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May 4, 2001

Jewish film fest on the way

The 13th Annual Vancouver Jewish Film Festival will kick off on the providential date of May 13 this year, with three films screening at the Norman Rothstein Theatre. The festival repertoire will include dramas, documentaries, comedies, musicals and animated films. It's a special anniversary for the film fair. As festival executive director Morey Altman put it, "We still haven't decided if a film festival celebrates a bar or a bat mitzvah, but either way, we're celebrating!"

Particularly noteworthy is the opening gala featuring the North American première of Minyan in Kaifeng. The film, which is written and directed by Steven Calcote and Jonathan Shulman, is narrated by Leonard Nimoy. It follows a group of Jewish expatriates who are looking for a Jewish community that thrived in Kaifeng, China, for hundreds of years. Discussions about identity and the Diaspora lead the minyan to realize that their questions about the Jews of Kaifeng are also questions about themselves and none of them have easy answers. Calcote and Shulman will make guest appearances during the evening.

The film fest will present a special screening of Children of the Storm May 20, in co-operation with Vision TV, which is a new media sponsor this year. The film's director, Jack Kuper, will be in attendance.

Music lovers will have a plethora of events to go to, with films that include a variety of subjects and styles, from klezmer (The New Klezmorim, May 14) to jazz (The Jazzmanfrom the Gulag, May 16) to the best of Israeli rock and pop (Israel Rocks! - A Journey Through Music of Visions and Divisions, May 21).

For comedy, there's Cours Toujours (Dad on the Run) May 20, a new French farce in the style of Martin Scorcese's After Hours. And film curator Murray Glass will be in Vancouver for Shtick, Schmaltz and Stereotypes May 15 for a look back at the Jewish comedy greats of film and television.

And for those who didn't catch Aimée and Jaguarat theatres around town recently, the 1999 Golden Globe Nominee will be screened May 21. The film takes place during the Second World War and follows the love story between two women - a German hausfrau and a Jewish member of the Undergound.

Offerings from local talent include Wanderings: Postcards from the Diaspora May 20, directed by Vancouver filmmaker Nikila Cole. The film follows Cole and her 13-year-old daughter as they explore 4,000 years of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora. Still (Stille), which airs May 23, is a documentary by Wendy Oberlander, who uses archival footage to recount the story of her mother's life. Both filmmakers will attend the showing of their productions.

Yom Kippur War recalled

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

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