Films hit close to home

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This article was published 29/05/2024 (881 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This year, the Winnipeg International Jewish Film Festival (June 1-22) happens to overlap with Toronto Jewish Film Festival (May 30-June 9). Apart from sharing a common goal of highlighting and celebrating Jewish film, the festivals are unaffiliated.

Perhaps compensating for the COVID-induced slowdown of the past few years, Winnipeg’s film fête is especially impressive this year, with a range of movies and events that transcend the typical festival experience, from a new virtual reality program to an informal seminar on the card game Yaniv that will precede the June 8 screening of the American comedy Yaniv, with director Amnon Carmi and actor Benjamin Ducoff conducting the tutorial.

The festival also showcases three films that literally hit close to home for Winnipeggers.

The Mourning Suit, billed as Winnipeg’s first homegrown feature film, is a restored 1976 drama by director Leonard Yakir set in the dying garment district of downtown Winnipeg in the mid-’70s.

The Winnipeg Connection series, screening June 14, combines two films with local interest. Crossing the River, by Allan Novak, is a 30-minute portrait of Novak’s relatives — Anne Novak, Sally Singer, Ruth Zimmer and Sol Fink — the oldest living siblings to survive the Holocaust anywhere in the world.

After escaping Nazi-occupied Poland, and coming through a Siberian labour camp, the family ultimately settled in Winnipeg after the war.

That film is paired with Gimpel the Fool Returns to Poland, directed by and starring former Winnipegger Howard Rypp, the longtime artistic director of Nephesh Theatre in Tel Aviv, who has been performing his one-man play Gimpel the Fool (adapted from the short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer) around the world for the past two decades.

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Curiously, the Toronto festival outmatches the local fest with a broader array of Winnipeg films in the first-of-its-kind City Spotlight series — described in the program as a newly curated screening series highlighting “the city’s vibrant art scene — from the establishment of the Manitoba Theatre Centre by Holocaust survivor John Hirsch to the legendary Winnipeg Film Group, now on the cusp of its 50th anniversary.”

Included in the program are screenings of both The Mourning Suit and Crossing the River, as well as director Noam Gonick’s docudrama Hirsch; Gail Singer’s 1991 comedy-drama True Confections (an adaptation of Sondra Gotleib’s memoir of growing up Jewish in 1950s Winnipeg); the 1973 documentary short The Jews of Winnipeg, featuring comedian David Steinberg; and Raisins and Almonds, a 1974 CBC drama based on Fredelle Bruser Maynard’s memoir of growing up as the only Jewish kid in a small Prairie town.

Toronto Jewish Film Festival programmer Stuart Hands put the series together, notwithstanding one surprising personal fact.

“Honestly, I’ve never been to Winnipeg,” Hands says in a Zoom interview from Toronto. “But I sort of have this mythology … these myths of what it’s like. I based what I was doing partly on that. I sort of feel like I would fit in more there than I do here.

“It’s certainly interesting there are more Jewish stories told on film and television productions in Winnipeg than there are in Toronto, considering the differences in the population size.”

The Toronto festival, now in its 32nd year, will also showcase the Winnipeg-lensed series Less Than Kind, screening three episodes of the 2008-13 comedy on June 8, with guests including creators Marvin Kaye and Chris Sheasgreen, producer Mark McKinney and stars Jesse Camacho and Brooke Palsson.

Hands acknowledges the series helped inspire the Winnipeg focus, but says other locally spawned talents also motivated him.

“Years ago, I wanted to do something on Less Than Kind as an event, sort of similar to what we’re doing now,” he says.

“But it’s also all the other people coming out of there as well. From Ken Finkelman (The Newsroom) to David Steinberg and Perry Rosemond (writer of King of Kensington and Royal Canadian Air Farce). The arts community in general and the Jewish arts community in particular, there just seems to be something more alternative to it, more offbeat.”

Most of the fest’s Winnipeg-focused program will be available online across Canada at tjff.com/tjff-city-spotlight-winnipeg, free throughout the month of June.

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By contrast, the Winnipeg International Jewish Film Festival, approaching its 20th anniversary, will be presenting films best seen in the cinema, mostly at the Berney Theatre on the Asper Jewish Community Campus, but also at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain in the case of the French films The Auction and The Goldman Case — the latter being an especially exciting get for festival producer Karen Burshtein.

“Pierre Goldman was a really revolutionary figure on trial for murder in Paris in France in the 1970s, and his case really just had a lot of impact on French society to this day,” she says.

The acclaimed 2023 drama (in French with English subtitles) won lead actor Arieh Worthalter the French César award for Best Actor this year.

“His performance just blows the roof off. It’s just fantastic,” Burshtein says.

Another score for the festival is the opening-night film Midas Man (June 1), an English drama about the life of Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

“We put a ton of work into getting Midas Man. We’re one of only two festivals so far in the world. Almost no one else has it except us,” Burshtein says, adding local band the English Moccasins will perform some Beatles songs during the opening night festivities.

The festival offers some virtual screenings, but Burshtein encourages viewers to see films in the theatre.

“We want to play our part in uplifting the international artistic community through compelling films that showcase Jewish experience,” she says.