The 25th Jerusalem Jewish Film Week will be held this year from December 9-14 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. While usually this event is called a festival, this year, in light of the war, the festive element will, understandably, be a bit muted. But while the guests, programmers, and audiences are all aware of the ongoing tragic events, the festival will provide an opportunity to cast out darkness and search for rays of light by celebrating and examining Jewish history and life through film. It will also feature traditional Hanukkah candlelighting before the evening screenings.
This year’s festival will feature over 30 films from 15 countries, including premiere screenings and restored classics. There will be documentaries, feature films, shorts, and animated films that examine issues of Jewish history and identity, as well as interfaith issues.
The film week will open with the premiere of James Hawes’s One Life, which stars two-time Oscar winner Sir Anthony Hopkins as real-life hero Sir Nicholas Winton, a British humanitarian who rescued hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them from Prague to England. Helena Bonham Carter and Jonathan Pryce are Hopkins’s co-stars. The film will be open later on at the Lev Cinemas chain. The opening-night screening will be held in the presence of VIPs, including diplomats and filmmakers.
Many of the filmmakers will attend the festival and take part in conversations and master classes with audiences. There will be a tribute to French-Jewish director Alexandre Arcady, who will be a guest of honor. His 1991 film, For Sacha, will be presented in the restored classics section. Starring Sophie Marceau, it tells the story of a group of French teenagers and their teacher who come to live in Israel on a kibbutz in 1967, and of the complex relationships among these young people. It’s an engaging, dramatic coming-of-age story and features many lovingly observed details of kibbutz life and even some comedic moments.
Arcady’s most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Algeria (aka Le petit blond de la casbah) will also be shown. Arcady was born in Algeria, and this semi-autobiographical movie looks at an Algerian-Jewish filmmaker who moved to France and who returns to Algiers with his young son to show one of his films there.
The Classics section of the festival includes a screening of Hello, Dolly!, the 1969 hit musical starring Barbra Streisand as matchmaker Dolly Levi. The movie was directed by Gene Kelly and co-stars Walter Matthau and Louis Armstrong, and Streisand fans should not pass up this chance to see the film on the big screen. Additionally, the 1923 silent film, East and West, directed by Sidney Goldin, will be shown in a digitally restored version. It’s a fascinating and comic look at the culture clash between American Jews and their European brethren.
The Israeli Films section includes Itay Vered’s Hope Without Boundaries, a look at Israelis who opened a field hospital in Ukraine during the war with Russia. Nir Mymaran and David Fram’s Shosha tells the story of a Yiddish cultural organization that operates out of the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station and attempts to stage a musical based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shosha. Short documentaries by the Ma’aleh Film School’s eighth graduating class of women ultra-Orthodox filmmakers will also be screened.
The International Cinema section features Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a disturbing movie that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year and tells the story of Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who lived there with his family and led an idyllic life, if you ignore the screams and shooting they heard almost constantly. You may not be in the mood to see a movie about a Jewish child being kidnapped, but Mario Bellocchio’s Rapito tells a very different historical drama about a Jewish child in Bologna in 1858 who was secretly baptized by his nanny and who is then taken away from his family by papal soldiers.
Antisemitism, Documentary, Jewish Portraits
THE SECTION called Antisemitism features the documentary Sarah Halimi: An Antisemitic and Unpunished crime, directed by Francois Margolin, about the killing of a French Jewish woman in 2017 by her Malian-born neighbor, who pleaded insanity. Maxim Pozdorovkin’s The Conspiracy is an animated documentary about the rise of antisemitism in the modern era. Who is Afraid of Hitler’s Town? A House and the Past Within Us by Gunter Schwaiger looks at the controversies surrounding Hitler’s birthplace.
In the very rich Documentary Section, Delphine Morel’s Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, With a Kiss as Deep as My Love examines the relationship between Dreyfus and his wife, and will be followed by a talk with Dreyfus’s great-granddaughter, Yael PerlRuiz. In John Hay’s Willem and Frieda – Defying the Nazis, actor/writer Stephen Fry goes to Amsterdam to uncover the little-known story of an artist and musician who forged identity cards that saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. While everyone knows about the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion, Kirk Wolfinger and Paula S. Apsell’s Resistance – They Fought Back tells some lesser-known stories of Jews all over Europe who resisted the Nazis. Christian Krones and Florian Weigensamer’s A Boy’s Life tells the story of Daniel Chanoch, who was only eight when he fell into the hands of Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz and lived to tell his story.
The Jewish Portraits Section features a number of films about notable Jews, both real and fictional. Adam Low’s James Joyce’s Ulysses examines the legacy of Joyce’s masterpiece through a close look at its Jewish protagonist, Leopold Bloom. Exhibition on Screen: Pissarro – Father of Impressionism by David Bickerstaff tells the story of Impressionist pioneer Camille Pissarro’s life. Eli Gorn’s Burning Off the Page looks at the story of Celia Dropkin, a writer of erotic Yiddish poetry. Conquering Time – Agnes Keleti by Katalin Olah is about a Hungarian-Jewish woman who is considered the greatest Jewish female athlete of all time.
The Concerto of Cinema season will open with a screening of Days of Pick, a celebration of the music and life of iconic Israeli musician Zvika Pik, directed by Shai Lahav and Ron Omer.
Roni Mahadav-Levin is the CEO of the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the director of the Jewish Film Week, and Daniela Turgeman is the artistic director. The full schedule and tickets are available at https://jer-cin.org.il/