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Jan Lisa Huttner Four CFIC ’06 “Sneak Peek” Reviews of 13

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SECOND CITY TZIVI’S SNEAK PEEKS

Coming Next Month in the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema:

FIVE DAYS JOY

KIBBUTZ THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY

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SECOND CITY TZIVI’S SNEAK PEEK Coming Next Month in the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema:

FIVEDAYS

Special for Chicago Jewish Community Online by Jan Lisa Huttner

Where were we exactly one year ago? Glued to our television screens watching the Gaza disengagement. Filmmaker Yoav Shamir captures the pain and the passion, the complexity and the conviction of that event in his masterful new documentary FIVE DAYS. A self-described “peacenik" with openly left-wing sympathies, Shamir would not have been my first choice for such a sensitive assignment. Although his 2003 doc CHECKPOINT won a slew of awards and was a candidate for the Israel Film Academy’s “Best Documentary" prize, I found CHECKPOINT (which I saw at the 2004 Chicago International Film Festival) one-sided and over-simplified. The “fly on the wall" approach to capturing the essence of a situation with no explanation or voice-over narration turned into a poor excuse for heart-wrenching visuals presented without context or conscience. So I went into FIVE DAYS a skeptic but I came out converted. In FIVE DAYS, Shamir embeds small camera teams within each group of participants, and then personally stitches the pieces of footage together into a comprehensive quilt. The narrative structure is set by the clock; from day one to day five, the agonizing minutes tick by until all of the resident families and protesting zealots are gone. In the end only the construction crews remain, as they slowly level the empty buildings. The main protagonists are Major General Dan Harel, head of the IDF’s Southern Command, and resistance leader Noam Shapira, a resident of the Shirat Ha’Yam settlement. Harel’s job is to motivate, coach, and restrain 40,000 nervous men and women in uniform. Shapira’s job is to rally the faithful through prayers and songs, and covertly mark out secret trails so that supporters can bypass the checkpoints and augment the ranks of the 8,000 residents. They play their parts in the full glare of the world press, and under the watchful eyes of Palestinian neighbors.


The tension is almost unbearable. Parents prepare young children for the arrival of soldiers in their intimate family spaces; teenagers congregate in synagogues and weep; young girls and old men plead with the soldiers; men of a comparable age, men who might well have been comrades during their own reserve assignments, try to bargain for another day or another hour. How can this not end in bloodshed, and yet it did not. It does not. FIVE DAYS is documentary filmmaking at its very best, tackling a crucial subject with depth and sensitivity, providing audiences with both indelible imagery and analytic understanding. While nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (where the film had its US premiere), FIVE DAYS has been otherwise overlooked, even by the Israel Film Academy. Given what’s happened recently, however, awarding the 2005 Best Documentary prize to Dani Menkin’s excruciatingly “uplifting" personal odyssey 39 POUNDS OF LOVE seems a bit like wishful thinking. When Shamir showed FIVE DAYS last year at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, he told the audience his experience gave him “hope with other kinds of political disputes." May those words of hope go from Shamir’s lips to the ears of the Almighty.

*****

The FIVE DAYS screening is scheduled for 5 PM on Wednesday September 13

at Chicago’s Webster Place Theatre. Click here for complete details about this year’s “Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema.

*****

Tziviah bat Yisroel v’Hudah (Jan Lisa Huttner) writes

the “Second City Tzivi Spotlight" on local arts & culture, a column which appears every month in the JUF News.

See our September issue for additional CFIC details including

Tzivi’s top picks. Send your comments and/or suggestions for future columns to [email protected].

Posted: 8/9/2006

LINK TO THIS ARTICLE:

http://www.juf.org/news_public_affairs/article.asp?key=7321&highlight=huttner



JOY

Special for Chicago Jewish Community Online

by Jan Lisa Huttner

After five years of arduous labor as the publisher of our website FILMS FOR TWO: THE ONLINE GUIDE FOR BUSY COUPLES (www.films42.com), my husband and partner Rich recently announced that he was burning out. “There are maybe a dozen basic movie plots,” he groaned after suffering through SUPERMAN RETURNS, “and I’ve already seen all of them too many times!” He’s right. Do you think being a film critic is “fun”? Well, sometimes it is, but sometimes I get so bored my tush starts to ache. But then I see a film like JOY and I’m back in the game. Still I wonder: Why are most of the things I see “same old, same old” while others are clearly something “more”? What’s the difference between a “movie,” entertaining or not, and a “film” with artistic merit? The first time I watched JOY, I was immediately struck by two facts:

1.) The plot revolves around Yom Kippur. 2.) The actor who plays “Yitzhak Levine” looks just like Ariel Sharon.

Keep these two observations in mind, and I’ll return to them later.

IS JOY A GOOD FILM? Putting on my film critic hat, I think JOY is a very good film, from its fabulous performances to its lovely little design elements. “Joy Levine” (Sigalit Fuchs) is a 35 year old woman who reaches a crossroads in her life: she’s single, she works at a dead-end sales support job, and her married boss Shimi uses her for his own pleasure. One day, just before Yom Kippur, Joy becomes mesmerized by a new TV promo – filmed in tight close-up, Tamara, the beautiful star of a reality show called “Gotta Be Happy”


(MUCHRACHIM LEHIYOT SAMECH), keeps repeating these words: “Yom Kippur is approaching and our show is about forgiveness. Listen to your heart. Listen to what it has to say.” Joy listens to her heart, and it tells her Tamara is speaking directly to her, so she arranges a meeting with Tamara’s producer Maya (Dorit Lev-Ari) and hooks her with a tale that has just the right frisson of titillating pathos. Maya goes into overdrive, pushing Joy to assemble all the players in time for the next program (which is scheduled for the night after Yom Kippur). But there’s a catch: every moment on the broadcast must be “real,” therefore Joy and Maya must operate in secret. Joy’s “victims” (that’s Maya’s word) must act (and react) spontaneously; they cannot be allowed to create “performances” for the camera. Joy’s “victims” are her nuclear family members: her father Yitzhak (Yossi Polak), her mother Chaya (Rivka Michaeli) and her brother Gil (Tal Friedman). Joy thinks they will only “be happy” if they publicly exorcise a shameful incident kept buried for 22 long years. But “tikkun olam” (“healing the world”) is a delicate business, and forgiving is a two-sided enterprise: one side must forgive and the other side must accept forgiveness. With a gambler’s brio, Joy is betting they will forgive her for tricking them if she simultaneously forgives them for past transgressions. As it turns out, though, they all have new secrets Joy knows nothing about, and their misery, in each case, is far deeper than she realizes. This dark heavy stuff is told with a light touch; director Julie Shles injects elements of magical realism and uses a brightly-colored TV-toned palette. JOY is a profoundly optimistic film that rewards its eponymous heroine for facing every obstacle with courage, strength, and determination. Shles demands that we look at people we typically turn away from, like a fat girl with sad eyes and silly clothes, and see the soul inside. She has created a love scene for Joy, set in a swimming pool, that’s as sensual as any “sex scene” I’ve ever seen, visually contrasting it with Shimi’s callous brutality. Screenwriter Omer Tadmor has written a couple of long passionate speeches ("People always talk about amnesia but never about the disease of remembering," says Joy to the friends who forced her family into exile.) which he counterpoints with several short bitter exchanges (“Yitzhak meet washing machine; Washing machine meet Yitzhak,” says Chaya to her aging, incontinent husband.) and the excellent cast members hit their marks every time. Dorit Lev-Ari is hilarious as the obliviously-workaholic Maya; Eliran Caspi is suitably despicable as Shimi; Tal Friedman is heart-wrenching as Gil, the family prodigy; and Keren Mor tackles the difficult role of Gil’s trophy wife Nora with just the right combination of presumption and pique before collapsing into a raw bundle of nerves. There’s also a comic character named Radi (Alex Sandrovich) who injects a graceful note of whimsy. Alas, Sigalit Fuchs will probably spend the rest of her career in supporting roles, and knowing this, she makes her every moment as JOY’s central character count.


SO WHAT ABOUT “THE BIG ISSUES”?

Question: Is JOY just another film about a “dysfunctional family”? Answer: No! JOY’s screenplay is built around the observance of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in the world’s only Jewish state, and the actor who plays Joy’s father Yitzhak (Yossi Polak) looks amazingly like Ariel Sharon. Furthermore, the film was made in 2004, so take 22 years away, and you’re back in 1982. Does the year 1982 have specific significance in the life of Ariel Sharon? In 1982, Israel was at war with Lebanon. In 1982, Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defense. In 1982, Christian Phalangists massacred Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refuge camps. Coincidence? We can certainly watch JOY and see nothing more than a well-made dramedy. We can ignore the rituals surrounding Yom Kippur, we can ignore Ariel Sharon’s life history, and we can ignore the tumultuous events of 1982. But if we ignore all this, I don’t think we’re seeing Julie Shles’ movie; we’re only seeing what’s on the surface, and we’re only seeing with our eyes, as if we had neither brains nor hearts. Most of us appreciate literary devices like similes and metaphors when we encounter them in novels and poems, but we have to work harder at the movies because film is a visual medium and everything appears to happen in “real time.” Furthermore, a simile announces itself. When Shakespeare says about Juliet "Death lies upon her like an untimely frost," he is comparing two states knowing they are not the same. But metaphors are more subtle and authors depend on empathic audiences. Consider this relevant metaphor from AS YOU LIKE IT: “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.” My sources tell me that despite its seven nominations from the Israel Film Academy including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor (Tal Friedman as “Gil”) as well as three wins for Best Actress (Sigalit Fuchs as “Joy”), Best Supporting Actress (Rivka Michaeli as “Chaya”) and Best Costume Design, JOY was neither a critical nor a commercial success in Israel. But what a difference one year can make! When JOY opened commercially on December 1, 2005 (after its July debut at the Jerusalem Film Festival), Sharon was riding high in the polls; he had successfully extirpated Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and his new Kadima Party was changing Israel’s entire political landscape. Consider the implications for longtime Laborites. Consider the implications for longtime Likudniks. What were their hearts telling them when Sharon enjoined them to move “forward” on November 22?


No wonder no one cared to notice the resemblance between their sitting Prime Minister and Joy’s emotionally-pummeled father. No wonder no one wanted to think about Lebanon, much less the nightmare year of 1982. But that’s the thing about art: sometimes the best work appears right at the edge of its time. “Yom Kippur is approaching and MUCHRACHIM LEHIYOT SAMECH is about forgiveness. Listen to your heart. Listen to what it has to say.”

*****

The JOY screening is scheduled for 9:30 PM on Sunday September 10

at Chicago’s Webster Place Theatre. Click here for complete details about this year’s Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema.

*****

Tziviah bat Yisroel v’Hudah (Jan Lisa Huttner) writes

the “Second City Tzivi Spotlight" on local arts & culture, a column which appears every month in the JUF News.

See our September issue for additional CFIC details including

Tzivi’s top picks. Send your comments and/or suggestions for future columns to [email protected].

Posted: 8/21/2006





KIBBUTZ

Special for Chicago Jewish Community Online

by Jan Lisa Huttner

“Dozens of people were injured throughout the day Friday, as Katyusha rockets landed in the Galilee. Injuries were reported in Nahariya, Yesod Hama'alah, Kfar Szold, Kibbutz Hulata, Safed, Peki'in and Hatzor Haglilit.”

Ha’aretz; Sunday, July 16, 2006

At one point in Racheli Schwartz’s new documentary KIBBUTZ, someone comments that border kibbutzim like Hulata once served a defensive purpose, but that role was far in the past. Ooops; this is clearly another case in which current events give new significance to some of the choices made months earlier by members of our CFIC program committee. Racheli Schwartz is a well-known and well-respected director of documentary films. KIBBUTZ is her 20th doc; the first one, released in 1985, was called POVERTY IN ISRAEL. Her work has received several Wolgin Awards from multiple Jerusalem Film Festival juries, and it’s been shown in many European and North American film festivals as well. Most of Schwartz’s films focus on women. For example, in BRACHA AND MASHA (1998) she tells the story of two elderly women displaced by a fire in their nursing home, and in LETTERS TO GERTA (2004), she tells the story of a Holocaust survivor asked to donate one of her few remaining childhood possessions to Yad Vashem. I haven’t seen either of these films; I only know about them from the descriptions on Schwartz’s website (http://galproductions.com). But watching KIBBUTZ, I think her interest in these subjects becomes very clear.


When Schwartz was child growing up in Hulata, the kibbutz movement as a whole was thriving. Kibbutzniks were national leaders in both the government and the military, and their mythical status as the founders of the state of Israel was beyond challenge. Kibbutz women were an especially unique breed – with strong limbs and brown skin from working in the fields, they eschewed superficial feminine frills and also repressed deep-seated maternal longings in their quest for full equality. These were the women who raised Schwartz, and they were her earliest role models. Like “Aleksii Prelapsarianov” the character known as “the oldest living Bolshevik” whose passionate soliloquy opens the second half of Tony Kushner’s masterpiece ANGELS IN AMERICA, these women were also true believers, and they pose a similar challenge to audiences watching KIBBUTZ today: "Change? Yes, we must change, only show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you that these blind eyes will see again, just to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent… If a snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin, he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin?" The strongest moments in KIBBUTZ feature three elderly women who function as a “Greek Chorus,” putting Hulata’s current concerns into historical context. Lifelong friends and comrades, Batya, Chaya, and Tova are Prelapsarianov’s sisters, but Chava is now a clerk in Hulata’s business office so she knows lots of little secrets. She laughs about receipts for cosmetics, for example, the use of which was once so socially unacceptable, but at lunch with her friends they admit that their chosen path was a difficult one. “I pulled off all kinds of tricks to be with my children,” says Tova. “There are feelings of guilt without a doubt,” agrees Batya. But despite all their personal sacrifices, back-breaking work, and radical intentions, Kibbutz Hulata has imploded, and by 2000, when the narrative begins, life as Batya, Chaya, and Tova once knew it is long over. I’d like to tell you that KIBBUTZ is an A+ doc, but I can’t. Yehuda Naor’s suicide in May 2000 was undoubtedly the catalytic event that set Schwartz’s agenda, but opening with this tragedy makes everything that follows it feel way too portentous and melodramatic. Furthermore, you need to bring your own background knowledge to KIBBUTZ in order to fully appreciate Schwartz’s story. Non-Jewish audiences in general and Jewish-Americans under 40 probably won’t have much appreciation for what the loss of kibbutzim like Hulata truly represents. But Jewish boomers like me who can fill in the gaps with personal memories will probably be very moved. (I know I was pretty bad at picking peaches, but I remember doing a reasonable job in the kibbutz factory, where I assembled irrigation system components in my day.) If I ruled the world, I’d show KIBBUTZ as a double-feature with NO LONGER 17, Isaac Zepel Yeshrun’s wonderful narrative feature about another imploding kibbutz. NO LONGER 17 played here as part of Chicago’s 2004 Israel Film Festival and is now available on DVD from Amazon, Netflix, etc.

*****


The KIBBUTZ screening is scheduled for 5 PM on Thursday September 14 at the Landmark’s Renaissance Place Cinema in Highland Park. Click here

for complete details about this year’s Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema.

*****

Tziviah bat Yisroel v’Hudah (Jan Lisa Huttner) writes the “Second City Tzivi Spotlight” on local arts & culture, a column which appears every month in Chicago’s JUF NEWS. See our September issue for additional CFIC details including Tzivi’s top picks. Send

your comments and/or suggestions for future columns to [email protected].

Posted: 8/21/2006





THE SCHWARTZDYNASTY

Special for Chicago Jewish Community Online by Jan Lisa Huttner

Miriam, the Schwartz family matriarch, is no shtetl bubbe. She escaped from Russia sometime in the 1940s with her beloved Yekatiel, made aliyah, and helped establish the B’nei Avraham moshav. While she’s easy on the eyes, Miriam has all the steel of Golda Meir; she’s a true mother of Eretz Yisrael. But times have changed. The Ashkenazi founders of B’nei Avraham have all grown old, and their village is now the home of Mizrachim (primarily from Yemen) with very different customs and beliefs. As Erev Yom Kippur approaches, one synagogue in B’nei Avraham will certainly be filled to capacity while the other one will most likely be empty. Bomba Schwartz, Miriam’s son, has been living in a settlement of his own on the West Bank, but he’s grown tired of it. He decides he wants to run for the Knesset, so he comes home in search of voters. His plan is to convince all of B’nei Avraham’s new Russian immigrants to spend Yom Kippur in the Ashkenazi synagogue. Yekatiel of Blessed Memory was once the cantor, so Bomba wants his son Avishai to lead the services. Once Avishai melts hearts with his melodious voice, Bomba reckons, he can close the deal with his own fiery political rhetoric. In addition to the three members of the Schwartz family identified above, there are two primary Yemenite characters and two primary Russian characters. The Yemenites are Eliezer and Ronit, and the Russians are Alex and Anna. Eliezer is a Rabbinical Judge and Ronit is his ex-wife. The screenplay never makes clear exactly when they separated. Did Eliezer leave Ronit because he wanted to lead a more religious life and she didn’t, or did Ronit leave Eliezer because she wanted to lead a more secular life and he didn’t? It doesn’t really matter. Suffice it to say that even though Eliezer has since remarried, he still loves Ronit.


Alex was a cancer specialist in Russia, but now he runs a grocery store in B’nei Avraham. He marries a Yemenite girl named Ziona and tries to fit in, but the Mizrachim hate him because he insists on selling pork. (“Not everything is chicken,” he tells Ziona in a huff. “We Russians eat other things too!”) Anna is Alex’s niece, the daughter of his brother. Her father asked to be buried in Israel, so Anna’s come to honor this last request. But since she isn’t Jewish according to Jewish law, Anna’s motives are considered suspect. Obviously Alex has no “influential” friends who can help Anna, but Miriam does. When the two women cross paths, Miriam immediately understands Anna’s plight; it turns out that the rabbinical authorities are also interfering with her own plans to be buried next to Yekatiel. Befriending Anna, speaking with Anna in their shared native tongue, reminds Miriam of the courage she once had as a girl, and she decides to fight back regardless of the personal consequences. If you’ve read your share of Russian novels, this epic tale of overlapping families will all make perfect sense; if not, you’ll need a cheat sheet. (On page five of GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, Philip Roth’s hero Neil Klugman describes his cousin Doris as follows: “Doris? She’s the one who’s always reading WAR AND PEACE. That’s how I know it’s the summer, when Doris is reading WAR AND PEACE.” The first time I read these words, I realized I was “a type;” my guess is there are lots of us.) The characters in THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY dance around each other just like the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskis, and the Rostovs, until all is finally resolved in a bittersweet coda narrated in the first person by Avishai. But while the structure of THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY may come from Tolstoy, the plot itself comes straight from Sophocles. Like Antigone (who defies the ruler of Thebes by insisting on a proper burial for her brother Polynices), Miriam has her own concept of justice and she will not be denied. In the Greek world, however, fate weighs heavy, whereas Jewish dramas typically end on the upbeat: “Life goes on.” I’m being deliberately oblique here because I don’t want to spoil your fun. THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY has belly laughs as well as tears, so I want you to enjoy this film and discover its nuance for yourself. I have the advantage of having seen THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY twice now, and I will admit that without a cheat sheet, the first time was rough going. But this is a film that stands up to scrutiny, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY was directed by Shmuel Hasfari, one of Israel’s foremost playwrights. The screenplay was written by Amir Hasfari, who also gets co-director credit. The strong theatrical roots of the piece are made vivid by Miriam Zohar’s extraordinary performance as “Miriam.” Although she doesn’t have many screen credits, Zohar is often referred to as one of “the first ladies of Israeli theatre.”


Most of Zohar’s co-stars, on the other hand, are well-known figures in Israeli cinema. Tal Friedman from JOY has great fun with the role of “Bomba,” Yehuda Levi, the heartthrob from YOSSI & JAGGER, plays “Avishai;” and Vladimir Friedman from BROKEN WINGS plays “Dr. Alex Alexandrov.” Character actor Amos Lavi (“Eliezer”) has a huge list of international credits to his name, while newcomer Ania Bukstein, charming as “Anna,” already has several new projects in development. But Zohar is the heart and soul of THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY, and her on-screen presence is magical.

*****

The CFIC’s first screening of THE SCHWARTZ DYNASTY is scheduled for 7 PM

on Monday September 11 at the Webster Place Theatre in Chicago, and the second screening is scheduled for 4 pm on Sunday September 17

at the Landmark’s Renaissance Plaza Cinema in Highland Park.

Click here for complete details about this year’s Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema.

*****

Tziviah bat Yisroel v’Hudah (Jan Lisa Huttner) writes the “Second City Tzivi Spotlight” on local arts & culture, a column which appears every month in the JUF News. See our September issue for additional CFIC details including Tzivi’s top picks. Send your comments and/or suggestions for future columns to [email protected]. Posted: 8/21/2006



second city tzivi’s sneak peeks coming next month in … · showing solidarity with israel at a...

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