Toronto Jewish Film Festival: A Thematic Sense of Place Propels Latest (and Online) Installment
By Jim Slotek
When I moved to Toronto to attend Ryerson, the forest of high-rise apartment buildings was a shock to my Northern Ontario-forged system. Soon I was living on the 16th floor of one, then on the 18th floor of another.
Mendel Tenenbaum.
The property management name was Greenwin, one of a slew of familiar corporate names behind the transformation of the city.
Shelter — a fascinating history of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees who forged that post-War transformation — is the opening night film Thursday (June 3) in the virtual version of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. The film by Ron Chapman documents a familiar story of the Jewish experience in North America, how lives and careers were carved in areas where they were “allowed” to do business.
Property development was one of those areas. In a stroke of timing, the first subway system in Canada opened in Toronto in 1954. And the people whose names would become synonymous with Greenwin (Green), the Tenen group (Tenenbaum), Cadillac Fairview (Diamonds and Daniels) and others, came up with the idea of building major rental properties at every subway stop, expediting the working lives of people for generations.
Shelter provides the statistic that some half-million rental apartment units were constructed in Toronto by Jewish builders between 1952 and 1975. They effectively turned a series of cumbersomely connected villages into a modern city.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
But the movie also includes the dichotomy that drove that generation of survivors. As Mendel Tenenbaum, the patriarch of the Tenen Group muses of his life before and after: “I think I had the best life. And I also think I had the worst life that anyone can have.”
Drive and joy seem an improbable thing after experiencing the worst of humanity. But Shelter in this way is reminiscent of Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch’s 2019 doc The Last Resort, about how an influx of sun-worshipping Jewish refugees built the glamourous Miami of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
And the Toronto development crowd was colourful indeed.
A property owner refuses to sell to Jews? Come up with a goyim partner to broker the deal, then rub it in the anti-semite’s face afterward. The biggest names in the business became a community of achievers, tied together by one of the city’s most legendary dealmakers, the late Eddy Cogan (author of the SkyDome), all of whom met at a now defunct but well remembered deli named Stubby’s.
“How did things we take for granted come to be?” is just one thematic path a documentary can take. But it’s a particularly relevant one for a city like Toronto, which is often guilty of erasing its past in the name of prosperity.
Available Ontario-wide, this year’s virtual Toronto Jewish Film Festival offers a curated program of more than 60 films from around the world, each available to be screened for 48 hours after its debut. The schedule includes a tribute to the late director Carl Reiner, with special guests.
Other highlights include:
-The Specials, directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano (The Intouchables) and starring Vincent Cassell and Red Kateb
-Summer of 85, a same-sex themed first-love story by François Ozon that played TIFF and Cannes last year,
-A German-Israeli mixed-marriage comedy Kiss Me Kosher by Shirel Peleg
-And Lune, a starring and co-directing turn by Toronto theatre veteran Aviva Armour-Ostroff about a bi-polar South African woman trying to leave Toronto to vote for the newly released Nelson Mandela. It won the TJFF’s Micki Moore award as “Centrepiece Film”
TJFF2021 Online runs from June 3 through 13. For more information, visit the official site.