Toronto Jewish Film Festival: The 'Cine-gogue' is Open, Dim the Lights!
Its slogan is, “Everyone is welcome in our Cine-gogue.”
Uncomfortably close to a “dad joke” it may be, but with 31 years of light and dark comedy, solemnity and deep dives into the human conditions of hatred, hope and haunted pasts, The Toronto Jewish Film Festival has earned some shtick.
The TJFF, which runs from June 1-11, is holding its cinematic services at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk and Innis Town Hall, with a selection of virtual screenings at tjff.com.
Opening night film is Philippe Le Guay’s The Man in the Basement, starring Jérémie Renier and The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo. The closer is Laura Bialis’s Vishniac, a documentary about Roman Vishniac the famed photographer of Eastern European Jewish life in the 1930s.
There are free events as well, highlighted by An Afternoon with Saul Rubinek, a career-spanning session with one of Canada’s best and, in many ways, most underrated actors.
Original-Cin screened several highlights on the TJFF schedule, reviews below. CLICK HERE for more information on the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.
Also be sure to read Liam Lacey’s interview with Shaina Silver-Baird, who co-wrote and stars in the Toronto-set musical (really a digital series) Less Than Kosher, about a pop singer who gets recruited to be a cantor in her synagogue.
Reviews by Karen Gordon, Liam Lacey and Jim Slotek
Opening Night film Thursday, June 1, 8 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Director Philippe Le Guay in attendance.
Co-writer/director Philippe Le Guay has woven themes and issues, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and Jewish identity into this Paris-set psychological thriller. Jérémie Renier and Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) are Simon and Hélène Sandberg, who live in a co-op apartment with their teenage daughter Justine (Victoria Eber). The problems start when Simon sells the basement locker to a retired history teacher, Jacques Fonzic (François Cluzet), who is anxious to take possession even before they’ve signed the deed.
Then Simon discovers that Fonzic is really an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who may have targeted Simon, who is Jewish, because of his family’s historical connection to the apartment. Trying to revoke the deal is complicated, strains the family to the breaking point, and reveals ugly tendencies in Simon’s neighbours. There are a few leaps of logic, but the film raises some unsettling and, sadly, familiar realities of an insidious prejudice that won’t go away. KG
Friday, June 2, Leah Posluns Theatre, 2 p.m.; June 5 & 6 Online via TJFF Virtual Cinema
First time director Marvin Samel’s dramedy IMordecai, is based on his family’s story, and is a loving homage to his parents, both Holocaust survivors. It’s also a story about Marvin’s frustrated relationship with his eccentric and hard-to-wrangle father, Mordecai, played with charisma (and an only so-so Yiddish accent) by Judd Hirsch. When Marvin (Sean Astin) drags his father to the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, Mordecai bonds with the young trainer Nina (Azia Dinea Hale), who has her own reasons for wanting to befriend an old Jewish man. Their friendship makes him feel young and energized again, but creates more family problems, and there is already enough tsuris for Marvin to try and manage. Samel stuffs a lot of story into the film, including animated segments that tell the story of how Mordecai, as a young boy growing up in Poland, lost his family, when both the Nazis and the Russians invaded. Still, the filmmaker’s aim is to keep the movie light, focusing on being heartwarming and uplifting. The result is mixed. IMordecai is uneven and too often falls into cliché. But what redeems it most is the obvious love that Samel has poured into the film. KG
Saturday, June 3, 9:15 pm Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.
There have been memorable docs about the paths taken by Holocaust survivors to reinvent themselves in a new world. Sometimes their energy reshaped entire cities (Toronto in Ron Chapman’s Shelter, Miami in Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch’s The Last Resort). Queen of the Deuce is one of the strangest and oddly touching of such tales, a story of a Jewish Greek woman who survived to almost single-handedly dominate the ‘60s/’70s New York porn cinema scene. Director Valerie Kontakos’ feature doc uses vintage film and the memories of cronies and adult children (who grew up in “the business”) to tell the story of Chelly Wilson.
Chelly effectively replaced the family she lost in Greece with a new family of adult-movie actors, street people — gay and straight — and the odd mobster. At once tough as nails and capable of great generosity, Chelly ran several theatres (and lived above one) at a time when 42nd St. was known as “The Deuce” and was the porn core of Times Square. The ‘60s soft-core vignettes are hilariously cheesy, and the widespread love for this growly surrogate mom of outsiders and scoundrels is frankly charming. A great story that would make a great dramatic feature. JS
Sunday, June 5, 7:30 pm, Innis Town Hall. Online June 8 and 9.
Canadian director Eli Gorn and writer Bracha Feldman’s documentary is part of the ongoing revival of Yiddish culture. It focuses on Celia Dropkin (1887-1956), a Russian-born American Jewish writer and mother of six, best known for her erotic, sometimes masochistic or suicidal-focused poetry, that was both modern in free verse technique and feminine in its perspective. The filmmakers use a variety of strategies to celebrate Dropkin’s artistic revival, including music, animation, archival photos and commentary from family and scholars who provide both context and speculation about her private life, including the somewhat alarming claim by a woman Orthodox sex counsellor that “A lot of eroticism is lost when you take the violence out of sex.” To emphasize the presumption that Dropin’s poems were autobiographical, the film has actress Gabrielle Rose performing a series of theatrical monologues, which are described as based on passages from Dropkin’s unfinished memoirs. LL
Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella
Monday, June 6, 7:30 pm, Leah Posluns Theatre.
The first Jewish woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada — and arguably the most progressive justice to wear the robe — Rosalie Abella’s combination of determination and eccentric amiability saw her career boosted by, of all people, top Conservatives including Brian Mulroney and Roy McMurtry. She created the term “employment equity” and fought to see it applied across the board in favour of women, Indigenous people, people of colour and the disabled. Barry Avrich’s film, which is peppered with Abella’s favourite Gershwin tunes, follows her home to a house decorated with colour and kitsch, and an adoring husband (the late author, Irving Abella). Human and humane, we need more like her on the bench. JS
Monday, June 6, 8:45 pm, Innis Town Hall. Online June 9 and 10.
In this satire about liberal white privilege in contemporary Israel, a middle-class gay couple, Ben and Raz, move into a gentrifying neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv, where they plan to raise a child, once they find a surrogate. When Ben sees an Eritrean man leaning on a tree he has recently planted, he calls the police, who chase and then viciously beat the neighbour. The episode doesn’t fit with Ben’s sense of himself as a sensitive liberal, and he lies to his psychiatrist about what actually happened. Meanwhile, his relationship with Raz suffers as he starts questioning his commitment to parenthood and the multicultural neighbourhood. Though smartly shot and acted, the film’s attention to Ben’s self-absorption and lack of interest in the victim of his entitled behaviour feels unbalanced. LL
Wednesday, June 8, 6 pm, Innis Town Hall. Online June 11 and 12.
The Abayudaya are a small population of Ugandan Jews whose history can be traced not to the ancient Middle East but back a mere century ago, when a military leader, Semei Kakungulu (1869-1928), decided to convert to Judaism along with his followers. Montreal director, Tamás Wormser’s documentary follows the efforts of various outside Jewish delegations to assist them, especially Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Riskin who helps the people of the village of Putti go through formal conversions and achieve recognition as Jews by the state of Israel. Though Wormser’s documentary celebrates Riskin’s mission, the film also shows the colonial echoes of the project, as some locals express discomfort with being “instructed” and treated as puppets. As one older member of the congregation says, “You call it conversion, we call it recognition.” LL
The Delegation
June 10, 9:15 pm, Innis Town Hall. Online June 12 and 13.
Asaf Saban’s film manages a complex emotional balancing act in this drama about a group of Israeli high school students, going through the pangs of first love and heartache while on a Holocaust tour of cemeteries and death camps in Poland. Frisch (Yoav Bavly), an introvert who is travelling, is in love with his childhood friend, Nitzan (Neomi Harari) who, in turn, is infatuated with the swaggering Ido (Leib Lev Levin). During the day, the kids tour Holocaust sites, ride the bus where they watch Holocaust-themed films and participate in talk circles to share their feelings. At night, they drink, hook up, and go to parties. Frisch’s grandfather (Ezra Dagan) — whose job it is to give the kids firsthand accounts of the Holocaust —who most clearly recognizes that youth need to focus on living. LL
June 11, 1 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. Online June 13 and 14.
If the degree of difficulty were the main qualification for excellence, Ady Walter’s Shttl would certainly qualify. First, his crew recreated an entire Yiddish town or shtetl (the “e” was dropped in the title to signify loss) outside Kyiv, shortly before the Russian invasion. Second, the script is in Yiddish, and third, the film was shot in one sustained take, in black and white, switching to colour for scenes in memory.
Shttl is set on June 21, 1941, the day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union and began the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. A young man named Mendele (Moshe Lobel), formerly a star yeshiva student, has returned from Kyiv where he works in a film studio. He has returned to see his family and especially his beloved, Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), a rabbi’s daughter who is betrothed to the fervently religious town bully, Folye (Kostiantyn Afanasiev).
The social complexity of shtetl life is demonstrated through a series of confrontations and arguments about Palestine, socialism, and women’s rights, between Mendele and his rabbi (Toronto’s own Yiddish-fluent Saul Rubinek). It’s a balancing act that suggests film can somewhat stand in for sacred texts, as a tool for guidance and commemoration. LL
Closing night film, Sunday, June 11, 8 pm, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.
Roman Vishniac (1897-1990) was an acclaimed photographer of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1930s before the Holocaust. He’s best known for his 1983 book A Vanished Life, with a forward by Elie Wiesel, and for his influence on Janusz Kaminski’s Oscar-winning cinematography for Schindler’s List.
Laura Bialis’ documentary unfolds through archival imagery, accompanied by interviews with Vishniac's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn. Born in Moscow to a well-off family, Vishniac moved to Berlin following the Russian Revolution, and then to the United States in 1940, where he developed a secondary career as a celebrated public intellectual and a specialist in microphotography.
Mara had a fraught relationship with her father following his divorce from her mother. Interviews with Mara and with Roman’s two grandsons paint a picture of a man often given to exaggeration and grandiose claims, creating a father-daughter rift that was only mended when Roman was on his death bed. The subsequent death of his eldest son left Mara as the inheritor of his vast photo archive.
The film doesn’t address the discoveries by curator Maya Benton, reported in The New York Times, that Vishniac’s published pictures of Jewish pre-war life — commissioned by a Jewish relief agency — were selective (and sometimes staged) images of piety and poverty meant to create a mythic timeless impression of enduring Jewish spirituality. (Benton, though not interviewed in the film, is thanked in the credits.) In its defense, Vishniac really is Mara’s film about family and memory in which, even more than in most families, photography plays an essential part. LL