The Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) is heading to its Closing Night on 17 March 2021 at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick. Film screenings have also started at Roseville Cinema in Roseville from 6-24 March. The best news is that there will be encore screenings at the Ritz Cinema from 18-31 March.
Among the choices of this festival are the following select international narrative feature films. Check them out during these last weeks of screening.
WHEN HITLER STOLE PINK RABBIT
Based on Judith Kerr’s beloved children’s novel and brought to the screen by award-winning German director Caroline Link, this German-Swiss film is about escape and adjustment as seen through the eyes of nine-year Jewish girl Anna. Fleeing Germany to Switzerland and then to Paris and finally London, Anna feels like a transient, eventually realising who Hitler really is as she misses her favourite stuffed pink rabbit left behind in Berlin. It is a drama about a forced exodus mixed with the idealism and hope of an innocent childhood.
ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN
With beautiful cinematography, lush production design and an uncanny score, this is the story of Stan Ulam, a Polish-Jewish mathematician with a fellowship at Harvard and then recruited to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The historical Polish-German production is a cautionary tale of moral accountability and responsibility for using nuclear weapons during World War II. Despite the title, this film is less about math than about the inner anguish of being responsible for ultimate mass destruction.
THE SIGN PAINTER
This light comedy-turned-tragedy tells the story of a sign painter aspiring to be an artist in his small waterside town in Latvia. He is torn between two loves – an ardent Jewish lady and a Latvian Christian woman. Politics dominate the country as it is ruled repressively by Nationalists, Communists, and then the Nazis as World War II ensues. The film’s lightness turns more grave and severe as the sign painter is recruited in the army and confronted with the brutalities of war. This is a worthy Oscar-entry from Latvia.
THOU SHALT NOT HATE
It starts with an accident where a Jewish surgeon and son of a Holocaust survivor tries to save a life until he sees a swastika tattoo on the victim’s chest. What follows is a guilt-ridden personal entanglement between the surgeon and the family of the victim. This Italian dark romantic drama is brooding as it is enveloping with conflicting emotions among the many characters, even with the surgeon’s recently departed father. It is a film about humanising a person despite the connection with the enemy. It is about transcending hate and anger through kindness and generosity.
AN IRREPRESSIBLE WOMAN
This slice of history is centred on the unlikely concentration camp wedding of Frenchwoman Jeanne Reichenbach and her longterm lover, a former socialist prime minister of France Léon Blum, both Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald. In a display of loyalty and resolution, Reichenbach voluntarily joined Blum at the camp in 1943. This French film is about strength and perseverance during a time of political vilification and persecution.
CRESCENDO #MAKEMUSICNOTWAR
It is a musical hurdle like no other. Renowned conductor Eduard Sporck takes on the challenge to create an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, with musicians coming from opposing spectrums of mistrust, fear and hate. The two best violinists, the suave Israeli Ron and the free-spirited Palestinian Layla, lead two groups who strongly doubt each other, whether in or outside class. This German production explores three weeks of fiery conflict and compromised cooperation within a melodious journey of hope and harmony.
UNCHAINED
Still to be screened is Part 4 (Episodes 10-12) of this suspense-filled TV series from Israel focusing on Jewish women whose estranged husbands refuse to give them a divorce. The series lead is Rabbi Yosef Morad, a deal maker and detective who liberates these women from their chains. More than this though, Morad’s own marriage to Hana is the locus of this finely woven plot of being an Orthodox wife. The season’s final episodes bring to a close the slow build-up of suspicion, mystery and unravelling of their secret lives.
A STARRY SKY ABOVE A ROMAN GHETTO
This is an affecting Italian interfaith film between Jewish and Christian youths in search of truth and honesty. It starts with an obscure photograph, as it then unravels the history of Rome’s Jewish ghetto, intercutting between past and present. The following details are re-enacted in a stage play comprised of Christian and Jewish students and despite the objections of parents. It is a film about past divisions as it is about reconciliation in the present.
THE END OF LOVE
From France comes this long-distance relationship that dissipates in actual reciprocity with the advent of technology. Filmed with micro digital cameras to capture those genuine emotions, this is a film about loss and relinquishment of paternal bonds as it is about hanging on to love sans physical intimacy. There is an immediacy to this webcam-style filming that denigrates technology’s value in sustaining a real connection.
THE SHEPHERD
This Hungarian film is set in 1944, and the shepherd is an elderly man living a solitary life until he discovers a Jewish woman wounded in the forest. The atrocities of war are painfully captured in this vérité-style filming of Jewish men and women escaping in the woods. The shepherd’s individual existence is now pushed to personal danger as he risks his life for the courage to save other strangers who are being senselessly chased and persecuted.
