Sixth Annual Jewish Film Festival

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The upcoming 6th Annual Jewish Film Festival promises to be the strongest programs of Jewish cinema that we’ve seen in Houston. Running from March 9-21 in three venues, the festival includes 18 films from the United States, Israel, Denmark and Australia.

The festival opens on March 9 at 7:30 P.M. at the JCC with “The First Basket”, a feature documentary about how Jewish basketball players and coaches dominated the early decades of the game. Using historical film, photos and interviews, director David Vyorst tells the story of how basketball spread through the YMCA-YMHA and settlement houses in the 1920s and 30s. Basketball programs were an important part of the progressive social reform movement that addressed the immigrant population. Thus basketball became a major sport along the East Coast.

A city style of game developed: lots of passing and ball handling, an offense that worked off the pick. Defense dominated. There were all-Jewish basketball teams like Eddie Gottleib’s Philadelphia Sphas, an integral part of the Jewish community there. The core of the Sphas became the Philadelphia Warriors, one of the first NBA teams.

An old basketball box score is appears briefly at the beginning of the film: New York 68, Toronto 66. The box score was from the first professional game of the pre-NBA Basketball Association of America. All of the starting five Knick players were Jewish.

The early NBA included genuine Jewish stars like Dolph Schayes of the old Syracuse Nationals and of course “Red” Auerbach, Boston Celtic head coach from 1950-1966. For New York fans, college basketball was really important because professional basketball was still considered a minor sport. One of the Jewish greats was Red Sarachek, coach of Yeshiva University’s basketball team

So what happened to all those Jewish basketball players? In the film, “Red” Auerbach argues that the mass emigration to the suburbs diminished the pool of Jewish players. And in 1950, the NBA opened up the game to black players. That opening significantly changed the make-up, nature and marketing of the game.

Near the end of “The First Basket”, the director takes us to Israel where basketball has become huge. We watch film clips of American-born Tal Brody, who played for Maccabi Tel Aviv from 1966-1980. Unfortunately, the film was released in 2008 and doesn’t include any mention of the Sacramento King’s Omri Casspi, the first Israeli-born player in the NBA. No matter. Anyone with even a passing interest in basketball will enjoy this film.
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The festival kicks into high gear on March 10 at 7:30 P.M. at the JCC with the Israeli mystery thriller “Seven Minutes In Heaven”. In four short scenes, director Omri Givon establishes that we’re in the hands of a master filmmaker. A young comatose man lies in a hospital room, intubated and hooked to a ventilator. A young woman shaves him and then hugs his unresponsive body. Scene two: the woman receives a phone call at her apartment from a physician. The condition of the young man has seriously deteriorated. In the third scene, a rabbi chants “El Male Rachamim” at a funeral ceremony. The young woman watches impassively. Scene four: the woman, in her shower, slowly breaks into sobs.

In four short scenes, we’re already impressed with Givon’s editing. As the film progresses, we learn that the dead man, Oren (Nadav Nates), and the woman, Galia (Reymond Amsalem), were victims of a suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus. Galia suffers from both external skin burns and internal memory loss of that day’s events. The film’s narrative follows Galia’s attempts to determine exactly what occurred immediately after the bombing.

Galia learns Oren was killed by a piece of shrapnel to his head in a second explosion in the bus. Pulled out of the burning bus by a paramedic, Galia survived. She learns that she was unconscious for seven minutes, feared to be clinically dead by the paramedic who rescued her.

The plot thickens as Galia encounters Boaz (Eldad Fribas) who assists her after she loses her handbag in the Jerusalem souk. Boaz shows up twice again. So does Oren who shows up in their apartment, clearly unhappy with Galia. Boaz turns out to be the paramedic who rescued Galia.

Galia finds the Zaka volunteer who assisted Boaz in carrying her from the bus. “You weren’t ready (to die),” the religious Zaka volunteer tells her. “They say there are souls that rise to heaven, but they’re not ready. They’re not complete.”

Apparently these souls are given a second chance to observe the life they’ll live if they choose to return. Thus the soul is given the opportunity to change her/his destiny.

At this point, we’re not sure where the film is taking us. We’ve been thrown off by the use of shifting time frames, flashbacks, hallucinations and non-linear story telling. Is this a metaphysical love story like “Ghost”? A supernatural mystery like “The Lovely Bones”? A psychological thriller like “Memento”? Clearly, the film narrative is unfolding in a type of reverse chronological order. In order not to be a plot-spoiler, I don’t want to reveal how director Omri Givon resolves Galia’s search.

Unlike the American films of this genre, “Seven Minutes In Heaven” is a reflection on the impact of terrorism on Israelis. As pure film, “Seven Minutes” is superb. The cinematography, especially the use of color, is first class. The actors are impressive. And nothing in the film feels forced.

Do not miss the opportunity to see this excellent Israeli film. The film will also be shown on March 19 at 1 P.M. at the JCC.
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Director Moshe Zimmerman’s “Pizza In Auschwitz” documents the Chanoch family’s six-day journey from Israel to four camps in Eastern Europe where Danny was interned. The Israeli feature, in English, Hebrew, Polish and Lithuanian, will be shown on March 11 at 7:30 P.M. at the JCC.

Eastern Europe is a Jewish cemetery for the daughter Miri. For the father Danny, now 70, it’s the land of his youth. “One might say it was as good as childhood gets,” he says of Kovno. They argue as dad wishes to recapture the childhood he once had while daughter can only see how that childhood ended.

For dad, there’s no sense of sadness. He says that he doesn’t cry because he “defeated the bastards”. Danny tells his children, “For me, the ghetto was a survival drill.”

By informing his children of what occurred to him during the Holocaust, Dad feels he raised his children to be strong and Spartan. Miri counters that she wasn’t ready for that kind of information.

“If you want to survive,” he tells Miri, “you have only one aim: make the next move to stay alive.”

On day five, at Birkenau, Danny arranges to spend the night in one of the barracks in order to recreate his experience for his children. They dine on a pizza. And they argue. “We got a dose of Holocaust straight into our veins, enough for a lifetime,”Miri says. She wants to go back to the hotel. Enough of this Holocaust re-creation.

Back home, Miri tells the camera that she’s never been so happy to be back in Israel. Obviously the Holocaust followed her father to Israel. It arrived in a shriveled and shrunken form. But the ripples of the Holocaust keep expanding outward.
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The Israeli crime drama “Ajami” opens on March 13 at 8:45 P.M. at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The movie, up for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, was co-written, directed and edited by the Israeli Jewish Yaron Shani and the Israeli Arab Scandar Copti.

Set in the multi-ethnic Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, the film follows the repercussions of a revenge killing.

In its most simple form, revenge killings (blood vengeance) are about notions of pride and honor. In Arab and Bedouin cultures, conflict between the families of the attacker and the victim often continues after the original belligerents are killed off because previously uninvolved extended family members expand the fight. There is a formal mediation process of reconciliation (sulha) that can end the conflict.

In the film “Ajami”, a cycle of blood vengeance is set off when a Bedouin extortionist is shot and paralyzed by a relative of Omar (Shahir Kahaba) in the Jaffa family restaurant of Abu Elias (Youssef Sahwani).  Targeted for murder as the next-in-line kin, Omar seeks the help of Abu Elias, who arranges a sulha. Unfortunately for Omar, there are no alternatives to raising the blood money than illegal activities such as theft and drug dealing. Meanwhile, the stories of other characters in the restaurant intertwine. There’s Malek (Ibraham Frege), a West Bank Palestinian working illegally in the restaurant to raise money for his mother’s operation. And there’s Binj (Scandar Copti) who is dating a Jewish woman and dreams of moving to Tel Aviv to live with her. There’s also Dando (Eran Naim), an Israeli policeman, whose brother has been kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists and who is trying to arrest drug dealers in the Ajami neighborhood.

If all this appears a bit difficult to follow, then put down your popcorn. This ain’t no multiplex movie. Directors Shani and Copti set the plot into chapters presented out of chronological order. They also employ a narrative technique known as decentering. This technique, (used in such films as “Mulholland Drive” and “Crash”) allows the film to shuttle back and forth between characters and events to present a multiple perspective (or multiple levels of reality) to the storyline.

More significantly, the directors made “Ajami” using non-professional actors without a script. The initial shoot, basically improvised, yielded about 40 hours of multi-camera footage. Thus, as the directors explain, each scene contained multiple possibilities, which could be edited and mixed in a variety of ways. The editing process took almost a year.

“Ajami” can be interpreted as a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as an insight into the ethnic, religious and class divides in the Middle East, as an authentic picture of the violence that always seems to lurk just underneath the surface in poor urban neighborhoods or as a fully realized example of what can happen when two different perspectives collaborate instead of destroy. Don’t miss this one!

“Ajami” will also screen on March 14 at 3:15 P.M. at the MFAH.
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Set outside Copenhagen in 1944, the protagonists of “Flame and Citron” are partisans, members of the Danish anti-Nazi resistance. They assassinate Danish collaborators and Germans. Sent to kill a German officer, Flame (Thure Lindhardt) hesitates. He believes the man is a “good German”, one who admires the partisans because he tells Flame that his cause is legitimate. But Flame’s superior, Aksel Winther (Peter Mygind) insists the German played him.

As the Nazis retaliate, killing both innocent Danes and partisans, Flame and his partner Citron (Mads Mikkelsen) become the most wanted men in Denmark. The duo struggle to hold onto their humanity and Citron comes to realize there’s no just or unjust war--there’s only war.

Within the genre of foreign features that deal with the anti-Nazi resistance, “Flame and Citron” is probably most similar to Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” in its complex presentations of good and evil. Historically, violent anti-Nazi resistance was pictured in terms of a simple morality play. But “Flame and Citron” director Ole Christian Madsen (like Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven) understands the resistance in terms of the nearness of danger and the sliding of human life into its most primitive form.

The commercial opening of “Flame and Citron” was delayed numerous times. Now we finally have the chance to view this Danish import. “Flame and Citron” opens on March 13 at 6 P.M. at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and will screen a second time on March 21 at 3 P.M. on the last day of the festival.
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During the 16th century, long before pop music and advertising slogans, English poet and clergyman George Herbert said, “Living well is the best revenge”. Some 50 Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor families followed that advice in 1979 when they cooperatively purchased 44 acres in the Catskill Mountains, north of New York City. They constructed a new community, the Four Seasons Lodge, where for three decades they summered together in an exuberant embrace of life-affirming joy.

Andrew Jacobs’ feature documentary “Four Seasons Lodge” chronicles the last summer of the bungalow colony. Old age has decreased the ranks of the survivors. The youngest members are now in their 80’s. And the story line takes off as the members have made a decision to sell the property.

Jacobs, whose “day job” is as a reporter for the New York Times, knows how to construct a feature story. Over the course of the film, he shows us the remarkable energy, wit and deep camaraderie of this circle of friends. Having survived death at least once, old age holds no terrors for them. And life is something to be deeply savored each day.

Legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles (“Grey Gardens” and “Gimme Shelter”) served as the film’s director of photography. Maysles’ skill shows in the details—whether it’s a shot of a row of shirt-sleeved arms extended at a card table, each arm revealed a tattooed camp number or raindrops plinking off a roof gutter.

By the end of the summer, a large portion of the members decide they’ve made a mistake and launch a legal battle to reclaim the Four Seasons. That battle is still going on in the real world.

“Four Seasons Lodge” will screen on March 14 at 6 P.M at the Holocaust Museum Houston and on March 21 at 4 P.M. at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
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“Leaving the Fold” is Eric Scott’s documentary feature about quitting the Hassidic community. One of five young people featured, Levi Riven, quit the Lubavitch community because he wanted to listen to non-Jewish music, watch movies, go to bars and get drunk without feeling guilty. This is in contrast to the community’s prescribed “correct” way of doing every act. Levi’s younger brother, Hudi, followed his example. Their father Pinchus remained a Lubavitcher but refused to “cut the spiritual umbilical chord” that links him to his sons. He believes his children have “a spiritual sickness” and wonders if he has somehow failed them, or failed to give them a good upbringing so that they found the outside world so attractive.

All of the young people featured in the film explain there’s nothing bad about being a Hassid but there’s something so attractive about “being your own man”, that is to say the freedom to explore without guilt.

As the only parent portrayed in the film, Pinchus is keeping his home open to his errant sons, hoping they will somehow re-assess their decision to leave. He prays for their return daily. Hudi doubts that will happen.

While there are some continuity and editing flaws in “Leaving the Fold”, Scott manages to present a story that rarely makes it into the film world.  “Leaving the Fold” will screen along with “Waves of Freedom” on March 15 at 7:30 P.M. at the Jewish Community Center.

The Arts District