The People of the Book on the big screen

The Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival celebrates its bar-mitzva year.

By HANNAH BROWN
Film 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Film 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival has become as much a part of the holiday season as sufganiyot and Hanukka chocolate coins. Now in its 13th year, the festival, which runs at the Jerusalem Cinematheque from December 17-23, features a wide variety of feature films, documentaries and short films from Israel and abroad.
The opening feature is My Best Enemy, a drama about art theft in Vienna during the Holocaust, directed by Wolfgang Murnberger. The festival features several other feature films from Europe, including the controversial Combat Girls, directed by Alina Levshin, about female neo-Nazis in contemporary Germany.
Simon and the Oaks is a Swedish film about the friendship between two boys, one gentile and one Jewish, during the 1940s. Joel Fendelman’s David tells the story of a Muslim boy in Brooklyn who is taken for a Jew by the members of a synagogue and embraced by the Jews there. Remembrance is about a love affair that starts in Poland during the Holocaust and is revived after 30 years.
Among the Israeli films being shown is a revival of Siege (Matzor), the 1969 film by Gilberto Tofano. It stars Yehoram Gaon and Gila Almagor in a romantic drama about the widow of a paratrooper who has an affair that outrages her late husband’s best friend. It was produced by Yaakov Agmon, Almagor’s husband,who was a director of the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. Agmon will receive the festival’s Life Achievement Award.
One theme that runs through this year’s offerings is the Jewish perspective on and contribution to the arts. Barak Stav’s documentary David Sharir: A Retrospective focuses on that Israeli artist’s contributions to the world of painting and set design. Stav looks back on Sharir’s half century of work as a series of his paintings inspired by the Book of Psalms is being exhibited in the US. The Jerusalem Cinematheque currently has a selection of his set designs and recent paintings on display, and this exhibit is open to the public free of charge.
The Crucial Choices of N. Bezem is a documentary by Yehuda Yaniv that examines the life and work of the artist Naftali Bezem.
Christian Bau’s In the Boondocks – Jimmy Ernst, Glueckstadt/New York is about the fates of the German-born New York artist Jimmy Ernst and his parents, surrealist artist Max Ernst and Louise Straus.
Francine Pelletier’s documentary Mordecai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews looks at the life of the irreverent and controversial Canadian novelist. Barney’s Version, the acclaimed recent film based on one of Richler’s novels and starring Paul Giamatti, and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the 1974 film starring Richard Dreyfuss based on Richler’s novel of the same name, will also be shown.
Yoram Gross, a Holocaust survivor and well-known Australian film animator, will be honored in the documentary Blinky & Me, directed by Tomascz Magierski. A restored version of one of his best-known films, the 1962 Joseph The Dreamer, will be screened.
Tony Curtis: Driven to Stardom by Ian Ayres examines the life of Bronxborn Bernie Schwartz and how he became a Hollywood icon.

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Taly Goldenberg’s documentary Lia is about Lia van Leer, the founder of the Jerusalem and Haifa cinematheques. It’s a look at the life of a woman who has used her intelligence and charm to build an amazing movie culture in Israel.
Franz Weisz’s Life? Or Theater? examines the work of Charlotte Salomon, who was killed in Auschwitz. She left behind a stack of more than 700 stunning autobiographical drawings.
Robin Garbose has made a musical, The Heart That Sings, about a young Holocaust survivor who goes to America and gets a job in a camp for pampered city girls. Since most of the actresses who appear in the film are Orthodox Jewish women, the director has requested that only women and girls attend the screenings.
David Kaufman’s Song of the Lodz Ghetto mixes music and documentary to tell the story of the role music played there. God’s Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz is a biography of that musical prodigy.
British actor and writer Stephen Fry examines his love for the music of Wagner in the film Wagner & Me.
A number of films deal with Jewish- Muslim relations, and among these is Alexandra Lipsitz’s Circus Kids, about a youth circus troupe from St. Louis, Missouri, that travels to Israel to perform with a mixed Arab/Jewish circus here.
For more information, the festival’s website is jjff.org.il