In less than a week’s time, from March 5 to 15, the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival will present its annual lineup of entertaining, provocative, informative and poignant films from Europe, Israel, Venezuela, Argentina, Canada and the United States to enthusiastic audiences.
It’s the festival’s 20th year, and the roster boasts more than 35 films, a number of them Bay Area premieres, including “Generation War,” a dramatic look at five young friends in Germany during World War II; “Mr. Kaplan,” a comedy with intrigue that was Uruguay’s submission to the Oscars; and “A Match Made in Heaven,” a documentary that follows four Orthodox Jews in Israel as they hunt for spouses.
Festival director Riva Gambert and a committee of about two dozen aficionados look for films by canvassing movie studios and film festivals, as well as considering movies they’ve read about or seen themselves. A committee member screens each nominated film to judge whether it’s a good fit for the festival, according to Debra Levin, the committee chair.
“We’re looking for films that really resonate with Jewish values but aren’t necessarily traditional Jewish films,” Levin said. “It’s a puzzle: You start to put together the pieces.”
Not all of the films chosen are explicitly Jewish: “A People Uncounted,” screening March 9 in Pleasant Hill, is a documentary about the Roma people in Europe. A Bay Area premiere, it was included because the persecution of the Roma has parallels with the Jewish experience, Levin said.
“It isn’t necessarily a film about Jews, but it’s about Jewish values,” she said.
To celebrate the festival’s 20th year, the committee decided to bring back two popular films shown in previous years: “Noodle,” about an El Al flight attendant who tries to return a boy to his mother in China after she has been deported from Israel due to an expired visa, and “Gloomy Sunday,” a romantic mystery set in Budapest during World War II.
Though the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival draws 30,000 attendees every summer, Levin said the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival offers a community experience for filmgoers who want to see great movies in their own backyard. Nearly 9,000 people attended last year, according to Gambert. Some of them come back year after year and look forward to spending time together, Levin said. “There’s a certain ‘camp’ feeling at the festival.”
East Bay International Jewish Film Festival, March 5-15 at Century 16 in Pleasant Hill and Vine Cinema & Alehouse in Livermore. www.eastbayjewishfilm.org/15
film review
A matchmaker who shows disabilities aren’t a deterrent
sue fishkoff | j. staff
Tova Shamsion is a matchmaker who doesn’t believe in love. But that hasn’t stopped her from helping hundreds of people find their mates.
Paralyzed from the neck down due to muscular dystrophy, she meets with clients in her living room, her heavy, immobile body propped up in an overstuffed comfy chair. Her daughter Dolly — who will someday inherit the business — takes notes as the clients talk and helps Tova leaf through her notebooks full of handwritten lists of other hopefuls to make the right match.
This 50-minute documentary by Israeli filmmaker Dan Wasserman, “Do You Believe in Love?” is a charming, unsentimental portrayal of a woman unbowed by her disability, who has made it her life’s mission to find mates for other disabled people, mostly from her own Sephardic community.
Wasserman follows Tova and her family for a year with his camera, earning not only their trust but that of Tova’s often severely disabled clients. We meet a blind woman who is rebuffed by one potential date during an initial phone call, but who gamely tries again and again. We see a young man in a wheelchair with a crippling speech impediment who hauls his useless legs up her staircase, hand over hand, so determined is he to find his bashert.
Tova’s no-nonsense treatment of her clients shows them as no better or worse off than other lovelorn singles — so long as they go into it with their eyes open, she warns. “Don’t go out with able-bodied men; they’ll sleep with you and never marry you,” she counsels one young woman, who is apparently prone to doing just that.
Tova’s eyes are ever alert, even calculating, as she sizes up her clients. She says it’s a business, but it’s clear that she finds deep spiritual satisfaction in creating marriages. Noting that Jewish tradition teaches that a person who makes even one successful match has a special place in heaven, she tells the camera that she’s made more than 550 and will “definitely” enjoy paradise.
Despite her gruff insistence that there’s no such thing as love, that marriage is about companionship and compromise, her own marriage of 43 years and her husband’s tender devotion to her suggests an opposite truth.
The looks the couple exchange at a family gathering where home movies of their wedding are shown — she pert and lovely in her 1960s hairdo, waving gaily at the camera as she steps out of the car with her dashing young husband, unaware of the disease that will soon strike — speak of a deep, enduring intimacy.
And yes, love. Not the fairy-tale princess kind, but the kind that every human being deserves.
“Do You Believe in Love?” 9:30 a.m. March 8 at Century 16, Pleasant Hill (50 minutes, in Hebrew with subtitles)
film review
Tender Israeli film looks at life in the rearview mirror
liz harris | j. staff
Do you have any regrets?
Sixty-year-old Ronnie, ceremoniously fired from his job as a film projectionist in Israel, certainly does. He’s been pining away for Rachel, the lost love of his life, for nearly 40 years. Now, with nothing holding him back and a plane ticket in hand to visit his brother in New York, Ronnie sets out to find her. “Is That You?” follows his journey.
Dani Menkin’s touching film has its Bay Area premiere March 9 in the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival. Menkin will give a talk at the screening.
Described as a “romantic road film” and a drama, “Is That You?” touches a range of emotions. It is liberally sprinkled with humor, warmth and sadness. After Ronnie reunites with his brother — a successful used car dealer who names all of his vehicles after women he’s had sex with — and is given his younger sibling’s blessing and a car named Bella, he goes off on his search.
Armed with an upstate New York address and a road map, Ronnie hits the road, determined to make good on a pledge he and Rachel made eons ago (before she left him and Israel) to celebrate her 60th birthday together.
But Ronnie’s road trip hits a road block when Bella dies and he’s forced to pull over in some unknown area.
That’s when Myla, a film student working on a documentary about regrets, comes to the rescue. She worked for a few years as an auto mechanic and proposes a deal: She’ll fix Ronnie’s car if he agrees to go on camera and answer her questions. He’s not really onboard but realizes he has no choice. Turns out, Myla can’t get Bella running, either, but seeing a worthy subject for her documentary, she offers Ronnie a lift and a second chance at finding Rachel.
With her camera running, they take off.
Finding Rachel proves more difficult than Ronnie had anticipated, as she has moved several times in recent years. But one address leads to another as Ronnie and Myla extend their trip, deepen their friendship and share their innermost fears and regrets with one another.
Does Ronnie find Rachel? No need for a spoiler; suffice it to say his adventure is a valuable, life-changing experience and one he does not regret.
Actor Alon Aboutboul portrays a genuine Ronnie — a likeable, rather ordinary man whose life hasn’t gone exactly the way he would have preferred. And in Myla, Naruna Kaplan de Macedo gives us an ambitious young woman determined not to let her self-doubts and unhappy childhood get in the way of her future.
“Is That You?” had its U.S premiere last October in Syracuse, New York, where it was filmed, as part of the Syracuse International Film Festival.
Menkin, 44, who co-wrote, directed and produced the movie, has taken on a serious topic in a way that belies his relatively young age. His film evokes questions that will leave many viewers looking inward and asking, “What are my regrets?”
“Is That You?” 7:30 p.m. March 9 at Century 16, Pleasant Hill (83 minutes, in English and Hebrew with subtitles)
film review
‘Art Dealer’ a broadly drawn thriller about Nazi theft
dan pine | j. staff
How much is one prepared to lose in search of the truth?
That’s a question Esther Stegmann, heroine of the French film “The Art Dealer,” never stops to ask herself. She’s too busy solving the mystery of her family’s lost artwork, long ago stolen by the Nazis, to care that her marriage and career have frayed to the breaking point.
The 2014 film makes its Bay Area premiere March 14 at the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival.
“The Art Dealer” tackles the Nazi penchant for looting Jewish art during World War II, the same subject matter explored in last year’s “The Monuments Men” and the upcoming “Woman in Gold,” starring Helen Mirren.
In this case, director François Margolin delivers an engaging but occasionally wobbly story more about family betrayal than Nazi war crimes.
Pressure points converge on Esther, a married mother and journalist, when she unexpectedly receives a package of vintage 8 mm film footage of her late grandfather, a Jewish art collector murdered by the Germans in 1941.
At the same time, her art-dealer husband brings home a large Rousseau-like painting of two leopards. That canvas, which once belonged to the Stegmann clan, as well as the hauntingly happy footage of her grandparents, propel her to learn what really happened to her family’s once-vast art collection, now seemingly lost for-ever.
Esther, played earnestly by Anna Sigalevitch, grows increasingly shrill, even paranoid, as clue leads to clue. One elderly relative ominously urges her not to dredge up “the dark times.” Her boss puts her on extended suspension. A national archive thwarts her research. Strangers stare. Someone is following her.
But Esther will not be deterred. “Usually the thieves have to explain,” she says when accused of stirring up trouble. In the end the truth comes out.
As the title suggests, “The Art Dealer” is about provenance, the chain of ownership of any artwork. Esther learns the hard way that possession hand-offs are not always clean. Indeed, history shows that Nazi Germany stole Jewish art worth billions, and full restitution has yet to be paid.
Unfortunately, the film’s indecisive pace and style hamper what might otherwise have been a taut suspense thriller.
Flashbacks in the form of those 8 mm home movies feel unconvincing and fail to fill in crucial plot gaps. Some scenes, shot verité-style, drag on, including a wedding sequence that features the creepiest rock ’n’ roll dancing this side of a Frankie Avalon movie.
And two brief interludes should win awards for the most pointless and gratuitous nude scenes ever committed to film.
By the end credits, good has triumphed over evil, even if it came too late for Esther’s father and grandfather. That proves satisfying enough, but unfortunately for his film, Margolin couldn’t resist melding Hitchcockian plot twists with pretentious French New Wave flourishes.
Otherwise he might have had a real work of art on his hands.
“The Art Dealer,” 8 p.m. March 14 at Century 16, Pleasant Hill (95 minutes, in French with subtitles)