FILM REVIEWS
AND CALENDAR
by Paul D. Goetz
Free Press staff writer
Photograph by Cori Wells Braun
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Writer-director Yossi Sommer is scheduled to attend the opening night screening of his award-winning adaptation of the play The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field. He will participate in a subsequent question-and-answer session followed by a reception featuring live music in the theater lobby. Tickets for opening night are $18. The film is described as a love story similar to Romeo and Juliet set in contemporary Jerusalem that combines fantasy, mysticism, and cabalistic spiritual symbols.
Festival programmers selected films to "reflect and serve the rich cultural, religious and ethnic interests of our diverse Jewish community." But the festival is also concerned with "building bridges to our neighboring communities, thus educating the general community on Jewish life and history." While the festival's fiction films outnumber nonfiction, these goals are perhaps best accomplished by the inclusion of several outstanding documentaries.
About 45 minutes into Mark Jonathan Harris's highly informative and deeply moving Holocaust documentary The Long Way Home, narrator Morgan Freeman describes a recess during the Allied trial of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It is Christmas Eve, 1945. Certain that it would be his last Christmas, former reich marshal Hermann Goering tells his cell-mates, "Don't forget that the great conquerors of history are not seen as murderers - Genghis Khan, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great. The time will come when the world will think differently about all this." It's a wild and scary thought, but not inconceivable. It is dark possibilities such as this that make films such as this essential viewing.
By employing rarely seen archival footage and voices taken from memoirs, letters, diaries, and oral histories, Harris sheds new light on that neglected period between the liberation of the Jews from the concentration camps in 1945 to the begrudged establishment of a homeland for them in Israel in 1948. Early on, he does not shy away from the horrors discovered at the camps, but puts an unusually human face on them, as the arriving soldiers stare in disbelief and then turn away in disgust, provoking shame in the prisoners, who realize they are inhuman in the soldiers' eyes. But Harris also makes it clear that thousands died of disease and hunger after the liberation, and those who did survive were hated when they returned to homes and families that had vanished because, as one put it, "...we returned from the dead." This is a film that forever changes the meaning of words like "liberation" and "freedom" in this context.
But it is the intervening years that are the most eye-opening. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had become "displaced persons," many detained in camps (some in the camps from which they had been freed), while thousands of others formed the largest illegal movement of refugees in modern times as they fled from Russia and Poland into the American zones of Germany and Austria in the hopes of making it to Palestine. We see extraordinary footage of some of them struggling to cross the snowbound Alps, and we witness life aboard ships bound for Palestine. Of the 63 ships carrying some 90,000 refugees, only six made it, but those that did were deported to filthy camps on Cyprus. Throughout, we are made aware of Britain's refusal to allow more than a few Jews into Palestine and the rising wave of Zionist terrorism aimed at undermining British colonial rule.
This is a disturbing tale of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism, British appeasement of oil-rich Arabs in a post-war world of shortages, and the tepid efforts of America and the United Nations to solve the problem. But what we remember most about the The Long Way Home is the resilience of a people determined to recreate that which had been destroyed, for it was in the displaced persons camps that the birth-rate was the highest of all the Jewish communities of the world. As one told a foreign correspondent, "My life is wrecked, but I'm going to live. I'm going to live for my children!"
It's been 18 years since director Ira Wohl won an Oscar for Best Boy, that affectionate portrait of his retarded 52-year-old cousin Philly, whose elderly parents, Pearl and Max, took care of him since birth. In that film, Wohl employed a frank, observational style while influencing events through his genuine concern for the welfare of his cousin. It was a first-person documentary strategy that fully acknowledged the subjectivity of filmmaking and the filmmaker's impact on the proceedings. After Max died, Wohl gently persuaded 78-year-old Pearl to allow Philly to join a Queens group home, which expanded Philly's horizons and helped him become more self-sufficient. The result was an unforgettable, emotionally absorbing, present-tense family memoir.
In Best Man, the festival's closing night event, Wohl revisits Philly, who turns 70 during the film, and it feels as though we've been reunited with old friends we've grown to love. Once again, we delight in Philly's love of coffee, his love of dance, and the way he says "yeah" to almost everything ("no" does not seem to be in his vocabulary). While Philly's sister Frances was a minor character in Best Boy, she comes to center stage in Best Man as she takes greater responsibility for Philly's life. (Pearl died in 1980.) Once again, we have the opportunity to see new horizons unfold for Philly and his family because of the nurturing nature of Wohl's approach. Wohl's visit results in Philly's first visit to the graves of Pearl and Max, while Philly's desire to visit Wohl in California results in his first ride on an airplane. The film culminates in Philly's Bar Mitzvah, another experience arranged by Wohl. While it's difficult to ascertain what these events mean to Philly, he does exhibit a solemnity at the cemetery and a boyish delight during the Bar Mitzvah which suggest that, while his youthful spirit has remained strong, the boy has become a man. Director Ira Wohl will attend the screening.
Early in A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, directors Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum stress the alien aspects of this sect of Jewish mystics. We hear the sometimes disparaging comments of casual observers and have our attention drawn to the Hasidim's outward exoticism - the men with their beards, side curls, and 19th-century suits, the women in wigs, long dresses, and often pushing baby carriages. We also hear of the severely defined roles that separate men and women, the denial of almost everything Americans take for granted, and the wariness they have for a culture they deem wicked. But in extensive interviews with articulate scholars and men and women both inside and outside the sect, we begin to see the humor and tenderness of family life that takes place alongside periods of nearly spellbinding spiritual joy. We also begin to understand the powerful need to preserve and recreate a culture that was nearly annihilated during the Holocaust, when four-fifths of the Hasidim perished. Certainly, there are those like the reasonable Pearl Gluck, who found she could not live within their boundaries, and there are those like the black park employee, who decries the Hasidic children's unwillingness to even say hello, wondering justifiably how they will fare in the world when they are older. Certainly, there is a gulf between the Hasidim and mainstream America, but with A Life Apart, Rudavsky and Daum have built the beginnings of a bridge of understanding.
There are other recommendable documentaries. Lisa Lewenz' A Letter Without Words explores her family's identity by using interviews with family members and fascinating footage her German-Jewish grandmother shot of life in Germany in the 20s and 30s, which had remained untouched in the family's attic until 1981. Marcia Jarmel's The Return of Sarah's Daughters is an attempt by Jarmel to understand formerly non-observant Jews returning to an orthodox life. By focusing on devout follower Ruth Devorah Shatkin and her lesbian friend Myriam, who left the same Hasidic sect to become a rabbi in the Reconstructionist movement, Jarmel has fashioned a penetrating look at women coming to terms with spiritual questions.
Of the fiction films I previewed, Ferid Boughedir's enchanting A Summer in La Goulette qualifies as a must-see. As he showed in Halfouine, Boy of the Terraces, Boughedir is a master at weaving multiple story-lines and getting the best out of a large cast. Set in 1967 on the eve of war in the Middle East, the film is a nostalgic look at a time when Jews, Muslims, and Catholics could live in harmony in the sunny seaside town. The story concerns three families, each with a beautiful daughter who wants to lose her virginity, and the lecherous old Hadj who eyes one of them for himself, and who is not above evicting the families in order to get his way. But the film is really about the fragility of community, and the realization of its value that becomes profound after it has vanished. Boughedir has dedicated the film to his closest childhood friends, a Tunisian Jew and an Italian Catholic. As he says, "When they and the other minorities left Tunisia, I became an orphan of both cultures..."
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