This is a fine, focused and unique film festival.

The National Council of Jewish Women New York Section has an open film competition which is held every two years. The focus is films on the “experiences, aspirations, accomplishments of Jewish women”,  and the selected films are screened in a one-day film festival.  These films have never before been shown commercially in the New York area. This year it will be held on Sunday, October 26, at the JCC in Manhattan (76th and Amsterdam.)

This year’s selected films are:

Making Trouble, director: Rachel Talbot. Four Jewish comedians reminisce about the careers of the women who paved the way for them with lots of great archival footage. See my previous review of this film on this blog on January 25, 2008. Click on calender or enter title in search.

Family Picture, director Itzhak Haluzi (31 minutes) A dinner invitation transports them to their past during the Holocaust and provides an opportunity for revenge. 

Not Old Yet, directors: Miri Shnera and Moshe Timor, (27 Minutes) Anna goes from being a successful opera singer in Ukraine to becoming a cleaning woman in Israel. A touching story of her determination, good humor and faith in pursuing her lost career.

Passages, director: Gabriela Bohm (66 minutes) When the film maker learns that she is pregnant, she searches for her family history of myths, mysteries and secrets on a journey that takes her to Israel, Argentina, Hungary, and the US.

Westerbork Girl, Director Steffie Van Den Ord (48 minutes) The story of Hannalore Cahn, who was freed from Westbork Transit Camp during WWII. A film about survival, memory and love. And about an impossible decision that still haunts.

My Nose, director Gayle Kirschenbaum (13 minutes) A mother’s preoccupation with her daughter’s nose. Will she or won’t she?

Here’s the link to their festival information.

An organizer wrote this note to me: “Some film makers will be attending the sessions and the reception… we will be honoring Jane Rosenthal (of the Tribeca Film Festival, etc) and the winner of the best film award at our festival (only the award maker and one or two of the staff knows who that is… even the committee does not know). The festival is a competition and the judging was done by an independent panel.”

Just before Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year ( it is now 5769 for those of you who are counting), we saw A thousand Years of Good Prayers, a wonderful Wayne Wang film based on the book of stories about China and the US by Yihun Li.

It is a story about relationships: communication,  truth, silence and healing.

The story very moving, it is shot delicately and the cast is excellent. Put this on your list of “must see” films.

A  man travels from his home in China to America to visit his daughter after her recent divorce. His trip starts off as a mission to comfort her and give her support through a difficult time, although their personal history has been marked by distance.

The quality and types of communication by all of the characters makes this story so poignant. I would write more but I do not want to spoil one single moment of this story.

 It is currently at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on Broadway and 62nd St. The NY Film Festival rightfully attracts so much attention, but I would urge you not to miss this film.

Last night we saw a preview screening of Fugutive Pieces, the Canadian film by Jeremy Podeswa,  which is based on the award winning novel by Anne Michaels. It open tommorrow, May 2, 2008,  at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (Broadway and 62ndst).

Even though novelized versions of Holocaust stories always give me pause, since the telling of true stories of actual survivors are so moving and shocking and much more important to remember, I still found that this film of survival, the blessed actions of decent people, the effect of memory and loss, and intimacy was extremely moving, poetic and very worthwhile. 

The cast is wonderful and much of the film is shot in beautiful locations Greece, and in claustophobic apartment interiors. Good metaphor for the main character’s exterior and interior life.

Go see the film.

This weekend we saw Who Will Carry the Word ? by Charlotte Delbo performed at the Red Fern Theatre by a very dedicated and moving cast and the Oscar winning The Counterfeiter.

Both pose the question of what is moral behavior under the most extreme immoral conditions of a concentration camp during the Shoah (Holocaust).

Our society is so based on the individual, we tend to want to focus this question on an individual’s behavior and choices but what emerges in both works is how the sum of the behaviors of individual actions adds up to something much more than what any one person does. In The Counterfeiter, we are in the male barracks of the Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen,  in the unique prisoner blocks dedicated to conterfeiting currency. *More on this camp and the specific barrack blocks later.

The lead character, Solly,  a Jewish counterfeiter, goes by his moral code: never be a rat even if you can’t stand the other guy, do anything to keep alive and help others stay alive. Adolf, the communist prisoner has a different code: don’t cooperate with the Nazis and sabotage the counterfeiting work, come what may and perhaps martyrdom is an honorable outcome. This code could easily enrage the Nazis to kill them all. The other inmates depicted just try to stay alive. 

In the end, both of these  points of view are needed by the group for moral and physical survival.

In this film, the “criminal” Solly is much more likable and much less frightening than the ”high-minded” Adolf. The Nazis are portrayed correctly as collectively dispicable, the worst of the worst, of course. Thankfully, there is no trace of any romanticizing  of them or of their motives. No individual action “overcomes” their collective guilt.

This excellent film is very worth seeing and deserves its award.

Who Will Carry the Word, was written by  Charlotte Delbo who was a survivor. The Red Fern Theatre Company partnered with the Remember the Women Institute for this production.

By contrast, we are in the women’s barracks of Auschwitz. These women do not have any skill such as counterfeiting, that they might be able to play for survival’s sake. They are trapped and helpless. Much of the overt dialog of the play involves the question of how to retain the will to live and whether to retain the will to live. What emerges is the way these women try to support and comfort each other. Again, the collective actions surpass any one individual’s action.

This was the first event on the Shoah I have attended in which much of the audience was young, and many probably were not Jewish. After the play, a camp survivor, Bronia Brandman, told her moving, harrowing, determined story of survival as a young pre-teen (and of becoming a teenager) and took questions afterwards. She was asked “Do you believe in God?” and replied with her family’s history which includes descent from illustrous Rabbis, and her love and devotion to Judaism and Jewish culture.

This was tremendously moving. She is an excellent soft-spoken  speaker, and a woman able to convey her experiences and emotions. She is a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage a Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Battery Park, New York City, and she speaks regularly to school groups. Some in the audience said that this was their first experience meeting an actual survivor.

The film, play and museum are all very, very worthwhile.

If you haven’t ever spoken with a survivor, try to do so before one can not do so any longer- time is running out as they age.

More on this camp and these specific barrack blocks: I will add  the fascinating experiences of  Remember the Women colleagues who visited the precise barracks depicted in the film.  I should receive the comments in a day or two.

Here are Bronia Brandman, Rochelle Saidel, and  the Red Fern Theatre’s, Melanie Williams and Emilie Miller.

Photo courtesy of the Red Fern Theatre Company

Aviva, My Love, is beautifully written and directed by Shemi Zarhin. Against all the odds of a hard-working life: financial problems, a maddeningly demanding family, gender prejudice, Aviva is an aspiring author of poetic story. The interaction between her personal reality and her story writing very skillfully brings to mind the interaction of the love affair and the war in Hiroshima, My Love.

Three generations of women are depicted, each with a distinct set of expectaions and coping skills which reflect their changed status in society over time. The film is engrossing and entertaining and will be shown in NYC again in March.

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I Got No Jeep and My Camel Died  and Souvenirs, are both documentary road-trip films with father-and-son relationship themes but are they feel extremely different.

 I Got No Jeep and My Camel Died  is a desert road-trip, with jeeps and camels, and a stop in Brazil(!). It is the personal musical journey of Yair Dalal filled with absolutely splendid music. Yair Dalal is a World Music star and you can hear his music on his site.

Souvenirs an entertaining and moving  father and son road-trip film about  truth and memory. Travel starts in Israel, through Italy, and Germany to Holland and takes us through 60 years of a father’s stories to the source of his experience. The end is wonderful.

Five Real Jewish Women - Three of them Mothers - All Dead of Cancer Before 60 ….by guest author NYCGuy.

 I sat between Lily and my mom at the afternoon screening of Making Trouble, a doc about three generations of Jewish comediennes, three of whose careers I experienced in real time: Gilda Radner, Wendy Wasserstein and Madeline Kahn. A Q and A followed with director Rachel Talbot and editor Philip Shayne in the Jewish Museum hall that could only be described as a sea of silver-haired ladies. I asked the director what it was like to deal with three boomer women whose lives had been cut short way too soon.

Talbot, a boomer, seemed taken aback, but Shane interceded that they were filming Wasserstein vis-a-vis Kahn’s acting career and her role in her Sisters Rosensweig when the playwright died. So, she became one of those profiled as well as the segue into the Kahn segment. I later discovered I’d erred about the very sexy, sharply funny Kahn. Her birth preceded the baby boom by four years.

 The film used the vehicle of four contemporary Jewish comics or comedy writers fressing at Katz’s delicatessen, for propulsion, but I don’t somehow recall mention of lives foreshortened. The film, with significant support from the Jewish Women’s Archive, is ostensibly about six pioneers - Molly Picone, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker and the still kicking Joan Rivers - but the sadly serendipitous inclusion of Wasserstein, a single mom and sole non-performer, added a woman as shammas whose extraordinary gift for story telling set ablaze the careers of many fine actresses.

So, you ask, who were the other two whose lives were cut short?

This evening I attended the closing festival screening with my friend M. The documentary, Orthodox Stance, looked at the boxing career of a Soviet immigrant, Dmitriy Salita, who takes on what was the sport of the earlier generation inter-war Jewish immigranmt boys who also sought a route out of poverty.

Dmitriy, who sat on the step next to us as the film rolled, began his training in the Starrett City Boxing Gym, a white kid among Black and Latin youths, with a legendary elderly Black trainer, Jimmy O’Pharrow, who, during the Q+A, Dmitriy named as his surrogate grandfather.

Early in his training, his mother develops and eventually succumbs to cancer. The husband of her Orthodox Jewish hospital roommate connects Dimitriy with a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi in Flatbush, setting a different spin on the young man’s life. His focus on boxing was also a way of dealing with the loss of his mother. The film opens theatrically at Cinema Village on January 25. Go see it!

Lily alread wrote about Praying with Lior. Isaw this with Lily and her husband sitting on one side and my friend G on the other. I had immediately checked off that film as a must see by the compelling picture of Lior in the Frestival brochure. In the course of the doc, via family film footage, we see the loss of Lior’s birth mother, a rabbi, and later discussion about this threaded throughout. His dad, also a rabbi, Mordechai Liebling,  a prominent thinker in the Reconstructionist movement eventually remarries. Lior’s new mom sees him into his current adolescence and with his dad to the pivotal preparation for the celebration of his bar mitzvah. On the eve of this event there is a scene with Lior and his dad at the birth mom’s gravesite. If there’s anyone unmoved their heart is clearly made of stone.

I don’t know if the organizers of what was the NY Jewish Film Festival 17 realized that the loss of vibrant women not due to the holocaust was woven through three very different documentaries that very much need to travel and be discussed.

That apparently is the desire of all the film makers.

In January 2009, the Festival turns 18, chai, life in Jewish numerology. What might this bring? Who might be missed?

Praying With Lior will open shortly at the Village Cinema, and perhaps elsewhere. We saw it at the Jewish Museum as part of the  Jewish Film Festival followed by a fascinating discussion panel.

Make time to see this film.

This is a loving, compelling documentary about the world of Lior, a young man with Down’s Syndrome, his amazing family which includes four siblings, his community, how he deals with loss, and his preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. (warning:bring tissues).

It is most interesting to see how people choose to project onto Lior what they would like to see- a Magical Child- and how Lior, his parents and siblings deal with reality. It is wonderful to spend time with this family.

This film festival has had so many special films that I want to comment only very briefly on just a few of them. Most of these will be shown in other festivals in the future, try to see them:

The Hebrew Lesson, documentary in Hebrew, Chinese, Russian and other languages, the drama of real peoples’ lives, with the kind of uniqueness and details that fiction can not dream up.

Someone to Run With, in Hebrew based on a novel by David Grossman- a riveting drama which takes place in Jerusalem. Extremely well done.

Love One Another, a restored print of a 1922 silent film with Danish and English titles, by Carl Dreyer (not Jewish) is a protest against anti-semitism in Csarist Russia. Very remarkable film. We saw it with a live pianist. Some of the actors are from the Moscow stage and eventually performed in the NY Jewish theatre of the 20’s and 30’s and in Hollywood.

Two Ladies,in  French and Arabic, Jewish Esther and Moslem Selima’s mother, are both Algerian born and living in France. They share a fascinating friendship in spite of the surrounding extremism and prejudice.

Each year I go to this festival and no matter how many films I manage to see, friends see a few I haven’t seen, they tell me how wonderful they were, and I have the feeling I have missed too much!

I have only one peeve about this fabulous film festival: how can they have so few showings of some of these films? We bought our tickets well in advance of the screenings and we were lucky enough to buy the last available tickets to at least two of the showings. If you hope to see any of these films, review the listings on the link and buy the tickets now since many showings will be sold out. Here is the description from their brochure:

“Presented by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln CenterWelcome to the 17th annual New York Jewish Film Festival, a global survey of innovative and provocative films—most receiving their New York or U.S. premieres—that explore the multi-faceted Jewish experience. To mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, this year’s festival showcases ten new Israeli films. We pay tribute this year to the late Austrian stage, television, and film director Axel Corti with screenings of four of his masterpieces. A total of 32 shorts, dramas, and documentaries from Germany, France, Argentina, Russia, Hungary, the United States, Mexico, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and Austria add up to an exhilarating worldwide journey.”

In a future post, I will comment on four of the films seen so far.

Here is a handsome photo of Jock Soto, the retired NYC Ballet principal dancer, taken by Daniel C. Miller in the lobby of the Walter Reade Theatre in Lincoln Centre after a showing of “Waters Coming Together” the documentary about his life and  career by Gwendolen Cates.  The film was wonderful.

We had seen some of the exerpts of dance shown live in performance.

His personal story, as a young dancing boy on the Navaho reservation in Arizona, then as a young teen completely on his own in New York, his devotion to dance, his beautiful talent and career  were all very compelling.

We witness the tough work and behind the scenes pain of dance not often depicted in film.  Also, so many other wonderful dancers are shown.

Makes you want to dance.

During the holiday week we saw five films. Two were new releases, After The Devil Knows, and The Bucket List and three were Bob Fosse revivals which we saw at the Reade Theatre at Lincoln Centre,  Lenny, All That Jazz, and Caberet.

In just a breath: The Fosse films knock the pants off of the new films we saw.

After The Devil Knows was chilling and very well done,  The Bucket List has a concocted “charm”.  Please just explain to me how can running away from it all, and leaving the people you love, be the right thing to do if you know that you do not have long to live? My “bucket” list would be vastly different. It was “charming”, entertaining and pretty dumb. It probably has all it needs to win some awards.

The Fosse films all hold up extremely well over time. This is a good time period to either be reminded about Lenny Bruce or learn about him for the first time, All That Jazz, about the life of Bob Fosse, is a great film and if you love dance you should certainly see it, and Caberet is devastating to see again. Rent them.