[ad_1]
The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival celebrates its 23rd anniversary by shaking off three years’ worth of fears and precautions and — on the plus side — embracing innovations caused by the pandemic.
“For us, this is the first time we’re sort of exhaling,” says executive director Kenny Blank.
The state’s largest film festival, the AJFF kicks off February 8 with the opening-night comedy-drama Karaoke and concludes on February 21 with a documentary celebrating composer Charles Fox’s career, Killing Me Softly With His Songs.
“Over the Covid years, there’s a lot we’ve learned about the need to innovate,” Blank says. Sure, in its first 20 years, the festival had already earned a reputation as a showcase for the latest in narrative features and documentaries. But in the heart of the pandemic, festival organizers had to figure out how to safely deliver those films to audiences, developing a virtual screening component that continues today.
“Even before the pandemic, audiences were starting to change their viewing habits, consuming more of this cinema art at home,” Blank adds. “Streaming was a growing presence, and we were probably more reluctant to deal with it prior to the pandemic than we should have been.”
Roughly half of this year’s film lineup is available for at-home virtual viewing, though some titles will be reserved for in-person showings in the festival’s theaters. That in-person experience has always been at the heart of festival, as much a celebration of the film-loving community as it is of the films themselves.
“This festival has always been about connecting these great stories with audiences,” Blank says. “There’s such a great sense of ownership in the community: ‘This is our festival’ — whether you’re Jewish or not Jewish, these films speak to all people. And we are continuing to provide the gift of great cinematic storytelling.”
As with other film festivals globally, the staff worried that the restrictions of the pandemic might lead to a letup in the production and release of movies. That hasn’t been the case. “At the end of the day, these are artists who want to be able to tell their stories,” Blank says. Despite or even because of challenges, “They’ve seen the importance of their craft, and they’ve been able to hone it and make their work even more disciplined.”
Will people turn up in person for movies in 2023? From early ticket sales, Blank got the sense that about 75% of audiences plan to experience the festival in person. This year’s venues, in the wake of the closing of the Tara, include Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center, the Plaza Theatre, Landmark Midtown Art Cinema and the Woodruff Arts Center’s Rich Auditorium.
AJFF also tested the waters for in-person attendance with a screening of the Leonard Bernstein documentary Bernstein’s Wall in September at Sandy Springs. “We had nearly 800 attendees,” Blank says. “That bodes well for what the festival demand will be.”
There’s news on that front. This year, festival goers can reserve their actual seats, a perk unusual among most film festivals. “It takes a lot of stress out of the moviegoing experience,” Blank says. In other words, lobbies will now be reserved for cinematic discussions rather than seating choice brawls.
While its strong suit is new films from around the globe, the festival also looks back every year. The festival includes a 45th-anniversary screening of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, a film that influenced many women-centric dramas that came after. Looking even further back, there’s the silent Yiddish entry Broken Barriers, with an original score that will be performed live during its Plaza screening.
Usually each year, a thematic or technical trend seems to emerge among the featured films. This time around, Blank sees some interesting things happening in documentaries. “That’s a category that’s sort of reinventing itself,” he says, speaking about some entries that blur the line between traditional narrative and documentary techniques, such as Exodus 91 and Savoy. The festival also features a large selection of writer-directors delivering very personal viewpoints in their work.
Whatever type of film you like, you’ll likely find it. And, as in most years in its existence, the festival will feature many of the artists — actors, writers, directors, etc. — on hand to discuss their work.
For complete festival information, visit HERE.
Here are my thoughts on some of the films I screened in advance.
America. The latest drama from writer-director Ofir Raul Graizer demonstrates the same sort of gentle, open-hearted approach to characters that he brought to a previous AJFF film, 2017’s The Cakemaker. A bit long, the new one focuses on swimming instructor Eli (Michael Moshonov), who has changed his name and his address to escape a brutal upbringing by his policeman father. When news of dad’s death reaches him in New York, Eli returns to Israel to settle the estate. There, he picks up his friendship with childhood pal Yotam (Ofri Biterman) and meets his fiancée Iris (Oshrat Ingadashet). Eli and Iris get closer than expected when Yotam temporarily leaves the picture. The actors are good, though Moshonov, in service to his walled-off character, sometimes feels a little remote. By its end, the movie provides a couple of twists as melodramatic as anything by Douglas Sirk or Pedro Almodóvar, but without their filmmaking oomph. Still, there’s a winning decency here that can win you over.
::
Attachment. From Demon to Tikkun, The Golem to Big Bad Wolves, AJFF has usually featured at least one striking horror film each year. This time, we get an extra genre spin. On top of horror, Attachment is an LGBTQ romance. When Danish actress Maja (Josephine Park) follows new girlfriend Leah (Ellie Kendrick) back to her London home, she finds that living in half of a duplex above Leah’s mom, Chana (Sofie Gräbøl), brings with it more than normal Jewish mother-in-law tensions. Chana is less worried about Leah’s attachment to Maja than the dybbuk who attached to her daughter first — the source of the many rites and superstitions that rule the household and drive Maja crazy. Writer-director Gabriel Bier Gislason wrings suspense out of characters’ miscommunications (sometimes intentional) due to the use of three different languages. And if his movie ends with a couple of huge plot holes, it also delivers some unnerving jolts and people we care about.
::
Barren. Both a rabbi and a film professor, among other things, writer-director Mordechai Vardi delivers this intentionally disturbing, thoughtful look at the chaos that shakes an ultra-orthodox couple’s life when they face troubles getting pregnant. Mili Eshet plays Feige, and her husband Naftali (Yoav Rotman) is a mama’s boy who listens to his parents and the local clerics when their attempts to have a baby fail to succeed. Though made by a man, the film does a good job at seeing things through Feige’s agonized eyes as a community (mainly of men) takes her body’s fate into their collective hands. The spectacular abuse of one man’s religious authority complicates the situation in ways that make a traditional happy ending close to impossible. A challenging film that’s certain to spark much discussion.
::
Cinema Sabaya. A bunch of women sit in a room talking about their lives, particularly their problems with the men in them. By film’s end, they’ve found the strength to head out into the world with new clarity and purpose. That description may sound a little like Best Picture Oscar nominee Women Talking. For my money, Cinema Sabaya — Israel’s official submission for the Academy Awards’ international feature category — is the better film. Or at least much more entertaining and colorful. Writer-director Orit Fouks Rotem plops us into a community center with a handful of disparate women — young, old, married, Jewish, Muslim — who have gathered to learn filmmaking as a hobby from young Rona (Dana Ivgy). Rona seems as interested in getting the women to talk about their daily struggles as in learning how a film camera works; it’s as much group therapy as a workshop. Religious and generational tensions erupt, and they’re handled with a conversational ease that gives the film the textures of a good documentary. It’s a feel-good and an informative, generous movie.
::
Concerned Citizen. If Tel Aviv has such a thing as a gay male Karen, then that would be Ben (Shlomi Bertonov). Partnered with Raz (Ariel Wolf) and hoping to become parents (like Barren, parenthood is a central plot element), Ben wants everything nice in the semi-sketchy neighborhood he’s helping to gentrify. That includes planting a tree in the sidewalk median outside the couple’s condo. When he spies some Eritrean immigrants casually leaning against the sapling, Ben grabs the phone and lodges an anonymous complaint with the police. That things go badly is an understatement, even if the man ultimately means well. Though it gets a little tedious in the middle section as it reflects Ben’s urban ennui a little too well, writer-director Idan Haguel’s drama raises questions about civic responsibility that feel vital in our non-civil era.
::
June Zero. The 1962 execution of Holocaust engineer Adolf Eichmann is the focal point of this drama co-written and directed by Jake Paltrow (yes, you’ve heard of his sister and mother). The movie shows how the event affected three men: a teenager recruited to help build a single-purpose oven designed to cremate Eichmann’s remains; an Israeli policeman anxious to maintain protocol while the war criminal is in his custody; and a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, assigned to be the man to interview Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem. The tones of the three segments don’t fully cohere, so the film is uneven but intriguing.
::
Karaoke. Like the festival’s closing-night film, Killing Me Softly With His Songs (an extremely laid-back look at composer Charles Fox’s career), the main selling point of Karaoke is its redemptive, easygoing nature. Longtime married couple Tova (Rita Shukrun) and Meir (the wonderful Sasson Gabay of The Band’s Visit) have settled into a spark-free, later-life existence in their high-rise condo. But they and fellow HOA members get shaken up in ways good and bad by the arrival of finely weathered, Maserati-driving lothario Itzik (Lior Ashkenazi). Booze, drugs and attractive young people of all sexes flow in and out of Itzik’s place, and Tova and Meir are equally shocked and attracted by the goings-on upstairs. (The police are called anonymously at one point by Meir, in an echo of Concerned Citizen). Writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s comedy-drama doesn’t take you anywhere you can’t easily guess in advance, but it’s a pleasant journey.
::
Leopoldstadt. Currently playing on Broadway, Tom Stoppard’s drama is presented in this National Theatre Live recording, shown in British theaters on 2022’s Holocaust Memorial Day. A slice of European history before, during and after World War II, the play’s lens is a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna. When we meet them, they’re half assimilated into the larger Christian culture. A Star of David winds up by accident on the Christmas tree, and the more glamorous of the family’s women is a model for Gustav Klimt. (The family tree, projected on a scrim at the start of the play, isn’t very useful in sorting the characters’ relationships with one another, something they even struggle with in Stoppard’s sly self-criticism.) Though it’s the Czechoslovakian-born playwright’s attempt to come to terms with his own Jewishness, an identity he only learned later in life as the adopted son of his mom’s British second husband, the play is hampered by Stoppard’s famous intellect. It feels more like a history pageant on fast-forward, peopled by two-dimensional characters we never really come to know.
::
March ’68. The star-crossed lovers of director Krzysztof Lang’s melancholy drama are as badly matched with parents as Romeo and Juliet were. The place is Poland, and the time is in the title. Hania (Vanessa Aleksander), an aspiring actress, is wooed by university student Janek (Ignacy Liss). But while her parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the war, Janek’s dad is a member of the city’s Soviet leadership slowly stripping Jewish citizens of their jobs and rights through bureaucratic means. The film gives us riots in the streets, infuriating prejudices masquerading as the political status quo, and a romance you root for despite the odds of both dramatic structure and history.
::
Savoy. For much of the seven hours that Palestinian guerrillas held the Tel Aviv Savoy Hotel hostage in 1975, Kochava Levi, a guest at the hotel, was a heroine. People listened to news reports in real time as she translated the demands of her captors from Arabic into Hebrew. She likely helped hasten the end of the siege and saved lives. But by the light of morning, when it was revealed that the young housewife and mother was checked into the hotel with her also-married lover, the trolling, sexism and shaming began, and Levi’s life would never be the same. Writer-director Zohar Wagner’s documentary is an often-thrilling blend of actual footage and recordings of the event from the time bolstered by reenactments skillfully dramatized by actors, with Dana Ivgy (of that other strong AJFF film, Cinema Sabaya) as Kochava.
::
Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming column here.
[ad_2]
Source link