This year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from April 18 to 26 and is bigger and better than ever. Here is a sampler of its eclectic films.
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My First War (Sunday, April 19, 3:30 p.m. at the Al Green Theatre) focuses on the 2006 Second Lebanon War from the perspective of Yariv Mozer, a junior Israeli army officer who also happens to be the director.
When he was called up, Mozer packed a video camera into his knapsack, and the images and sounds he captures are searingly honest and cinéma vérité as its best. The soldiers in his regiment, who are stationed in a serene plum orchard opposite the volatile Lebanese border, reveal their innermost fears, concerns and critiques of the war. They speak of contradictory orders and disorganization and voice respect for the tough and disciplined Hezbollah fighters. A senior officer admits to being frustrated because Israel cannot stop the incessant rain of Hezbollah rockets.
Mozer himself is is also critical. He describes the war as a “useless” one that leaves him with an “indisputable feeling” of defeat. He complains that his fellow soldiers are “sitting ducks.” He thinks that the last 48 hours of the war, during which 33 troops were killed, were unnecessary. He claims that the generals hid their “incompetence” at the expense of “heroic” soldiers.
The images are stark: tanks open fire and missiles are launched. In addition, the camera pans on cars that have taken a direct hit and on an apartment building that has a gaping hole on its side.
This is war at its ugliest.
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Amos Oz (Sunday, April 19, 10 a.m. at the Al Green Theatre), by Greek filmmaker Stelios Charalampopoulos, is a sympathetic and empathetic profile of a major Israeli novelist.
Oz talks about an array of interlocking topics – his home in Arad, his themes, his writing methods, his family background, his parents’ devotion to European culture, his mother’s suicide, his father’s intellectual bent and facility with languages, his former homes in Kibbutz Hulda and Jerusalem, his beloved wife, his engagement with politics, his revulsion of violence and his desire for peace with the Palestinians.
Visiting Greece in the company of the director, he waxes nostalgic about the Jewish community of Salonika, which was largely decimated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Oz, in this documentary, emerges as an eloquent and reflective person.
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Po-Lin: The Slivers of Memory (Tuesday, April 21, 2:30 p.m. at the Al Green Theatre), by Polish director Jolanta Dylewska, lovingly preserves the shtetls of Poland through home movies shot in the 1920s and ’30s. Composed of flickering images and sombre commentary, mixed in with revealing talking heads of aging Poles who lived with Jews, this is a film to savour.
The remarkable footage, taken from such towns as Gabin, Slonim, Kurow and Boryslaw, drips with nostalgia, bringing back venerable rabbis, smiling young couples, carefree children, blushing women, a crowded market, a water carrier straining under a load and a band in full throttle. A clip of a visiting American Jew is particularly interesting.
In a hushed tone, the narrator delivers a moving eulogy on Polish Jews and their institutions, synagogues, holidays and customs. Poles old enough to remember the past recall their Jewish friends and acquaintances. “Theirs was a different world,” a woman says, distilling to the core of the matter.
On the whole, Dylewska strikes a positive tone. To her credit, she also deals with the dark underside of Polish-Jewish relations.
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In Search of the Bene Israel (Tuesday, April 21, 5:30 p.m. at the Bloor Cinema) turns on an ancient Jewish community in India, centred in Mumbai, that has been vastly depleted by emigration since Indian independence. The director, Sadia Shepard, has a personal stake in the story. Her grandmother, who married a Muslim and lived in Pakistan for some years, was a Bene Israel herself. Shepard, an inquisitive guide, relates the community’s storied history and meets a few of its members, including an Israel-bound couple, a movie director exploring her roots and an oil presser, the last of his breed.
This is a vibrant film brimming with the bold, flamboyant colours of India.
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The Fire Within: Jews of the Amazonian Rainforest (Tuesday, April 21, immediately after In Search of the Bene Israel), by Lorry Salcedo Mitrani, delves into the figurative heart of darkness, the trackless jungles of Brazil and Peru. From the late 19th century until 1912, a procession of young, adventurous Moroccan Jewish men went to South America, galvanized by the rubber boom and hoping to strike it rich.
When the market collapsed, most of these adventurers returned to their homes, but some stayed behind and married local Indian women. Their fourth- and fifth-generation descendants are the subject of this fascinating movie, which is set mainly in the ragged but exotic town of Iquitos, Peru.
The film explores two themes: the campaign they wage to be accepted as Jews by the hidebound Jewish community in Lima and their decision to settle in Israel as new immigrants.
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King Lati the First (Friday, April 24, 10 a.m. at the Al Green Theatre) is odd and absorbing, a testament to naieveté and misplaced hope. Uri Bar-On’s offbeat documentary revolves around a Senegalese Muslim worker in Israel, Aziz Diouf, and his eight-year-old son, Lati, whom he is grooming for greatness. Aziz, an earnest, well-intentioned man married to a half-Jewish blond Russian, fervently believes that Lati can lay claim to the throne of his tribe in Senegal. Irina, his wife, is skeptical, but Aziz pushes on.
In pursuit of this far-fetched goal, the family travels to Aziz’s poor, decrepit village, but the path to the throne is littered with obstacles and cultural chasms. Bar-On’s final scene, in Israel, is a triumph of irony.
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Camera Obscura (Saturday, April 18, 9:15 p.m. at the Bloor Cinema) comes straight from Argentina. An inventive blend of live action, animation and still photography, Maria Menis’ unusual feature film, which takes place primarily on an isolated farm on the pampas, is about immigration, family bonds, solitude, the perception of beauty and the transformational effects of photography.
