With the current intifada raging in Israel, one of the more anticipated
films of the festival may be Kippurby Amos Gitai. Though
the drama follows a small unit of soldiers during the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, the anti-violence message is one that maintains its relevance
eternally.
Gitai has taken an in-depth look at two close friends, Weinraub
and Ruso, who can't find their regular army unit and who join a
first aid group assigned to retrieve wounded soldiers on the front
lines. The film starts slowly, with almost an hour going by before
the viewers are taken into the war scenes. The slow movement of
the first half of the film, along with the disorganized way in which
the two protagonists make it to "the action," contrasts
strongly with the images of them risking their lives and making
snap decisions in the field. The tension runs high with every move
they make closer to the shelling and highlights the difficulties
they and the doctor that accompanies them have in trying to treat
the wounded. In one formidable scene, the small group of men try
in vain to move a soldier out of knee-deep mud tracks in a tank
battlefield. The hapless troupe keeps dropping the patient and viewers
begin to understand the frustration and futility faced by the inexperienced
recruits.
Unfortunately, Gitai chooses to intersperse the combat scenes with
long shots of Weinraub looking out of the helicopter window. Meant
to convey the reflection the soldier is going through, the scenes
are so long, they begin to get boring. Rather than convey the tedium
the soldier is feeling, they only serve to cause the viewer to lose
interest for that brief period.
Though the movie does not approach films like Platoon or
Saving Private Ryan in their overwhelming and horrific portrayal
of violence, it does give the audience a uniquely grave perspective
from an Israeli veteran of an Israeli war.
Kippur shows May 15, 9 p.m., at the Norman Rothstein Theatre.
- Baila Lazarus
Trying to stay alive
One Day Crossing takes place in Budapest during October
1944. As the Hungarian Nazi movement Arrow Cross grows stronger,
a young Jewish couple poses as Christians to protect their son.
Even after the announcement that the war is over, the family's lives
are in danger; Jews are being taken to the river to be shot. There
is a chilling scene where the mother rushes out to find her son,
comes to the river and yells for the soldiers to stop because her
"Christian" son may be among those about to be murdered.
Her son is not there but another Jewish boy is, with his mother.
The two women exchange a long look, after which the "Christian"
woman claims the boy as hers.
One Day Crossing, directed by Joan Stein, is showing May 15, 7 p.m., at Pacific Cinémathèque. The 25-minute film, which is in Hungarian with English subtitles, was nominated for a Best Short Drama Academy Award last year. It is followed by the documentary Pola's March, which chronicles the journey of Holocaust survivor Pola Susswein who travels from Israel to Poland with 200 teenage students on the March of the Living program.
- Cynthia Ramsay
Spiritual possession
The Dybbuk, a Polish movie (with English subtitles) set
in turn-of-the century rural Poland, retells the Chassidic folktale
of a wandering soul in search of an earthly host.
The wrath of the spiritual world is unleashed when a matrimonial
promise binding a yeshivah student and a young woman is betrayed
by the girl's father. Using the power of the kabbalah, the student
frees his own soul from his body and inhabits the form of his beloved.
The rebbe must then try to exorcise the demon from the woman.
This is a quite bizarre film. In addition to the possession of
a woman by a spirit, there is a trial in which the plaintiff is
a dead man who is summoned from his resting place to testify. This
is not a movie for those who prefer the tangible and rational to
the mystical and strange.
The Dybbukdefinitely has a made-for-TV feel. It was produced for Polish television and is directed by Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa). It is presented in co-operation with TVP S.A. Polish Television and screens at the Pacific Cinémathèque May 17, at 7 p.m.
- Cynthia Ramsay
Japan's consul saved Jews from Holocaust
Out of the Holocaust came a small number of redeeming stories of
humanity amid chaos. There were people who, at risk of their own
lives, went to extraordinary lengths to do what they could to save
victims of the Nazi regime.
One of those people was Chiune Sugihara, an otherwise ordinary
Japanese diplomat posted to Soviet-occupied Lithuania. As the Nazis
marched toward Lithuania, Sugihara was moved by the hundreds of
Jews amassing outside his consul building every day. As he learned
about their potential fate at the hands of the advancing Germans,
he disobeyed orders and began writing thousands of transit visas,
which would allow the refugees entry to Japan. In all, Sugihara
managed to save 6,000 Jews and - as the documentary Sugihara:
Conspiracy of Kindnesspoignantly displays - was responsible
for 60,000 survivors and their descendants being alive today.
Sugihara is the only Japanese citizen given Yad Vashem's honor
of "righteous among the nations."
What is just as interesting as the stories of Sugihara - told through
the eyes of his widow and other eyewitnesses, including survivors
- is the political and historical backdrop to the events. The relationship
between Jews and Japanese goes back to the Russo-Japanese war of
1905. Jacob Schiff, the American financier, was the only banker
willing to lend money to the Japanese to fight the war effort. Other
bankers expected a Russian rout over the Japanese, but Schiff had
heard the news stories of the grisly Kishinev program of the previous
year, in which Russians had brutally destroyed an entire shtetl.
Despite his best economic judgment, Schiff was willing to fund the
Japanese as retaliation for the pogroms. This single financial transaction
propagated an assumption among the Japanese that Jews like Schiff
held inordinate power in the Western world.
In addition, the situation in Lithuania during the early part of
the war was of particular interest to the Japanese. Although the
Baltic state might seem remote from the Japanese sphere, Imperial
Japanese leaders knew it would be one of the first targets if Hitler
broke the non-aggression pact with Stalin. Therefore, any indications
that Sugihara could send home suggesting imminent German attack
would leave Japan free to invade Manchuria - Manchukuo as they called
it - without fear of Russia opening a second front with Japan.
The film, which won best documentary at last year's Hollywood Film Festival, was directed by American Robert Kirk and plays at the Rothstein Theatre at 7 p.m., Sunday, May 20. n
- Pat Johnson