Vancouver Jewish Film Festival

Don’t miss Jewish film fest

Full Support shines a positive, life-affirming light on Noa’s Bras, in Jaffa. (photo by Tulik Galon / Go2Films)

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival is now underway, with screenings at Fifth Avenue Cinemas through May 1, then at the Rothstein Theatre May 2 and 4. There are numerous films being presented, from documentaries to mysteries, dramas and more.

Being supportive

It may seem like a strange thing to say, but women should put Noa’s Bras, in Jaffa, on the itinerary of their next trip to Israel. If you don’t need a bra, you can go try some on, just for the experience of being well taken care of. At least, that’s how it seems a visit would go, from watching Michal Cohen’s documentary, Full Support.

Full Support shines a positive, life-affirming light on this store to which women come in need of varying sizes, looks and fits. Some brave clients share their stories with the filmmakers, and the result is a moving portrayal of women of all ages, socioeconomic backgrounds and life circumstances. Among them are cancer survivors, victims of abuse, divorcées; one woman wants something sexy, another just wants something comfortable, a preteen looking for her first bra comes in with her mom. The staff – maybe one or two of whom are proprietors? (it’s not clear) – are knowledgeable, respectful and helpful. It is amazing to see the staff literally size up a client from across the counter and then know which of many, many boxes they must go to for the bras they’re looking for. The store apparently offers 189 sizes!

Outside the store, the camera catches men walking by the shop, some even peeking in, then almost running away with embarrassment. There are other moments of humour, as well as many touching moments, including when one of the store clerks pops into the tailor next door for him to sew up this or that and we find out that he and his wife are waiting for a permit to visit their daughter in Nablus.

Full Support is an interesting, thoughtful and funny film.

– CR

A murder mystery

photo - In Highway 65, a demoted Tel Aviv detective, Daphna (Tali Sharon), finds herself assigned to investigations in the hick town of Afula — In *Highway 65*, a demoted Tel Aviv detective, Daphna (Tali Sharon), finds herself assigned to investigations in the hick town of Afula. *(still from film)*

Family secrets are the theme in Highway 65, in which a demoted Tel Aviv detective finds herself doing slashed tire and lost phone investigations in the hick town of Afula.

Daphna (Tali Sharon), the downgraded cop, is a shlubby Columbo with appalling table manners but proficiency at her job. The lost phone – a seemingly innocuous investigation – leads to something much larger. The phone’s owner, Orly, has been missing for a week and no one has reported her absence.

It’s a small town where everyone knows everybody’s business and outsider Daphna finds herself in the midst of a perversely convoluted family drama, crossing personal and professional boundaries with nonchalance.

The family is marking the 10th yahrzeit of the missing woman’s husband and Daphna’s investigation puts a serious crimp in the commemoration. The family has an ominous mafia feel to it and the film jolts the viewer with an instant of truly shocking violence that illuminates the narrative and ultimately fingers the culprit.

Fans of quality Israeli TV will recognize Sharon from her role as Hodaya in Srugim, about Orthodox singles in Jerusalem. The male lead, Matan, is played by Idan Amedi, a singer-songwriter and actor known for playing Sagi Tzur in Fauda. Amedi was seriously injured during reserve duty in January 2024, when six fellow soldiers were killed in Gaza.

– PJ

Relentlessly talented

photo - Diane Warren: Relentless introduces audiences to the seemingly chaotic genius of songwriter Diane Warren — *Diane Warren: Relentless* introduces audiences to the seemingly chaotic genius of songwriter Diane Warren. *(still from film)*

Everyone knows a song that was written by American songwriter Diane Warren – everyone. For more than 40 years, she has been writing hits in multiple genres. From “Rhythm of the Night,” performed by the band DeBarge; to “When I See You Smile,” for Bad English; to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” sung by Aerosmith; to multiple songs performed by Beyoncé, Michael Bolton, Cher, Celine Dionne, Meat Loaf, Whitney Houston and so many others. Her writing has earned her a long list of awards and 16 Academy Award nominations – while she has yet to win an Oscar for a particular song, she was recognized with an honorary Oscar in 2022 for her achievements.

The documentary Diane Warren: Relentless, directed by Bess Kargman, introduces audiences to the seemingly chaotic genius of Warren, who was born in Van Nuys, Calif., into a middle-class Jewish family. The third daughter of David and Flora Warren, she is much younger than her sisters and knew, from a young age, that music – rather than something more conventional – was the path she wanted to follow.

Her parents struggled with how to parent Warren. Her dad was supportive of her music dream, at least, but her relationship with her mother was troubled till the end. Warren grew up feeling an outsider both at home and at school. It is not clear when she was diagnosed, but having Asperger’s syndrome contributes to both Warren’s genius and her struggles. She also shares that she was molested as a child, in the context of having written “Till It Happens to You,” which Warren wanted Lady Gaga, also a survivor of sexual assault, to sing.

A lot of Warren’s collaborators lend their views to this documentary, and their respect for Warren is clear, even when there are hurt feelings. For example, she gave both LeAnn Rimes and Trisha Yearwood the song “How Do I Live,” but both versions ended up being a hit.

A master of romantic songs, Warren has no romantic partner, only a love for creating music – something she is driven to do and will continue to do as long as she is able.

Relentless is a fascinating look at a fascinating person.

– CR

Quest for the past

photo - The Property closes the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival May 4 — *The Property* closes the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival May 4. *(still from film)*

One probably wouldn’t expect lots of yuks in a film about a grandmother and granddaughter traveling from Israel to Poland to reclaim property lost during the Holocaust. But the first great guffaw in the closing night film of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, The Property, comes early, with the frustrated chaperone of ill-behaved high school students shouting, “You don’t deserve to be taken to the concentration camps!”

Dark humour and subtle situational absurdity shine a light on serious paradoxes, twists of fate, loss and possible redemption. The film by Dana Modan, based on a graphic novel by her brother, Rutu Modan, centres around distinctive characters and intersecting personal and world history.

The trip’s mission seems straightforward, but Savta has a secret – and a secret agenda. Secrets abound, actually, but the conundrum, as the granddaughter observes drily, is that no one really cares.

Ostensibly, the family is returning to Poland to regain physical property stolen during the war – an apartment building – but it becomes clear almost immediately that the grandmother is after something else. The viewer’s assumptions about her motivations will be subtly upended.

The grandmother, Regina (Rivka Michaeli), and granddaughter, Mika (Sharon Strimban), spend much of their time in Poland doing their own things, but their experiences – past and present – imitate the other’s. History and the present day seem to merge, then diverge, when Mika stumbles into a too-authentic immersive experience at a museum that is the essence of dark humour, as is the interaction with a museum curator who takes her work just a tad too seriously.

Family secrets, though, are the heart of the film, as are the complex interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles across generations.

Beginnings and endings and the sense that the past keeps repeating are a thread throughout The Property.

“How many times can you start a life all over again?” asks the grandmother at one point. But Mika’s experience suggests it’s all a big repetitive cycle anyway.

– PJ

For tickets to the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, visit vjff.org.

Guns & Moses to thrill at VJFF

Filmmakers Salvador and Nina Litvak with Guns & Moses cast members Neal McDonough, left, Dermot Mulroney, centre, and Mark Feuerstein, right. (photo from Pictures from the Fringe)

Los Angeles filmmaker and author Salvador Litvak (no relation) will be in the city for this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival to promote and talk about his and wife Nina Davidovich Litvak’s latest movie, Guns & Moses, which screens April 27, 4 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

The action thriller features a Chabad rabbi who becomes a detective and gunfighter to investigate a murder at his synagogue. This will be the third movie by the Litvaks and their production company, Pictures from the Fringe. Their previous films are When Do We Eat?, about “the world’s fastest seder gone horribly awry,” and Saving Lincoln, which is based on the true story of Abraham Lincoln and his friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon.

Between movies, Salvador Litvak became the Accidental Talmudist – in fact, his last event in Vancouver was an Accidental Talmudist Shabbaton at the Kollel. He and his wife co-manage accidentaltalmudist.org, which has more than one million followers. Last year, he published a bestselling book, Let My People Laugh: Greatest Jewish Jokes of all Time.

Salvador Litvak grew up in New York but was born in Santiago, Chile.

“My mother’s family, both my mother and grandmother, were Holocaust survivors who came to Chile from Hungary and my father’s family ended up in Chile fleeing the pogroms in the Ukraine about 1905,” he told the Independent. As immigrants, he said, “we got to this country and my parents wanted me to go to Harvard to be a doctor and, since I was 5, I said OK, but, eventually, I figured out that I didn’t want to be a doctor and I didn’t want to be a lawyer because I enjoyed writing and creating very much.”

He said, “Eventually, I talked my way into UCLA film school, where I arrived in the 1990s, attended the MFA director’s program, and said thank G-d I didn’t miss this because this is what I was meant to do.”

Pictures from the Fringe’s first feature film, When Do We Eat?, about a dysfunctional family’s Passover seder, was inspired by the fact that there were no Jewish holiday movies and the Litvaks wanted to “create a Jewish version of It’s a Wonderful Life.” Both filmmakers are baalei teshuva, or returnees to Judaism, and were “in the early stages of their journey,” said Salvador Litvak. They infused the movie with a “tremendous amount of spirituality, Torah and Chassidut,” but, he noted, “now that we’re Orthodox, we admit that it’s a little edgier than we would like.” However, he said, “All of the deep stuff in it, the Torah, the love, in addition to the raucous humour, stands the test of time.”

Litvak said his journey as the Accidental Talmudist and the establishment of accidentaltalmudist.org have helped When Do We Eat? gain new popularity and provide a built-in audience for Guns & Moses, which was partially inspired by a tragic shooting in California on April 27, 2019.

The couple had “built a large audience interested in authentic Jewish content, and we are filmmakers, so we knew that our next movie would be somehow Jewish. I wanted it to be an action thriller because I love action thrillers,” he said.

The Litvaks watched a thriller a day for three years to “learn the genre inside out,” he said. “While we were immersed in that, there was a tragic murder, a shooting at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, Calif., where a young white nationalist came in and murdered a woman named Lori Gilbert-Kaye, injured the rabbi, and would have killed a lot more people if his gun had not miraculously jammed and members of the congregation rushed at him and then he fled.

“I went down the next day and attended Lori’s funeral and interviewed the rabbi and congregants and got to know what happened there personally, and I said there is something in this that can become an action thriller with a murder/mystery structure,” he said.

And so, Guns & Moses – about a Chabad rabbi who becomes an investigator and gunfighter after witnessing a tragic shooting at his synagogue – came into being. It was filmed in 2022.

Litvak said he knew that a movie about Jews under attack who fight back “would always be relevant, but we had no idea how relevant it would be” after Oct. 7, 2023.

One of the important themes of the movie, said Litvak, is that Jews are in danger and need to protect themselves and be responsible for their own safety. For him personally, that has meant joining a Jewish self-defence organization called Magen Am (which means Shield of the Nation) and going through extensive training (including learning how to use a gun) so that he can protect his own synagogue in case of an attack like the one in Poway. In the movie Guns & Moses, the character of Rabbi Mo Saltzman goes through the same training that Litvak went through.

In Guns & Moses, Saltzman is played by actor Mark Feuerstein, who starred in the hit series Royal Pains and appeared in the movie Defiance, among other things. The cast includes American-Israeli actor Alona Tal as the rebbetzin, Christopher Lloyd as a Holocaust survivor, as well as veteran actors Neal McDonough and Dermot Mulroney, Jake Busey, Craig Sheaffer, Mercedes Mason, Mark Ivanir (who also appeared in When Do We Eat?) and young actor Jackson Dunn, who Litvak believes will become a star. Litvak praised his cast, who only had 20 days to film Guns & Moses.

Litvak is looking forward to coming back to Vancouver, where he has visited many times because he has family here. The city is “very dear to my heart,” he said, and he loves the people and feels at home as soon as he lands here.

For tickets to Guns & Moses and other Vancouver Jewish Film Festival screenings, visit vjff.org.

David J. Litvak is a prairie refugee from the North End of Winnipeg who is a freelance writer and publicist, and a mashgiach at Louis Brier Home and Hospital. His articles have been published in the Forward, Globe and Mail and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His website is cascadiapublicity.com.

* * *

Editor’s Note: Guns & Moses’ North American release date is July 18. For more information, visit collider.com/guns-and-moses-trailer-release-date.

Film Fest starts soon

Sabbath Queen is a film about the life of Amichai Lau-Lavie, part of a rabbinic dynasty going back 38 generations. (still from film)

The 36th annual Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs April 24 to May 4, beginning with opening night film Midas Man, which “offers Beatles fans a fresh look at the pivotal role Brian Epstein played in the band’s meteoric rise.” An enormous range of dramatic and documentary films, features and shorts, fill out the festival’s run, and the Independent reviews some of them here.

Tradition!

Hester Street, based on Abraham Cahan’s 1896 Lower Eastside immigrant novel Yekl, was released in 1975, about the same time as Fiddler on the Roof. The movie approaches some of the same topics of assimilation and tradition, without the song and dance.

Yankl (now Americanized Jake, played by Steven Keats) transforms from a yeshivah bocher to a shmatte sweatshop worker. Along comes Gitl, the wife who had waited behind in Russia, and young son Yossele who, payos cut off, becomes Joey.

The 50th anniversary of the film’s release reminds us that the 1970s were a time of nostalgia and of Jewish narratives that both idealized and lamented the American dream. In Hester Street, which is in black-and-white for mood, the boarder Bernstein (Mel Howard) represents tradition and continuity, contrasting with Jake in the fight of money versus learning, of getting ahead versus getting an education. Bernstein’s presence in the home of the primary couple puts Gitl in a predictable three-cornered bind both romantic and cultural.

Hester Street, which is filmed in black-and-white for mood, confronts the themes of tradition and assimilation — *Hester Street*, which is filmed in black-and-white for mood, confronts the themes of tradition and assimilation. *(still from film)*

Younger viewers might take some time to recognize Gitl (Carol Kane) as the kooky landlady from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Meanwhile, the tough-talking landlady in Hester Street is recognizable as Doris Roberts, who contemporary viewers will recognize as the buttinsky mother-in-law from Everybody Loves Raymond.

There are subversive components of the film, including the role of divorce in perpetuating traditional values. Subversion twists again and indeed Gitl assimilates in her particular ways. As the last line in the film declares ambivalently, “We mustn’t be too quick to say this or that.”

Director Joan Micklin Silver was a pioneering woman in male-dominated 1970s Hollywood.

Kosher queen

Tradition, continuity and modern times are absolutely the themes of Sabbath Queen, a film by Sandi DuBowski about the life of Amichai Lau-Lavie.

The scion of a rabbinic dynasty going back 38 generations, Amichai is the son of politician, ambassador (“and we suspect a spy”) Naphtali Lau-Lavie and nephew of Israel Meir Lau, former chief rabbi of Israel. Filmed over 21 years, the documentary follows Amichai as he is ordained as a rabbi, via the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. But choosing the Conservative movement over orthodoxy is the least of Amichai’s rifts with his traditional family.

In 1993, Amichai was outed as a gay man in a news report and, it seems, he never looked back. After fleeing to New York a couple of years later and getting involved with the Radical Faeries, a queer, shamanistic spirituality group, “one vodka too many” leads to his alter ego emerging “out of my head like Athena.”

The drag queen Hadassah Gross – a Hungarian sex advisor, kabbalist, matchmaker and widow of six rabbis – was born. Amichai describes his drag persona as “something between channeling and performing” and it is all about exploring the intersections of feminine and masculine. (“What the goyim call the yingele and the yangele,” says Hadassah.)

“Artists are the new rabbis,” he declares, but eventually seems to decide that being an artist is not enough and he seeks his rabbinical smicha, in large part, it seems, to combat his brother and the larger establishment on Orthodox dogma.

He becomes the spiritual leader of a decidedly unorthodox congregation called Lab/Shul. And, when his officiating of interfaith partnerships clashes with the Conservative movement, the rabbi faces the consequences.

Amichai’s brother, father and mother have their reservations, to put it mildly, about Amichai’s activities.

“We’re pushing a lot of boundaries here,” he acknowledges. Or, as his Orthodox rabbi brother puts it, not entirely sympathetically, “He’s playing with Judaism.”

One feels invasive as the camera goes close up on Amichai at his father’s funeral and that sense of voyeurism repeats throughout the film, as does the feeling that the documentary’s subject is something of an emotional exhibitionist.

The relationship between Amichai and his immediate family represents the larger cultural dissonance between queer and other nonconforming Jews and the orthodoxy of the tradition, though there is an astonishing, uplifting conclusion to some of these challenges by the film’s ending.

A family affair

I first saw A Real Pain on a flight home from Israel last month. Selecting a Hollywood treatment of two cousins doing a Holocaust road trip to their grandmother’s hometown in Poland, I girded myself for cringe-inducing, inappropriate or otherwise disappointing fare. My expectations were pleasantly upended. This is a profound, beautifully presented film that hits the right notes in so many ways.

I am not the only one impressed. Unbeknownst to me when I chose it, the script and the acting were already grabbing accolades worldwide. Costars Jesse Eisenberg (who won the BAFTA Award for best original screenplay) and Kieran Culkin (who won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best supporting actor) deliver moving and multidimensional characters.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) are the proverbial odd couple but what I had somehow anticipated to be slapstick comedy turned out to be deeply touching. As we find out more about Benji’s story, his erratic behaviour makes more sense.

Moments that could come off as didactic – almost documentary-like scenes at the Polin Museum and the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, among others – somehow work even when you think they shouldn’t. The British tour guide James (Will Sharpe) is repeatedly challenged by Benji and acknowledges his own shortcomings as a non-Jewish facilitator, inviting viewers to ponder insider/outsider roles in the immediate and larger story.

If you ever wondered what corner Baby from Dirty Dancing ended up in, here she is – Jennifer Grey – playing a supporting role as one of the members of the cousins’ small tour group.

Spousal secrets

It is hard to write about Pink Lady without giving too much away. A seemingly ordinary religious Jerusalem couple with three happy kids and an involved extended family are upended when the husband is subjected to violence and blackmail.

Director Nir Bergman’s Hebrew-language feature film sees Lazer (Uri Blufarb) and Bati (Nur Fibak) pondering the most existential questions of how God challenges even his most dedicated adherents. A deeply serious film with both laugh-out-loud incongruities and eye-covering discomfiture, Pink Lady is a slice-of-life with deep theological questions.

Oct. 7 revisited

image - Of Dogs and Men, which deals directly with the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, is a blend of fiction and documentary — *Of Dogs and Men*, which deals directly with the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, is a blend of fiction and documentary. *(still from film)*

At least two films in the festival deal directly with the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.

Of Dogs and Men is a blend of fiction and documentary. Director Dani Rosenberg’s film follows 16-year-old Dar (Ori Avinoam, also cowriter) as she sneaks back into Nir Oz, her vacated kibbutz, in search of her missing dog Shula.

While the quest for the dog may be a stand-in for the larger search

Israelis have undertaken as individuals and collectively to discover the fate of missing people – Dar’s mother’s fate remains unknown – it is hard not to wonder if the choice to centre a (missing) dog in the story is not meant to invite dissonance among overseas viewers. Given the indifference and even celebration with which some people worldwide have responded to the Oct. 7 attacks, is the tragedy of a lost dog a statement on the qualitative value the world places on Jewish life?

Dar tags along with a woman who rescues animals in the abandoned and war-torn areas.

“Aren’t you afraid of dealing with those dogs?” she asks the woman.

“Look what human beings did. So, I should be afraid of dogs?” the woman responds. “There’s no creature more awful, crueler than human beings and I still live among you.”

Through the imagery of destruction and the litany of names of victims, the film breaks down distinctions between Israeli and Palestinian victims.

The documentary 6:30 provides a harrowing, minute-by-minute narrative of Oct. 7 events from different locations and perspectives. The interviews with survivors just a week after the attacks show raw emotion.

Some of the Nova festival-goers thought they were hallucinating as the hellish day unfolded. Several people, including first responders, speak of detachment, of a disconnect between what they were seeing and what they could believe. In retrospect, one survivor wonders if his liberation is real or if he died and that is what he is now experiencing. Others talk of the emotional burdens they will carry forever.

Linor Attias, a United Hatzalah volunteer who arrived at Kibbutz Be’eri in a mass casualty event vehicle, notes with pride that Arabs and Jews were united among the rescue workers trying to save the lives of victims. She loaded people into ambulances, where they released piercing shrieks of agony, having held them in for hours of silence in order to save their lives.

“That howl of pain cuts through the soul,” she says.

The most chilling thing about the film is realizing, amid all these horror stories, that these are the testimonies of the lucky ones.

Full details and tickets are available at vjff.org.

Ed Asner shines in final role

Ed Asner gives a remarkable performance in Tiger Within, which is part of the online Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, April 15-19. (tigerwithin.info/press-photos)

I had the privilege of interviewing Ed Asner several years ago. It was an experience I (and my mother, who also got to speak with him) won’t forget. So, it was with some sentimentality that I watched his last film, Tiger Within, which can be screened online April 15-19, as part of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which has other movies being presented at the Rothstein Theatre April 12-14.

Asner, who died in 2021, gives a wonderful, understated performance in Tiger Within, as widower and Holocaust survivor Samuel, who takes a troubled young woman under his wing, and changes her life for the better. His performance is the main reason to watch this film. People old enough to know Asner will understand when I say Tiger Within would have fit perfectly into the ABC Afterschool Special lineup. Well-intentioned, it is not well written and, with the exception of Asner, the acting is middling.

Casey, played by Margot Josefsohn, is a rebellious teenager with a struggling mother who prefers to keep her nasty boyfriend happy than care for her daughter. Casey’s father has started a new family and their suburban life isn’t a place for the mouthy, punk-loving, artistic teen. Another highlight of Tiger Within is Casey’s art, which makes appearances throughout, further communicating her frustrations and other feelings.

Out on her own, Casey is lucky to meet Samuel, who sees her inner light and inherent worth, even if she doesn’t. He manages to see beyond the swastika someone spray-painted on her jacket, which she didn’t bother to wash off, and her antisemitic opinions, including that Jews made up the Holocaust, which were taught to her by her mom and others. He gives her the unconditional love, snippets of wisdom and space to “tame the tiger within” and make her place in the world.

The movie has a timely and important message. And a younger audience might be just the one to receive it in the manner it was intended.

“One of the biggest tragedies is the misuse of love, the most powerful force there is,” writes director Rafal Zielinski on the movie’s website (tigerwithin.info). “Loving oneself, family, group, race, country (narcissism) and being incapable of loving the other equally, as oneself, is the misuse of love, it breeds hate.

“That is the message, I feel, in this film – Samuel overcomes hate for this girl and shows her unconditional love.

“It’s the greatest gift anyone can receive on this earth, and he keeps his promise, he once made to his wife – ‘to forgive all before he dies.’”

For tickets to Tiger Within and other festival films, visit vjff.org.

Movies that offer optimism

Stay With Us (still from the film)

Healing. Of body and soul. Of self, community, family, friends. This year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival offers many poignant films – dramas sprinkled with humour that invite contemplation, and hope that we flawed humans are capable of change and loving one another, despite our insecurities and differences.

Of the films the Jewish Independent reviewed this week, Stay With Us and Rose are among the films that will be screened at Fifth Avenue Cinemas in the main portion of the festival, April 4-12, which is followed by various screenings at the Rothstein Theatre April 13-14. No Name Restaurant will be both at Fifth Avenue, as well as online during that portion of the festival, which runs April 15-19.

Stay With Us is a sensitively written and well-performed movie that is based on Moroccan-born Canadian comedian Gad Elmaleh’s real-life fascination with the Virgin Mary. In the movie, he returns to Paris to visit his family, not sharing with them that he is in the process of converting to Catholicism. Perhaps because he’s dealing with his own actual emotional journey (though he co-wrote the script with Benjamin Charbit), Stay With Us delicately and thoughtfully explores some of the roles religion has in life and the effects a potential conversion can have on a family.

Despite being an immensely personal film – Elmaleh’s real parents and sister play his family in the film and most of the cast are people close to him – Stay With Us will resonate with anyone who has questioned their purpose in life, or been curious about other religions and cultures. Elmaleh doesn’t disparage religion or the religious. Thankfully, he chooses to tackle the subject seriously, with well-timed comedy, his own stand-up act as part of the story, as well as other natural-seeming, unforced funny moments – the reaction of his parents when they find a statue of the Virgin Mary in his suitcase is hilarious, for example.

The movie Rose is similarly satisfying – serious but also light and amusing. In the first minutes, set at Philippe’s rocking, festive, friend-filled 80th birthday party, we learn that Rose and Philippe are still madly in love after decades of marriage, that their three adult children each have their own personal challenges and rivalries (between themselves and for their parents’ affection), and that Philippe is fatally ill.

Understandably, after Rose loses the love of her life, she grieves. Her children worry that she doesn’t answer the phone, that she’s not taking care of herself. When 78-year-old Rose does start to take care of herself, to focus on her needs, to rediscover herself after years of being a wife, mother and grandmother, her children worry even more.

image - a still from the film Rose — Rose *(still from the film)*

Written by Aurélie Saada and Yaël Langmann, Rose is a charming, heartwarming film about how we choose to experience life, its happy, sad and other moments – and how it’s never too late to find joy. Saada is the film’s director, and she also composed original music for the film, which has a notably wonderful soundtrack. The movie is infused with her Tunisian Jewish background.

“It was important for me to put my first film in this setting because I didn’t want to cheat,” Saada says in the press material. “I wanted this film to resemble me and not to borrow anything from cultures that I hadn’t sufficiently mastered. Also, Eastern Judaism is often caricatured in French cinema. I wanted to show its more complex face, far from the clichés. But it remains a setting, a costume, a perfume because the heart of the subject is not there. This film may be imbued with Judeo-Eastern culture, but a friend of mine from Corsica, a Christian, told me a short while ago: ‘It’s crazy, it’s like home.’ I believe that we humans are much more alike than we imagine.”

This notion pretty much encapsulates the film No Name Restaurant as well. Written and directed by Stefan Sarazin and Peter Keller, the idea for the story apparently came from Sarazin’s “numerous travels to the Middle East” and was “inspired by an abandoned boat in the desert and the friendship to an elderly Bedouin.”

Ben, an ultra-Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, has yet to marry. Within hours of arriving in Jerusalem, both to visit family but mostly to meet the matchmaker – who he purposefully misses by taking his time to get to his uncle’s shop from the airport – Ben eagerly agrees to Uncle Yechiel’s request to head right back to the airport to catch a flight to Egypt.

image - still from the film No Name Restaurant — No Name Restaurant (still from the film)

The Jewish community of Alexandria, the president of which is Yechiel’s brother-in-law, needs a 10th man to form a minyan before Passover. If they can’t observe the holiday, according to some written agreement, all the community’s property and possessions will have to be turned over to the state.

Ben seizes the chance to save the ages-old synagogue, but misses his plane and then is kicked off the bus to Alexandria by fellow passengers, putting the whole plan in jeopardy. Luckily, he is picked up in the Sinai Desert by Adel, a Bedouin searching for his lost camel. Unluckily, Adel’s truck breaks down and the two men must head out on foot. Short on water – much of which had been used by Ben for ritual handwashings along the way – and going only on Adel’s memory of a well his family had frequented when he was a kid, the journey is fraught with existential concerns, including what other Arabs might do to a Jew in their midst and to the Bedouin who is helping him.

No Name Restaurant is a buddy movie that delivers all that one would expect from such a movie and more. With respect and humour, it brings together Jews, Muslims and Christians in a novel way to optimistic effect.

For the full Vancouver Jewish Film Festival lineup, go to vjff.org.

History, family & love – Vancouver Jewish Film festival starts April 14

A Radiant Girl (still from film)

As the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival approaches, the Jewish Independent reviews three more of the festival’s offerings: A Radiant Girl, All About the Levkovitches and One More Story.

Linking past to present?

In A Radiant Girl, 19-year-old Irene (Rebecca Marder) is an actress whose incessant theatrics get on her family’s nerves but the enthusiasm for performing that she and her diverse group of drama student friends exhibit provides a convenient distraction to the events going on around her in 1942 Paris.

A succession of Nazi policies add up, one after another, from the “Juive” stamped in red on her identity papers to the expropriation of Jewish people’s bicycles, radios and telephones, but Irene and her friends continue their thespian activities, mostly oblivious to larger events. The viewer, of course, knows that more ominous things await but the ending is both dramatic and subtly understated.

Costuming and hairstyles in the film do not always clearly situate the timeframe of events, especially early on, and a viewer beginning the film without any background might not be certain if it is set in contemporary times or another era. As the movie progresses, automobiles and more clearly discernible 1940s clothing styles make the era more specific. But is the filmmaker sending a message about the timelessness of vigilance against the slow drip of authoritarian actions that can lead to totalitarianism and catastrophe?

Shadow boxing

image - All About the Levkovitches (still from film) — All About the Levkovitches *(still from film)*

A family drama is at the heart of All About the Levkovitches, in which Tamás, an aging boxing coach in Hungary (Bezerédi Zoltán) is forced to confront his estranged son Iván (Tamás Szabó Kimmel) who, recently religious, returns from Israel for his mother’s shiva, hauling along his young son.

The decidedly unobservant father/widower has no interest in following traditional Jewish mourning rituals. “What’s a minyan?” asks one of his friends as he explains what is happening at home. “A bunch of Jews in my house,” he replies. (“When my mother died, we just drank,” the friend says.) The arrival of the local Jews to pray with the grieving son while the father goes about his business in an undershirt is a priceless vignette of worldviews colliding.

The father, who doesn’t know any Hebrew, and his grandson, who may or may not understand Hungarian, eventually find a common language. So, too, do the estranged father and son, through much fighting, boxing, arguing and wrestling demons.

The grandfather’s disastrous attempt to assemble a Scandinavian do-it-yourself wall unit as his own ritual tribute to his late wife is a metaphor for his fumbling way of dealing with crisis, a project that is (somewhat predictably) resolved when the handy ba’al teshuvah son finally relents to helping, resolving not just the bookshelf problem but the larger issue of how things fit together.

It is a darkly hilarious and often emotionally moving drama.

Live, laugh, love

image - One More Story (still from film) — One More Story *(still from film)*

In One More Story, Yarden (played by Dina Sanderson) is a 20-something journalist at Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper and needs an attention-grabbing human interest series. She goes to that old standby, modern dating, and sets up doofus Adam on a series of disastrous dates, aiming for the print media version of the reality TV dating genre.

She recounts the foibles of Adam’s love life – with flashbacks to cringe-inducing interactions between the hapless Adam and a stream of mismatched potential romantic interests – while herself on a first date (with the film’s director Guri Alfi, playing the bad first date foil for Yarden’s storytelling).

The bad dates within a bad date motif provides a canvas for a variety show-style packed script of hilariously calamitous meetups. But Adam goes off script when love at first sight hits him out of the blue – literally – which does not coincide with Yarden’s journalistic requirements.

There is nothing particularly innovative in the romantic comedy department, but the witty writing and vivacious acting, plus a veritable bombardment of sight gags and more subtle facial expressions, make the film a laugh riot and a delight.

Watch vjff.org for the full lineup and tickets for the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which runs April 4-14 in theatre and April 15-19 online.

Drama & more at film fest

Yoav Brill’s documentary Apples and Oranges, about a moment in the history of the kibbutz movement, is mesmerizing. (photo by Avraham Eilat)

The 2024 Vancouver Jewish Film Festival takes place in person April 4-14 and online April 15-19. As usual, a diversity of offerings is included in this year’s festival and the Independent will review several films in this and upcoming issues. The Vancouver Jewish Film Centre also sponsors events throughout the year and some screenings take place before the annual festival begins. Full festival details will be online at vjff.org as April approaches.

Idealism remembered

Amid the euphoric aftermath of the 1967 war and the enduring popularity of the 1958 Leon Uris book Exodus (and its 1960 film incarnation), thousands of Jews and non-Jews descended on Israel to volunteer on kibbutzim.

They came to experience and emulate “the embodiment of man’s highest ideals – the kibbutznik,” as an apparently promotional film clip declares in Yoav Brill’s mesmerizing documentary Apples and Oranges. In just one particular spurt, 7,000 volunteers arrived in Israel en masse from around the world.

Through the recollections of aging Scandinavians, Brits, South Africans and others, and with nostalgia-inducing archival footage, the documentary shines a light on the socialist idealism and hippie adventurism that motivated these people to travel to the farming communities of rural Israel. Many returned, to Sweden, Denmark, wherever, and formed associations to support the kibbutzim and drum up more volunteers. So successful were they that the supply exceeded the demand. One group chartered a jumbo jet to go from Stockholm to Tel Aviv but the Israelis had to admit they had no use for 340 volunteers.

Generally, the spirit of the overseas visitors was welcomed, though the social impacts were not negligible. The temporary nature of their visits was disrupting. A middle-aged man reflects on his perspective as a kid on a kibbutz, welcoming all the strangers who became like big brothers and sisters, only to have his heart broken every time the groups departed from what he calls “the kibbutz fantasy.”

Strangers from another world – blond, exotic, sophisticated and drinking milk with their meals – descended on a cloistered society where all the teens had been together since kindergarten, introducing predictable social and hormonal disruptions. For their parts, many of the volunteers soon discovered they had no aptitude for the tasks to which they were set, although at least one Brit made use of his talents performing Shakespeare for an audience of cattle.

Many of the overseas youngsters were unabashedly out for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. As one woman interviewed in the documentary says, “If there weren’t female volunteers at [Kibbutz] Mishmar HaSharon, many of our boys would still be virgins.”

In one incident that apparently caused national outrage, a group distributed hashish-laden brownies to an entire community, including at least one 8-year-old child, a crime that is not the least bit funny – but, of course, is hilarious when recounted by octogenarians who experienced it.

With their Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan LPs, the foreigners brought a little bit of Woodstock with them, and took away some Israeli dance routines. But the adventure, as the viewer knows more than do the figures in the old footage, would not end well. Terrorism, including a highly publicized attack in which a volunteer was murdered, would strangle the flow of future volunteers.

The documentary is a masterpiece of the genre, capturing the joy and exuberance of the experience for both Israelis and the visitors, but addressing the serious problems the interactions raised. The clash of cultures introduced existential issues, including around conversion, mixed marriages, secularization and, of course, the collapse of the traditional kibbutz.

The apples and oranges of the title, we are to understand, are the people who came together on the kibbutzim, as much as the produce they harvested.

Critics of the volunteer phenomenon seem to place some of the blame for the collapse of the kibbutz system on the labour underclass they represented, which undermined the egalitarian foundations of the movement.

The kibbutz network has largely petered out, almost entirely in spirit if not completely in form, and some of the Jews and non-Jews who came during the heyday have remained and integrated to varying degrees in the society that Israel has become. In one instance, an aging, bearded former volunteer actualizes his idealism by leading a ukulele orchestra.

The collapse of the idealistic experiment that the end of the film documents is expected but no less depressing for that. The slice of history and the magnificence of the story, so vividly told in the film, will stay with the viewer.

Transcendence of song

photo - In Less than Kosher, the real star is the voice of Shaina Silver-Baird as Viv, an atheist turned cantor — In Less than Kosher, the real star is the voice of Shaina Silver-Baird as Viv, an atheist turned cantor. *(photo from Menemsha Films)*

In Less than Kosher, a number of fairly two-dimensional character sketches come together – but with a redeeming twist.

A feature film that began its life as serialized online videos has the feel of excellent amateurism. Wayward Jewish girl meets rabbi’s bad boy son. Overbearing Jewish mother, well-intentioned buffoonish rabbi, go-along-to-get-along intermarried stepdad and hyper-chatty high school friend flesh out the cast.

Sitcom-like circumstances turn the atheist young woman into unlikely cantor. But the outstanding component of the film, the real star, is the voice of Shaina Silver-Baird, the lead actor and co-producer (with Michael Goldlist) of this cute confection.

The unlikely cantor Viv, whose once-promising pop music career is on the skids, has the voice of an angel and the story is less about her family or her romance with the (married) rabbi’s son than about the transcendent power of song. When she opens her lungs, Viv ushers in a changed world – and Silver-Baird’s voice invites the viewer into it. Music video-style segments, which Viv is dismayed to have dubbed “Judeopop,” raise the film to a different level. Liturgical music goes Broadway. Amy Winehouse does “Shalom Aleichem.”

A tiki-themed shiva is truly the icing on the sheet cake.

Mysterious case

photo - The Goldman Case is a dramatic reenactment of the case of Pierre Goldman — The Goldman Case is a dramatic reenactment of the case of Pierre Goldman. *(photo from Menemsha Films)*

He was guilty of much, but was he guilty of murder? Pierre Goldman maintained he was innocent of the latter charges and a based-on-a-true-story film explores not only a man’s possible guilt but the intergenerational impacts of Polish-French Jewish life in the mid-20th century and their potential explanations for some unusual behaviours.

The Goldman Case is a dramatic reenactment of a famous (in France, at least) case of the Jewish son of Polish resistance heroes, whose own life was impacted by an apparent need to fill the giant shoes of his parents. The son wanted to be “a Jewish warrior” and so became a communist revolutionary, traveling to Latin America, Prague and elsewhere in search of opportunities for valour.

Charged with a series of crimes, including the murder during a holdup of two pharmacists, Goldman was convicted in 1974 and sentenced to life imprisonment, though he maintained he was innocent in the two deaths. Following the 1975 publication of his memoirs, the judicial system reconsidered his case and major French voices, including Jean-Paul Sartre, took up his cause. This film is a (massively condensed) court procedural of that retrial.

Goldman’s Jewishness was not on trial but, interestingly, his defence team built their case partly around his family’s experiences.

The case – and the film – end with a new verdict. But the dramatic story would continue. Audiences will no doubt race to Google more about Goldman and his crimes and punishments. Enduring mysteries, though, will make the search necessarily unsatisfying. This cannot be said of the film, though, which is a gripping enactment, enlivened by the extremely animated courtroom drama, which suggests the French judicial system tolerates a great deal more outbursts than we expect in Hollywood depictions of North American judicial proceedings.

Resistance screens here March 3

A still from the documentary Resistance: They Fought Back. (theyfoughtback.com)

Resistance: They Fought Back screens March 3, 2pm, at Rothstein Theatre. Presented by the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre, special guest at the screening will be director Paula S. Apsell.

The film’s synopsis reads: “We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed ‘Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.’ Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel and the U.S., Resistance: They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis.”

For tickets ($10) to the screening, visit vjff.org.

– from theyfoughtback.com

Alegría a gratifying movie

Alegría screens at the Rothstein Theatre March 19, and online March 19-26. (photo from vjff.org)

You can pick your friends, the old saying goes, but you can’t pick your family. For Alegría, a prerequisite of adulthood is distancing from relatives and interacting with them on her terms.

The vital 40-something protagonist of Alegría, screening in the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival (vjff.org), has deliberately carved out a self-centred existence in her quiet hometown of Melilla, a small Spanish city on the northern coast of Africa. Alegría (Cecilia Suárez) Facetimes with her kibbutznik daughter and directs the young Muslim woman who cooks and cleans for her, relishing her independence.

Warm colours and inviting interiors, however, signal from the outset that Alegría is going to be a story of connection rather than isolation, of love supplanting loneliness and redemption trumping regret. In her satisfying and touching feature debut, Spanish director and co-writer Violeta Salama’s generosity extends well beyond Alegría to the young women who enter her orbit.

But none of that is on the table when Alegría gets a call that her Orthodox brother, sister-in-law and niece are coming to Melilla for the latter’s wedding to a local guy. They plan to stay at Alegría’s place – the house where she and her brother grew up – invading her space and brushing the cobwebs from her dormant Sephardi Jewish identity.

Alegría has literally sealed off the past – mezuzot, photos, furniture and menorot behind a locked door. Secular to the point of caustic irreverence, Alegría views her assimilation as an emblem of freedom and enlightened coexistence. Bit by bit, though, she will realize that she has denied a core component of her character.

Alegría doesn’t define herself in terms of or in reaction to men, and hasn’t for a long time. Yet the tough love, bordering on lack of empathy, that this stalwart feminist evinces for Yael, the bride, and Dunia, her part-time housekeeper, is shocking.

Yael is used to obeying her father but is beginning to doubt the merits of transferring that acquiescence to her soon-to-be husband. Dunia’s brother, the head of that household, stands in the way of her dream of studying drawing in Paris.

Women escaping the constraints, and embracing the ties, of family has long been the stuff of melodrama. But the filmmaker adopts a lighter tone with humorous bits that undercut the seriousness with which the characters take their respective situations.

“I’d cut my foot off before stepping into a synagogue,” Alegría proclaims in a seemingly unambiguous rejection of ritual, tradition and faith. But when she visits the rabbi to reserve the mikvah for the bride and Yael’s mother, their banter suggests that he and Alegría had a youthful romance (while opening the window to a potential future relationship). The synagogue, therefore, doesn’t represent a religious institution or unhappy family memories to Alegría. It’s just a reminder of who she used to be – or, more accurately, who she is.

One of the pleasures of Alegría is that it unfolds in a calm, civilized setting that feels like an oasis. No sirens or boom boxes jangle our nerves, and the family feudings rarely require the raising of voices.

Salama told an interviewer when she was completing the film in 2021: “To create Alegría’s world, I wanted to steer away from the realism of life in a border town, a major port, instead setting her down in the world of my childhood. I want to share the city as I see it, the city I carry inside me, and so I recreated certain moments where the focus is entirely on these seemingly very different women who share the same problems and contradictions.”

To that end, the centrepiece of the film is an overnight outing to Dunia’s grandmother’s house, just over the border in Morocco, where the women cook, dance and toss an impromptu bachelorette party for Yael. They are free to live on their terms, fully self-sufficient, with no men in sight.

Alegría offers some passing yet pointed critiques of patriarchal autocracy, and the male characters are relegated to the edges of the frame. This is what used to be disparagingly called a “woman’s picture,” because it centres women’s demands – to be who they want to be – and desires – to avail themselves of every opportunity. The most gratifying aspect, however, is that the movie’s spirit of cooperation and, yes, coexistence ultimately touches every character.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Depictions of turbulent times

In March ’68, the shocking events of the Polish political and social crisis of that time are dramatized through the eyes of two families. Hania, a young woman who is Jewish, is in love with Janek, a boy whose father is a member of the nomenklatura, a senior official whose career is endangered by the political activism his son is dabbling in.

But careers are only one of the concerns for Jewish Poles, whose very identities as citizens of the country are in jeopardy, as the society spirals with a chilling and apparent suddenness into antisemitic frenzy. The blatant antisemitism is masqueraded as an “anti-Zionist” campaign and a defence against “non-Polish” elements.

Poland was in a financial panic, with wage reductions and assorted economic turmoil. Events spiraled after the expulsion from the university of political dissidents and the closure of a theatre presentation deemed anti-government. No prerequisites are required. The film, from director Krzysztof Lang, tells the viewer all they need to know about the history – and the petty and not-so-petty indignities of living under a repressive regime.

Through the braying voices of the country’s communist leaders and parallel street-level Jew-baiting, the status of Jewish Poles deteriorates rapidly and Hania’s family is faced with a choice for their future.

This Romeo and Juliet story is endearingly told against the heartbreaking backdrop of generational divisions that were tearing at families all over the world in 1968, a microcosm of the larger tumult. In Poland, these divisions were exacerbated by a social contagion that forced an exodus of much of the tiny remnant of post-Shoah Polish Jews, a disappearance that is emotionally depicted in black-and-white at the end of the film.

* * *

Lost Transport opens like a war-era cinematic news short, an elementary map of Europe being encroached by Allied forces from the West and Red Army movements from the east.

As the Soviets advanced, the Nazis selected from among the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen a few thousand of what they called Austauschjuden, “exchange Jews,” who they imagined to be of particular value to the Allies and who, as a result, the Nazis intended to barter for German prisoners of war or money. Almost 7,000 inmates, in three train transports, were being moved from the advancing front. A train bound for Theresienstadt (now in Czechia) encountered a blown-up bridge and was stranded near the German town of Tröbitz. Within days, the incarcerated passengers were liberated by the Red Army (and, later, by Americans).

Lost Transport demonstrates the chaos and confusion of liberation for the Jewish passengers and defeat for the German residents.

It seems a tactless quibble with these sorts of dramatizations to note that healthy actors are obligated to believably depict the victims of atrocities, but in this instance the task seems particularly stark, with almost all of the liberated people well-clothed, clean, remarkably well-groomed and bright-eyed.

The story is viewed primarily through the eyes of Isaac and Simone, a Dutch couple liberated from the train; Vera, a Russian sniper; and Winnie, a young German woman who sees her mother shot by the Red Army and her home taken over by the other main figures in the film. The characterizations are often cardboard – the individuals are rough stand-ins for their respective peoples – and the script ham-fisted. The three women eventually see one another’s humanity (even if the viewer struggles to do so) and the resolution is almost painfully perfect.

March ’68 and Lost Transport screen as part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. For tickets and the full festival lineup, visit vjff.org.