent without being caricatures, but Jay Leno’s bizarre casting as Ed Sullivan is a headscratcher. Epstein died at 32 of an accidental overdose, which the filmmakers wisely keep offscreen, giving Brian his own Abbey Road cover moment for the final shot.

 

 

Also dying far too young was Czech writer Franz Kafka, who succumbed to tuberculosis a month shy of his 41st birthday; Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann’s The Glory of Life takes the measure of the artist as a dying man, vacationing near the Baltic Sea for rest, but meeting and falling in love with Dora Diamant, who would accompany him through his final days. The filmmakers flirt with but manage to skirt soap opera thanks to a lack of hysteria and a pair of pitch-perfect portrayals by Sabin Tambrea (Franz) and Henriette Confurius, whose Dora is full-bodied and immensely sympathetic.

 

 

A trio of documentaries chronicled three audacious lives. Yael Melamede’s touching and intensely personal Ada—My Mother the Architect is a first-person look at Ada Karmi-Melamede, an important Israeli architect who was even more importantly Yael’s mother. We get the sense of Ada as a creator of brilliantly conceived buildings alongside her loving relationship with her daughter, shown through touching discussions between them. 

 

 

In The Spoils, a tragic and complex story is told of Jewish art dealer Max Stern, whose impressive gallery holdings were broken up, as were so many others by the Nazis, although he did escape to London and later to Canada. Jamie Kastner follows the trail of the ongoing attempts at repatriating his works alongside documenting the German city of Düsseldorf’s decision to pull the plug on a Stern museum exhibit in 2017, nominally over the provenance of a single artwork. The morality and legality of restitution is argued—especially by a Dusseldorf lawyer aptly named Ludwig von Pufendorf, whose pronouncements skirt anti-Semitism. For highly contentious subject matter, Kastner navigates the many sides and players with intelligence and clarity.

 

 

The title tells all in The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival, which is Julie Rubio’s informative if chatty portrait of the singular Polish artist who was famous in her circle in her lifetime but has become far more renowned now, nearly four decades after her death. For those with little or no knowledge of Lempicka’s artistry and legacy, Rubio has created a good primer, and her interviews with Lempicka’s granddaughter and great-granddaughters provide a welcome personal touch.

 

 

The lone fiction feature I saw, Blind at Heart, was in many ways the most remarkable. Based on Julia Franck's prizewinning novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blindness of the Heart), Barbara Albert’s arresting and formidable feature follows Hélène, a young Jewish woman who arrives in Berlin in the midst of the liberal Weimar Republic hoping to become a doctor and hiding her identity—when the Nazis come to power, she makes decisions that will change the course of her life. Albert tells this intimate story about extraordinary resilience on an appropriately epic scale, and it’s centered by the tremendous performance of Mala Emde, whose Hélène is an unforgettable creation.