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<\/a>Matchmaking 2<\/i> (Israel), which screens on May 5, also has a misfit at its heart. Many of the actors from the first movie reprise their roles, including Maor Schwitzer as Baruch Auerbach, a former rising star scholar in his ultra-Orthodox community, now in his late 20s and yet to find a wife. There is no need to have seen the first movie to fully enjoy its sequel. The characters are likeable and, even when Baruch acts like an idiot, you still cheer for him and hope that he\u2019ll find his match.<\/p>\n
While Matchmaking 2<\/i> gives viewers a glimpse into the cultural differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and into the ultra-Orthodox shidduch<\/i> (matchmaking) system, it is mainly a rom-com. As The Floaters<\/i> does, the movie celebrates Judaism and Jewish life with humour, tenderness and respect.<\/p>\n
As entertaining, in a completely different way, is the documentary The Stamp Thief<\/i> (United States\/ Poland\/Germany), which screens May 7.<\/p>\n
The Stamp Thief<\/i>, produced\/directed by Dan Sturman, is fascinating on many fronts. The filmmakers make a potentially convoluted detective story into an easy-to-follow \u201cpage-turner\u201d and there are a few moments where you\u2019ll find yourself holding your breath. There are also many moments \u2013 well after the film \u2013 where you\u2019ll be thinking about humanity\u2019s capacity for doing good and evil, intergenerational trauma, generational responsibility, and many other issues.<\/p>\n In The Stamp Thief,<\/i> it\u2019s refreshing how open the filmmakers are about the morality of what they\u2019re trying to do \u2013 steal back for the Jewish community some rare stamps that were stolen by a Nazi officer whose task was to catalogue and appraise the possessions being stolen from Jews entering Auschwitz. The conversations between producer\/writer Gary Gilbert and his family are uplifting, even as his family questions his motives and actions, because that\u2019s what loved ones should do \u2013 be supportive but not uncritically so.<\/p>\n The story behind the filmmakers\u2019 quest came from screenwriter David Weisberg\u2019s father, who was a psychiatrist. His dad had a patient in the 1970s who was married to the daughter of a former Nazi. The patient revealed that his father-in-law had buried a case of stolen stamps in the basement of his home in Legnica, which was part of Germany until 1945, but is now in Poland.<\/p>\n Weisberg had no desire to return to Poland, but his friend Gilbert was game, and Gilbert had a plan \u2013 one based on an elaborate \u201cfake movie\u201d scheme that Weisberg\u2019s father had\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n drawn up in the \u201970s. Sturman would direct a fake film, giving him, Gilbert, producer Dylan Nelson and their handpicked team a non-controversial reason to explore the former Nazi\u2019s apartment building. The help they receive from Polish film professional Sylwia Szczechowicz-Warszewska is moving, and the resulting documentary is compelling.<\/p>\n<\/a>