If there’s one thing Jews know something about — and I’m speaking as one of the tribe now — it’s the folly of the unexamined life. Sure, we’ve got suffering and survival down pat, but the Jewish penchant for deep, abiding and often rueful self-examination — otherwise known as guilt — is legendary. Those requiring further proof should make a point to drop in on the Seventh Annual Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival, which runs from Feb. 19 to Feb. 24.The desire to reflect, to get to the heart of things, to hold the darkness up to the light, informs each of the eight, otherwise very different films featured at this year’s festival.
Split pretty much evenly between American and Israeli features, the movies presented at this year’s event include everything from eccentric romantic comedies to heartwarming coming-of-age tales, and even something that’s very nearly an action movie — but all of them are products of the contemplative urge. One way or another, each one of these eight movies taps directly into some of the more profoundly contradictory impulses within the Jewish soul. Answers are not always forthcoming, but that’s beside the point. What’s important here is the process of exploring and raising questions.
Take The Komediant, for instance. On the surface, The Komediant is a lighter-than-air soufflé casting a nostalgic eye back at the golden age of the Yiddish theatre. Dig a little deeper, though, and you begin to get a Roshomon-style memory piece in which a mother and daughter offer very different accounts of what each believes to be the truth of their shared history.
The movie’s subject is the Burstein family, a Yiddish vaudeville act popular both in New York and abroad during the first part of the last century. Through interviews with surviving family members and archival footage, Komediant (the Yiddish word for actor) offers an account of a familial unit who basically sacrificed their private lives for a public one, of parents obsessed with artistic excellence, of children consumed with pleasing their parents. We also get a richly evocative glimpse into the early days of the Lower East Side, and a now all-but-vanished Jewish immigrant culture. The film has some serious things to say, but its tone is both playful and elegiac, steeped in the wry, bittersweet humor of Yiddish culture and language. The Komediant kicks off this year’s festival on Wednesday Feb. 19 with a 1 p.m. matinee.
Things move into high gear that evening with a 7:30 p.m. screening of the powerful and complex The Believer, one of the best films being presented at this year’s festival. Offering further proof that truth really is stranger than fiction, the inspiration for The Believer lies in the real-life story of a young Jewish man whose intense self-hate caused him to transform himself into a rabidly anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi skinhead. The film is specific in its depiction of nuances of the Jewish character, but it is chillingly universal in its exploration of the inexplicable ways by which all of us come to love and hate who we are. The Komediant and The Believer will both be presented at The Royalty Theatre in downtown Clearwater, a new venue for this festival.
Things move across the bay on Thursday Feb. 20, with a 7:30 p.m. Tampa Theatre screening of the fascinating and provocative documentary Trembling Before G-d. The mingling of the spirit and the flesh is usually a pretty risky subject, but Trembling Before G-d raises the stakes by painting a portrait of gay, ultra- religious Orthodox Jews caught between their faith and their human nature. This absorbing, unflinchingly honest documentary gets deep under the skins of individuals who should be paralyzed by an apparently irresolvable dilemma but aren’t. The movie shows us plenty of pain, but is so strangely hopeful and filled with love (for its subjects and their faith), that it ultimately conveys all the passion and sincerity of a prayer. A panel discussion will follow the screening.
The festival takes a break on Friday in observance of the Jewish Sabbath and returns to Tampa Theatre on Saturday for a double-feature, beginning with a 7:30 p.m. screening of Focus. Based on a 1945 novel by the noted American playwright Arthur Miller, Focus stars William H. Macey as a man who buys himself a pair of glasses and suddenly finds that the whole word is perceiving he’s Jewish (he isn’t). Director Neal Slavin creates an interestingly deadpan, occasionally nightmarish atmosphere that is equal parts David Lynch and Kafka, but the film’s message — bigotry is irrational and infectious, and no one is immune — is delivered in a ham-fisted way, lending the whole thing a veneer of clunky self-righteousness. Focus is probably much more worthwhile for the discussion it will undoubtedly engender than for the film itself.
Besides The Believer, the other highlight of this year’s festival is a remarkable film from Israel called Late Marriage, which screens at 9:30. The winner of nine Academy Awards in Israel, Late Marriage is the story of a pampered, aimless 31-year-old man whose doting, controlling parents hit the ceiling when they discover he’s having a secret affair with a single mother several years his senior. Complicating the mess is the fact that he comes from a family of Russian Jews from formerly Soviet Georgia, while she’s a Sephardic Jew of Moroccan ancestry.
The movie’s sitcom-like premise is belied by its knowing observations on the culture divides within Israeli society, and some razor-sharp humor that becomes blacker and more abrasive as the film progresses. Director Dover Kosashvili (whose Russian ancestry parallels that of his hero’s) makes fine use of an intentionally understated approach, and includes one of the longest, most wonderfully spontaneous sex scenes you’ll ever see on screen, allowing us to instantly become intimate with his characters. Late Marriage is both funny and frightening as it goes about illustrating the conflict between following one’s heart and following tradition. It’s a film as engaging and exotic, in its way, as Monsoon Wedding, but don’t go expecting a happy ending.
There’s something of a mixed bag in store for festival-goers stopping by Tampa Theatre on Sunday, Feb. 23. First up, at 1 p.m., is Stolen Summer, a film best known as the subject of HBO’s recent Project Greenlight series, which documented the troubled evolution of this little indie film from script to finished product. Stolen Summer turns out to be a sweet, well-meaning movie but, for my money, is by far the weakest link in this year’s lineup. The story — a little Catholic boy bonds with a terminally ill Jewish boy — is trite and overly cute, with a ham-fisted message straight out of an ABC after-school special. The characters are likeable, and several of the performances are actually good (Aidan Quinn, Bonnie Hunt and Brian Dennehy among them), but the movie seems harmless at best, awkward and manipulative at worst.
At 4 p.m., the festival will screen Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone, a film that missed its scheduled premiere in the Bay area last year, then came and went so quickly that probably less than a hundred people managed to actually see it.
The Grey Zone is a grim and self- conscious film, but it’s also a uniquely ambitious one, especially as Holocaust movies go. Rather than go the expected route and simply document the unfathomable evil of the Nazi genocide one more time, the movie complicates itself by extending its focus to yet another monumentally unsettling phenomenon: the Jewish prisoners who actually aided their captors.
The film takes place in 1944, toward the end of the war, at the infamous Aushwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. As the drive to exterminate the Jews intensifies, the Nazis begin bribing select Jewish prisoners with extra rations or a few extra months of life in exchange for helping to lead their fellow lambs to the slaughter. The Grey Zone is the story of one of these Jewish Sonderkommando groups, of the deal they struck with the devil, and of how they eventually rose up against their masters. The film applies a liberal slathering of artistic license to the events it depicts, but it offers an unblinking look at what Holocaust philosophers like to refer to as the banality of evil.
On Monday, the festival heads to yet another new venue (USF’s Hillel Jewish Student Center) and signs off with a 7:30 p.m. screening of Time of Favor an award-winning Israeli production that might be described as a thinking person’s action flick. This atmospheric thriller is set primarily in a settlement of orthodox Jews on the occupied West Bank, and revolves around a plot to change the nature of the area around Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — politically charged land sacred to both Jews and Muslims. The switcheroo here is that the movie’s terrorists aren’t Islamic Arab nutcases, but Israeli Jews — right-wing nationalists not far removed from Igal Amir, the fanatic who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin’s murder actually occurred while the script for Time of Favor was being written, and there’s a ring of poignancy to the characters’ motives and the events the film depicts. Fans of Hollywood action movies will probably find the pacing of Time of Favor a bit slack and its production values a tad generic, but the movie is likely to ultimately win over those same viewers with its heady blend of genuine excitement and timeliness. The film’s star power (a mix of Israeli matinee idols and slumming artists) and its insights into the real-life clash between religious and secular elements within Israeli society are just the icing on the cake, and one more highlight of what promises to be a festival to remember.
The Seventh Annual Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival runs from Feb 19 to Feb. 24 at the following locations: Tampa Theatre (711 N. Franklin St., Tampa), the Royalty Theater (405 Cleveland St., Clearwater) and Hillel USF Jewish Student Center (13101 Sycamore Drive, USF). Individual tickets are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and students. Festival passes are good for all eight films and cost $42 ($30 students/senior citizens). Tickets are available at the Tampa Theatre box office, Royalty Theatre box office, USF Hillel Student Center and Tampa JCC Federation Campus. For more information, call Cathy Gardner at 813-264-9000.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2003.
