Human stories the beating heart of Jewish Film Festival

The 25th edition of the Winnipeg International Jewish Film Festival began last night at the Berney Theatre with a sold-out screening of Fantasy Life, a movie about a nervous manny who falls for his psychiatrist’s daughter-in-law while caring for her three daughters.

The opening-night screening is one example of the kaleidoscopic potential offered by the entry point of global Jewish cinema, a subgenre that at its best manages to be both highly specific and broadly universal, just like any other religious, ethnic or cultural filmography.

“Even though the films we show come through a Jewish lens or from a Jewish angle, at their very base, they’re always human stories,” says film festival producer Karen Burshtein, who selected the films for the annual event, which runs to May 23 at the Asper Jewish Community Campus.

“Everyone — regardless of background — can connect to these stories, which are about everything from the immigrant experience to the plight of the dispossessed to a family’s experience with divorce.”

The festival’s mix of 22 selections features historical drama, period comedy, pressing contemporary narratives and wide-ranging documentaries:

• Sheitel, an exploration of the significance of wigs and headscarves for orthodox and Hasidic women;
• Orna and Ella, a portrait of a resilient woman-run restaurant on Tel Aviv’s Sheinkin Boulevard;
• and a comedic doc that surely boasts the longest title in the festival’s history: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way).

The doc by American director Nick Davis features archival footage of the original Toronto production of Steven Schwarz’s musical Godspell, which starred a rising tide of Canadian-Jewish talent, including Eugene Levy, Paul Schaffer and Gilda Radner.

“The roots of so much comedy can be traced back to that place, from SCTV to SNL to South Park,” Burshtein says of the doc, which screens Sunday at 7 p.m.

 

Another light-hearted documentary Burshtein’s excited to screen is We Met at Grossingers (Saturday, 8 p.m.). Directed by Paula Eiselt, the feature-length doc revisits the Catskills resort community that served as an inspiration for Dirty Dancing.

“When other resorts were restricted, when Jews or Black people weren’t allowed in, Grossingers became a place for Jews, and later other disenfranchised communities, to go and escape the city,” says Burshtein.

 

Winnipeg comic Benji Rothman will warm up the audience with a standup set before the screening.

Stories of Jewish women were also important for Burshtein to highlight, and one of her favourites is a documentary portrait of artist Tamara de Lempicka, an icon of the Art Deco period whose Jewish identity was shrouded in secrecy throughout her working life. Playing May 21 at 2 p.m., the movie will be followed by a discussion moderated by local art history buff Susan Freig.

 

This Sunday, the festival will screen the latest doc from Peabody-winning filmmaker Abby Ginzberg, an exhaustively researched profile of Henrietta Szold, the founder of the Hadassah women’s organization, who’s credited with saving 11,000 children from certain death during the Holocaust.

 

One feature film that shouldn’t be missed is The Sea, or HaYam/Al-bahar, which screens on May 18. The winner of best picture, best director, best screenplay and best supporting actress at last year’s Ophir Awards in Israel, the debut feature from Shai Carmeli-Pollack tells the story of Khaled (Muhammad Gazawi), a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who ventures off into Israeli territory during a school trip.

A collaborative film made by Jewish Israeli and Palestinian artists, The Sea — Israel’s official entry for last year’s Oscars — has been compared favourably to the neorealist work of Italian postwar cineaste Vittorio De Sica. In a rave review, Variety called the film “a deeply humanist tale about borders, permits, the interdependent economies of two neighbours and the power of the dominant language.”

 

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman