The Toronto Jewish Film Festival: After 75 Years, A Rhapsody Reborn
By Liam Lacey
At the heart of this year’s 30th Toronto Jewish Film Festival is a film called The Rhapsody, a hometown documentary with a global resonance.
The subject is Leo Spellman, a Polish-born composer, Holocaust survivor and Toronto dance orchestra leader, a lively character whose life was a testament to the power of creativity.
Before emigrating to Toronto, Spellman (originally Szpilman) experienced terrors comparable to those of his first cousin, Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose memoir was adapted into the 2002 Oscar-winning film, The Pianist. While Wladyslaw avoided detection in Warsaw, Spellman and his wife hid in the forest and in a padlocked apartment. At one point, he took a bullet in his arm.
In 1947, in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Spellman began writing a three-part composition called Rhapsody: 1939-1945, marking the experiences of war, suffering and then release.
When Spellman emigrated to Toronto, he kept the composition in a suitcase in his garage. He subsequently raised a family, making a living as a property developer and dance band leader, effectively putting his past behind him. But a half-century later, in the late 1990s, the Holocaust Museum in Washington approached his cousin, Wladyslaw, about providing music for a conference of survivors and their families called, Life Reborn.
Wladyslaw, who said he hadn’t written any specifically Jewish music, suggested they contact his cousin, Leo, in Toronto. The sheet music came out of the suitcase and Rhapsody 1939-1945 had its premiere in Washington in 2000.
Subsequently, Spellman’s family approached Paul Hoffert, the Toronto composer and co-founder of the ‘60s-‘70s jazz-rock band Lighthouse, with an aim to record the work and having it performed in Canada. Hoffert, who had lost relatives to the Holocaust, became deeply committed to the project. He and his wife Brenda oversaw the recording of a CD, and the Canadian premiere of the composition as part of the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto in 2012. Spellman attended the performance, three months before he died at the age of 99.
Obituaries of the time quoted excerpts from a documentary in the works from the Hoffert’s son, David. In 2016, there was a 30-minute film for television, Leo Spellman’s Rhapsody In Concert and that seemed to be the end of it. But, in the years since Spellman’s death, the film kept expanding.
Acclaimed musician/Holocaust survivor Leo Spellman
The current film has a pivotal scene, following Leo’s death, at his daughter Helene’s place, where we see the family discover Leo’s diary of his experiences during the war. The Spellman family had the diary translated and the British actor, Stephen Fry, adopting a Polish accent, was brought in to read excerpts, with David Hoffert providing illustrations and animation.
In the film’s coda, we follow the extended family on a 2016 trip to Leo’s hometown of Ostrowiec, where Spellman was honoured with a special day. The family also met with the son of Henryk Wronski, the Polish student who put his life at risk by providing Spellman and his wife a hiding place for 18 months.
Paul Hoffert, in describing his initial contact with Leo Spellman, said it came to him as a “vanity project” which, judging by the long list of credits and thank yous (everyone from Moses Znaimer to Rush’s Geddy Lee), evolved into something more like a collective passion project. For Spellman, who performed at more than a thousand weddings and bar mitvahs, the tribute seems fittingly sentimental and ceremonial, a communal celebration of the perseverance of creative work.
Four more films to watch:
In contrast to The Rhapsody, the music in this light-hearted documentary is loud and, often, not very subtle, though the passion of the players is still there.
The film is about David Fishof, a motorcycle-riding American Modern Orthodox Jewish grandpa who came up with the rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp concept, the subject of one of the best-known Simpsons episodes.
Starting as a waiter in a Catskills resort, Fishof graduated to entertainment booker, sports agent and then promoter for tours for The Monkees and Ringo Starr. Twenty-five years ago, he came up with the idea of the camp, where amateur musicians spend several thousand dollars for a week living in a hotel and jamming with the likes of Alice Cooper, Roger Daltrey of The Who, and Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of KISS. The film follows four of the regular middle-class campers exulting in their rock star fantasies in what is, essentially, a promotional film.
This wry absurdist drama, which was nominated as Israel’s selection for the Best International Film at the 94th Academy Awards, is an unexpected choice for a Jewish film festival, in that it’s almost devoid of Jewish characters.
Israeli director Eran Kolirin, behind the 2007 breakout hit, The Band's Visit adapted the 2004 novel by Palestinian author Sayed Kashua about the marginalized status of Arab citizens of Israel. It follows Sami (Alex Bakri), an Arab working for an Israeli cellphone company, who returns to his home town, an Arab village in Israel, for a wedding.
Unexpectedly, Sami finds himself trapped in the town when it is put under military lockdown by Israeli authorities. Cellphone reception is cut, then electricity. And, as the village is walled off, internal political and social tensions well up. In 2021, when the film appeared at Cannes, the Palestinian cast of the film, protesting the film’s categorization as “Israeli” refused to attend.
The debut film from actor and musician Aurélie Saada pays tribute to her Tunisian Jewish roots in a film starring veteran French star, Françoise Fabian as Rose Goldberg, a 78-year-old woman who is suddenly widowed.
Rose defies the narrow expectations of her emotionally rigid adult children – Pierre, a strait-laced doctor married to an Orthodox woman, Sarah, an unhappily divorced choreographer, and Leon, a petty criminal who still lives with mom.
Reminiscent of the second-chances drama of Sebastián Lelio’s Argentinian second-life drama, Gloria, the film embellishes its story of late-life emotional reawakening with splashes of North African Jewish culture, including music, dance and a recipe for date-filled maamoul cookies.
French auteur Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale,, Kings and Queen), fulfilled a longtime ambition with this chamber adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1990 novel, Deception, about a married Jewish-American author, also named Philip, in London and his affair with his muse-mistress, an unhappily married English woman, who goes unnamed.
Without changing any of the Anglo-American backdrop, Desplechin presents his film in French, starring French character actor Denis Podalydès and Léa Seydoux (both very good) as a couple in a book-lined apartment, making love and, mostly, talking. Occasionally, the film breaks out of its confines, with flashbacks of Philip’s previous, terminally ill lover (Emmanuelle Devos), and a vignette in which Philip is on trial in an all-female court room for misogyny. Transitions between experience, memory and fantasy are deliberately blurred, in the porous membrane between fiction and reality.
The 30th edition of the Festival, launches June 9, screening 70 titles from 16 countries, both in person and online. In-person screenings take place from June 9-15 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Innis Town Hall, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, and Leah Posluns Theatre. Films are available online from June 16-26, via the TJFF Virtual Cinema. For details about the film program and tickets, go to The Toronto Jewish Film Festival website.