The Annual New York Jewish Film Festival Hits 20

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 10 January 2011 02:55

Written by Laura Blum

Why is the New York Jewish Film Festival (January 12 to 27, 2011) different from all other Jewish film festivals? Lenny Bruce's Talmudic commentary, "Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish," hints at an answer. Back for its 20th whirl, NYJFF once again presents movies exploring the Jewish experience but that any restless, ironic, brow-beating Manhattanite might identify with in spirit.

The Festival brings together two of the City's cultural shrines, The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in this annual ritual at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater. Its 2011 slate spans 37 features and shorts from 14 countries.

Opening night is an appointment with Mahler on the Couch/Mahler auf der Couch, Percy and Felix Adlon’s fertile imagining of Gustav Mahler’s tortured marriage to Alma, whose affair with architect Walter Gropius prompted the composer to seek a therapy session with Sigmund Freud in 1910. No matter that the actual encounter was an outdoor stroll involving no horizontal confessions; here the father-son duo take history as a muse for pondering love and art -- and their obsessions and betrayals -- in retro fantasy's shimmer.

Barbara Romaner, a veteran of the stage, is a light source herself as pianist and composer Alma who sacrifices her creative life to serve her husband until frustration drives her elsewise. If the glinting melodrama doesn't snag you, perhaps the music will. Underscoring the drama is Mahler's unfinished Symphony No. 10, performed here by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The Festival closes with Avi Nesher’s The Matchmaker, a coming-of-age story harking back to 1968 Haifa, where teenaged Arik learns about love and post-traumatic stress under the tutelage of matchmaker Yankele Bride who survived the Nazi death camps. Book-ending the film are Arik, now a middle-aged man, and his father, silhouetted against the smolder of Israel's 2006 war with Lebanon.

News of the matchmaker's passing sends Arik reminiscing about his youth in the aftermath of an earlier conflict -- the 1967 Six Day War -- which the Hebrew title Pa'am Hayiti (I Once Was) gets at with old-fashioned storybook wistfulness. "I Once Was" is also perhaps Nesher's ventriloquy for an Israel whose military adventures he now questions, but whose founding raison d'etre was as a refuge for victims of persecution.

Whatever Yankele Bride or his comely business partner, fellow survivor and elusive love once were is glimpsed through the prism of their current efforts at redemption, even when those efforts would seem to be at odds with expectations, desires and even the law. Yankele Bride's quest to give people "what they need, not what they want" is the crowning lesson for his young apprentice -- and anyone who has been looking for love in all the wrong places -- to salvage from the ashes of conflict and grief.

The film overstays its welcome as the story spurts and shunts, yet its three-penny philosophy of love and fragrant period nostalgia earned it seven Israeli Academy Awards, including for Best Picture, and are apt to please NYJFF crowds.

Another period piece, The Roundup/La Rafle, loses the warm gels in recounting France's “Vel' d’Hiv” mass arrest of Jews during World War II. Filmmaker Roselyne Bosch put her journalistic background to use in researching the roundup of 13,000 Jews – to the Vélodrome D'Hiver and on to the camp of Beaune-La-Rolande, from Vichy to the Berghof terrace – as ordered by the Gestapo and puppet Vichy regime.

“All the events in this film, even the most extreme, truly occurred in the Summer of 1942,” goes a title card at the beginning of the film. So despite the starry sheen of Jean Reno (The DaVinci Code), Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds), Sylvie Testud (La Vie en rose) and Gad Elmaleh (The Valet), there's never a way to dismiss the atrocities unfolding on screen as just a horror flick.

Even if you've seen 1,000 holocaust films before, Bosch defies you not to agonize as two Parisian families whose sons are best friends go from wearing yellow stars to being corralled by the French military to heading out in trains for detention camp. And damn if you don't cringe when red cross nurse Annette Monod (Laurent) protests by eating the same rations as she doles out, shedding 14 pounds in a week. She and Jewish doctor David Sheinbaum (Reno) are among the caregivers who labor in unforgiving conditions to save the starved and diseased Jews under the apathetic eyes of French and German guards.

The story is familiar enough but somehow the very fact of this being France makes it possible to endure yet another grim entry from the Shoah shelf. Precisely the film's weakness – that it lays on the manipulative sap – makes it compulsively watchable. If for no other reason, La Rafle merits viewing in order to understand the history chapter that French leaders have for so long denied.

As if to asterisk the dramatic narrative, the Festival provides a documentary about the deportation of French Jews. Raphaël Delpard’s documentary, Convoys of Shame/Les Convois de la Honte, investigates how French national rail entity SNCF hauled Jews, Roma and members of the resistance to Nazi concentration camps.

Documentaries hold sway over this year's Festival agenda. From New Argentine Cinema poster boy Daniel Burman comes 36 Righteous Men/Los 36 Justos, which marks a departure from his Woody Allenesque pokes at Buenos Aires neurotics. Burman sets out with a group of Orthodox Jews on their yearly pilgrimage to the tombs of righteous men in Russia, Ukraine and Poland, most notably that of the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov.

Yet, as with any Jewish film festival worth its kosher salt, this year's lineup includes forays into humor and music. Both abound in Erik Greenberg Anjou's The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground. Chronicling four years of joys and oys in the veteran klezmer fusion band, the film captures their creative churn and ecstatic performances as well as their unravellings and resiliencies as colleagues, business partners and individual artists.

But just as you suspect the film might slide into Metallica: This Monster Lives-style group therapy, it layers on cultural and historical context, most notably via an excursion to Eastern Europe, where klezmer music originated and where it's enjoying a government-subsidized revival. Too bad more wasn't made of these riveting back-to-the-roots revelations, which provide more enduring nourishment than the slightly contrived storyline following the campaign trail for a Grammy (which the group won, a first for klezmer music). And unless you're in the music business, you may not require such a granular telling of the pitfalls and opportunities of the field. Snip, snip may be your vicarious edit. Still, The Klezmatics is well worth the ticket, even if only to capture performance footage of this vibrant and oniony New York band.

For a full description of Festival offerings, including live performances and discussions, go to: http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/nyjff.html

The general calendar of screenings are at the Walter Reade Theater unless otherwise indicated.

(At The Jewish Museum: Mon Jan 24: Tevye at 3:00)

(At The JCC in Manhattan: Tue Jan 18: My So-Called Enemy at 7:30)

Wed Jan 12
1:00 Mahler on the Couch
3:30 Stalin Thought of You
6:00 Mahler on the Couch
8:30 Stalin Thought of You

Thu Jan 13
1:00 Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
3:15 The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground
6:00 Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
8:30 The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground

Sat Jan 15
6:30 The Human Resources Manager
9:15 Red Shirley with discussion

Sun Jan 16
1:30 Lies My Father Told Me
4:00 The Roundup
6:45 My So-Called Enemy
9:00 Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish with Seltzer Works

Mon Jan 17
1:00 Houdini
3:30 Wrong Side of the Bus with Strangers No More
6:00 Eichmann’s End: Love, Betrayal, Death
8:15 The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground

Tue Jan 18
1:00 Wrong Side of the Bus with Strangers No More
3:30 Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray
6:00 The Roundup
7:30 My So-Called Enemy [at the JCC]
9:00 Sixty and the City with Quentin and Ferdinand

Wed Jan 19
1:30 Cabaret Polska with 8 Stories That Haven’t Changed The World
3:30 Sixty and the City with Quentin and Ferdinand
6:00 Cabaret Polska with 8 Stories That Haven’t Changed The World
8:15 Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray

Thu Jan 20
1:00 Grace Paley: Collected Shorts with Vera Klement: Blunt Edge
3:30 The Human Resources Manager
6:00 Grace Paley: Collected Shorts with Vera Klement: Blunt Edge
8:30 The Human Resources Manager

Sat Jan 22
6:30 I Miss You
9:00 The “Socalled” Movie with performance

Sun Jan 23
1:30 Singing in the Dark
4:00 Eichmann’s End: Love, Betrayal, Death
6:15 The “Socalled” Movie
8:30 I Miss You

Mon Jan 24
1:00 Convoys of Shame
3:00 Tevye [at The Jewish Museum]
3:45 As Lilith
6:00 Convoys of Shame
8:45 As Lilith

Tue Jan 25
1:15 Black Bus
3:30 Yolande: An Unsung Heroine with My Father
6:00 Black Bus
8:15 Yolande: An Unsung Heroine with My Father

Wed Jan 26
1:15 Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish with Seltzer Works
3:45 36 Righteous Men with Inventory
6:00 Precious Life
8:30 36 Righteous Men with Inventory

Thu Jan 27
1:00 Crime After Crime
3:15 The Matchmaker
6:00 Crime After Crime
8:30 The Matchmaker

New York Jewish Film Festival
January 12 to 27, 2011
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway)
Lincoln Plaza Upper Level
New York, NY 10023

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