Review of the 8th Annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival
By Ben-Z. Shek (September / October 2000)

The Eighth Annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival, May 4-11, presented some 60 films of varying quality. In this year of the 55th anniversary of the end of World War Two, films and videos dealing with the rise of fascism and the near eradication of European Jewry were ever present; there was also a thought-provoking round-table discussion on the topic, "Enough Holocaust films already!" the most salient points of which I will relate in a future article. Arik Kaplun's fine fiction film on ex-Soviet immigrants in Israel, Yana's Friends, reviewed here last year, opened the Festival, which closed with the video documentary The New Klezmorim... by Montreal director David Kaufman. More on this anon.

My overall impression, although I wasn't able to see the entire program, was that the quality of this year's choices fell short of those of previous years. Nevertheless, some of the pictures stood out for their sensitive treatment of significant subject matter coupled with artistic quality. One of these was German director Didi Danquart's Jew-Boy Levi (1999). Set in 1935 in the Black Forest area shortly after Hitler rose to power, it is centred on the cattle-dealer of the title who becomes the butt of the insults of people of various social strata seduced by Nazi ideology. These latter include an engineer supervising repairs to a railway tunnel, his servile secretary-mistress, clergy, and some farmers and railwaymen. Levi wears a black bowler and a watch-chain, and descends from a long line of respected rural merchants. With his pet rabbit, Yankl, and a penchant for singing Yiddish folk songs (the recurring riddle song Tumbalaika but also, appropriately, Mark Varshavsky's Dem Milner's Trern-The Miller's Tears-depicting the persecution of a Jewish miller in Tsarist Russia), he is shocked by his first encounters with Jew-baiting. The film shows how some ordinary folk embrace Nazism for narrow, selfish reasons, but also shows, through the barmaid Lisbeth, who is attracted to the hero and courageously saves his life, that all were duped by the officially-sanctioned race hatred.

A second fiction film treating persecution of Jews is Italian director Matteo Bellinelli's The Third Moon (1997). Set and stunningly shot among the architectural treasures, canals and gondolas of Venice, it unfortunately has a convoluted plot that lacks focus. There are flashbacks to the Jewish ghetto during the war, the ravages of Italy's race laws flowing from Mussolini's alliance with Hitler, and a tragic love story; the director also inserts an opera centred on Shylock and a Russian art forger which, taken together, make for a confusing mixture.

Several documentaries, too, tackled the fascist nightmare. Uncle Chatzkel (1999) is a video by Australian director Ron Freedman, about his Lithuanian (nonagenerian) relative. Chatzkel Abramovitch lived through the horrors of two world wars and, especially, the near annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry by the Nazis and their local henchmen. A distinguished, honoured linguist, he was working at 93 on a new Russian-Lithuanian dictionary when his nephew came to Vilnius to make the video. He has also published works on Yiddish philology and, although a non-Communist, was an editor/translator in the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet.

In the video, Chatzkel describes in detail the liquidation of the ghettoes of Kaunas and Kovno. He himself survived internment at Dachau, and was reunited with his wife, who was also a prisoner of the Nazis. But two of their sons were killed. Chatzkel's sister Ghitta emigrated to South Africa in 1913, and some of her offspring moved to Australia. Chatzkel was delighted to see a video of his relatives' peysakh celebration in Johannesburg.

An interesting piece of history, Uncle Chatzkel is somewhat marred, in my view, by its Cold War vocabulary, which seems more that of the director than of the subject.

In a cynical class by itself is the short Nazi film, The Fuehrer Gives a City to the Jews (1944). It is supposedly a "documentary" of the idyllic life of Jews in Nazi-ruled Terezin, Czechoslovakia. Produced by Goebbels' propaganda ministry, it aimed to deceive Germans and Jews alike about the fate of the 140,000 Jews who were herded into Theresienstadt, of whom 34,000 died there, and 87,000 were deported to death camps. To the sounds of Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn and klezmer recordings, we are shown "scenes" of children and adults at work and play (in clothing factories, concert and lecture halls, soccer fields, art workshops, and garden plots). While most smile (one can imagine the pressure to do so), many have blank, sad faces, and the yellow stars bring an ironic sense of reality to this skilful, yet heinous, fakery. A horrid shock comes when one makes the leap from the footage of nude men showering after a "sports" event, to the pre-gas chamber "cleansing" that these same Jews were to experience soon after the filming.

A vow never to go to Germany because of its Nazi past was broken by a world-renowned artist last year. The new video Violin Up! Isaac Stern in Cologne captures vividly the workshops he led with brilliant young musicians, as did an earlier film on a similar trip to China. Not only does Stern offer technical advice to his students, he also imparts to them a fiery passion for making beautiful sounds that flow from the soul. To see their responses and the audiences' standing ovations for them and him is a heartwarming experience. 

There were many Israeli films-old and new, features, documentaries, shorts, T.V. serials-at this year's Festival. Only one of those I saw, Sharon Shamir's documentary Peace by Piece (1997) dealt to any real extent with the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict. It covers the first-ever tour of Israel by two Jordanian political satirists, Nabil Sawalha and Hisham Yanis (who was born in Jaffa). As luck would have it, the comedians were to set out on November 4, 1995, the day after Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. In consultation with their Israeli hosts, they went ahead with their tour. Despite much opposition in Jordan to their trip, they decided that the stakes were too high to abandon it.

At their first appearance before 2,000 Arabic-speakers in a Tel Aviv theatre, they depict a meeting between Rabin and a stuttering Yasser Arafat to loud laughter. Shortly after, they begin to wonder whether a grieving country is an appropriate venue for such a tour, but continue anyway. A projected visit to the Western Wall, where a soldier refuses to let them near the religious shrine, evokes memories in Yanis of his family's flight in fear in 1948. "If our likes had received compensation, or been granted the right of return," he says, "the major Middle East problem would have been solved."

The Arab comedians meet with Premier Shimon Peres, feminist Knesset member Shulamit Aloni, and Arab and Jewish mayors. They return to the Cameri Theatre in Tel-Aviv to a standing ovation from a packed Jewish house. In the meantime, they learn of their expulsion from the Jordanian Writers' Union, and dread their reception on their return. But, in fact, they are embraced in the streets of Amman, and cheered in their own theatre. Peace doves, real ones and paper models, frame this film. But the exact content of the satirists' skits is never fully clear.

Faye Lederman's timely short video documentary, Women of the Wall (1998) relates the founding in 1988 and the subsequent activities of the Orthodox women's group that has insisted on the right to pray at the Western Wall on an equal footing with men. The brave multi-generational demonstrators have been vilified as "prostitutes" and told that giving in to their demands "will be the ruin of Israel." The film traces the ups and downs of court struggles since 1989 that have reached the Supreme Court but not resolved the issue. One regime after another, beholden to the religious parties, has procrastinated, establishing commissions that have brought in untenable "compromises." Shortly after the screening, Israel's Supreme Court upheld the women's right to unimpeded prayer at the Wall, but the Knesset scuttled the ruling by voting in a new law imposing six-year prison terms on those exercising this right!

Two 1999 Israeli video features, obviously made for television, set in different historical periods and milieus, contain love affairs between Jews and Arabs, but the theme is marginal and undeveloped in both. Isaac Z. Yeshurun's Air Time, set in today's Israel, focuses on a businessman who fails to resolve a knot of personal problems by cell-phone conversations with his estranged children (his daughter loves a Palestinian) and Russian immigrant girlfriend. Eli Cohen's Ergoz treats an historical episode: the sinking in 1961 of the ship of the title off the coast of Morocco, causing the death of 44 Jews fleeing to Israel as Arab-Jewish tensions mount. At the centre of the action is the wealthy Abutbol family, owners of a swank hotel. This time, one of the sons loves a Muslim woman, while another is active in the Zionist underground. The story had considerable potential, but director Cohen, maker of excellent films like The Summer of Aviya (1988), its sequel, Under the Domim Tree (1995), and the Canadian co-produced The Quarrel (1992), all reviewed here, disappoints in this overly complicated, psychologically weak work.

Much more convincing is the bittersweet Argentinian love story, Autumn Sun (1996), starring Norma Aleandro, fondly remembered for her role in The Official Story (1985) on the "disappeared" victims of the military dictatorship, and Federico Luppi, the lead in John Sayles' striking Men With Guns (1997). These splendid actors play out the love affair between the fifty-ish Jewish accountant, Clara, and a pretending "Saul Levin," a Gentile who answers her lonely-hearts ad. A sub-plot dealing with urban delinquency distracts from the otherwise touching tale of post-mid-life romance.

A first viewing of the closing video feature, The New Klezmorim: Voices Inside the Revival of Jewish Music, gave me a warm glow from seeing familiar faces: singer and fiddler, Michael Alpert, and Brave New World; Adrienne Cooper, who specializes in Yiddish working-class songs; musicologist Zalmen Mlotek, among other things, director of the New Yiddish Chorale of New York; and young fiddler Reena Katz, a teacher at Toronto's Winchevsky School. But a second viewing of David Kaufman's video, highlighting the 1998 "Klez Camp" in the Laurentians, left me somewhat disappointed with its overly "talking heads" approach. The lack of a co-ordinating "voice over" results in repetition, overly lengthy verbal expositions, and not enough music. The video, completed on the eve of the Festival, needed more editing and a more cohesive structure. 

BEN-Z. SHEK is Professor Emeritus of French Literature of the University of Toronto and an Outlook Associate Editor.