Finding a connecting thread
Jewish film fest at Brandeis marks 10 years
The search for authenticity is a theme that threads its way through the 10 selections that make up this year's roster for the National Center for Jewish Film's festival. "Tenth annual" is a bit of a misnomer, though, as NCJF director Sharon Pucker Rivo explained over the phone from her office on the Brandeis campus.
"We began with 16-millimeter films in the '70s," she noted. Outreach was limited, however, "until we had our own place -- we needed a proper facility." The 220-seat Wasserman Cinematheque , built a decade ago, drew new viewers -- many of whom had footage of their own to contribute.
Today, the National Center for Jewish Film not only houses the largest, most comprehensive archive of Jewish-themed film and video outside of Israel, it produces and distributes films while retaining its original role as a study center and restoration facility. Dozens of rare fragments and 35 full-length Yiddish-language feature films have been salvaged to date, including this year's vintage entry. "The Living Orphan" (1937) , about an ambitious actress torn between her career and her marital and maternal obligations, resurfaces in all its tragicomic glory April 15.
A restored 1937 short, the upbeat travelogue "Jewish Life in Vilna ," precedes -- and provides background for -- Christa Singer's 2003 portrait, "Samuel Bak: Painter of Questions," to be shown April 15 . In the film, Bak looks back on his idyllic childhood in Vilna (Vilnius in Lithuanian), which was ripped to shreds in 1939 by a German pogrom: Bak and his mother alone survived. Film crews followed along when, in 2001, a chance encounter with a scholar researching the actions of "righteous Christians" during World War II led to a Bak retrospective at Lithuania's National Museum and the artist's return for the first time to his native country.
Bak will appear at the April 15 screening, and nearly every film is presented by a key figure in its evolution -- be it subject, writer, director, or producer.
Not every film is overtly message-laden. Dina Zvi-Riklis's "Three Mothers" (2006), scheduled for April 21 , could be viewed as an extrapolation of the plot line that informed "The Living Orphan" -- though it's far more sophisticated, a female-centric family saga in the Sirk/Almodovar vein.
It's the '60s and Rosa (portrayed by supple-voiced Israeli pop star Miri Mesika ), a young wife and mother, is willing to jeopardize her family life for a shot at fame as a singer; her two sisters help her out of loyalty, a pattern set since childhood. Flashing forward to the sisters in their 60s, the accumulation of falsehoods threatens to topple their very survival, along with the well-being of the next generation. Intricately plotted, the drama ends with a wry, redeeming twist.
Also set in Israel in the '60s, Hanan Peled's "Dear Mr. Waldman" (April 15) takes a child's eye view of two parents permanently scarred by the Holocaust. Ten-year-old Hilik (Ido Port ) willingly takes on the burden of making up for a horrific past -- to the extent that when his father Moishe (Rami Heuberger ) deludes himself that his dead first son somehow survived Auschwitz, Hilik, imagining himself helpful, provides falsified proof. The resulting damage caroms around the family, and beyond. Peled, child of a survivor and a former head writer for the Israeli "Sesame Street," gets the perspective just right in this thoroughly adult drama.
The remaining feature, "My Mexican Shivah," directed by Alejandro Springall -- producer of "Casa de los Babys" -- from a novella by Amherst professor Ilan Stavans , sports an original score by the Klezmatics and is billed as a comedy (screeners for this April 14 "sneak preview," which was well received at the New York Jewish Film Festival, were unavailable as of press time).
David Vyorst's documentary "The First Basket," which opens the festival on April 12, is definitely on the light side. Expressively narrated by actor Peter Riegert , the film recreates the urban Jewish heyday of amateur and early pro basketball in the first half of the 20th century.
"Fence, Wall, Border" (April 22 ), which tracks the barrier currently under construction between Israel and Palestine, is as timely as today's headlines. The three-hour series, which aired on Israeli television, has been trimmed to 130 riveting minutes. Conducting a series of outspoken, on-the-spot interviews on both sides (some leading to heated skirmishes), director Eli Cohen poses the question: Will the fence, intended as a security measure, do more harm than good by intensifying the conflict?
In "2 or 3 Things I Know about Him," which shows at the Institute for Contemporary Art on April 19 and again at Brandeis on April 22 , German filmmaker Malte Ludin bravely turns over a rock in his family history. His father, Hanns Ludin , served Hitler as ambassador to Slovakia and was executed as a war criminal in 1947 . To this day, his three elder sisters -- intelligent, cultivated women all -- hold their beloved Vater blameless, insisting that he didn't know the ultimate disposition of the thousands of Jews he deported. The documents Ludin digs up prove otherwise; ensuing confrontations with the loyal daughters crackle with tension.
In "Secret Courage: The Walter Suskind Story" (to be screened at Brandeis on April 18 ), the lie goes in the other direction. As a Jewish Council member charged with overseeing the deportation of Dutch Jews, former salesman Walter Suskind, a German native, was despised during his lifetime: He himself ended up in Auschwitz, where, rumor has it, he met his death at the hands of fellow inmates. Until recently, very few people knew that, in concert with Henriette Pimental , the director of a neighboring childcare center, Suskind succeeded in shepherding some 800 to 1,000 Jewish children to safe harbors in the countryside.
In 1988, one such "saved child," historian Maurice Vanderpol of Newton, helped to establish the Walter Suskind Memorial Education Fund to support the Young at Arts program at the Wang Theatre, and in 1990 Boston Globe reporter David Arnold traveled to Amsterdam, where he found ample evidence of Suskind's true history. Marlborough-based photographer Tim Morse was commissioned to create a short video commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fund in 1998, and found that the story would not let him go.
The result is this gripping documentary, which -- through historical footage and interviews with rescuers and rescued alike -- recreates the burning moral dilemmas of the day. The resistance workers who risked their lives still agonize over the fact that, despite the many children they saved, they couldn't do more to stem a colossal injustice. Still, their aged, animated faces bear witness to the consolation that, in some circumstances, trying is all. 