Arts & Culture | Film

Mississippi’s Burning Questions

08/10/2010 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

In 1964 when she was only 17, Micki Dickoff asked her father if she could go to Mississippi to work with the volunteers of Freedom Summer, registering black voters. Her father, a Mississippi native, refused to allow her to go. His was the only Jewish family in a small Mississippi town, and he feared what she would find there. Not long after, his worst fears were confirmed when three of the volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by local Klansmen, all of them deputy sheriffs of Neshoba County.

New Holocaust Film: Recycling History

08/10/2010 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

It’s a rather odd admission for a director whose first feature film is a ground-breaking documentary about the Holocaust, but growing up in Israel, Yael Hersonski avoided films about the Shoah and memorial sites like Yad Vashem. She had a much more vivid reminder of the events at home.

Hate-Group Members In Love

08/04/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

There have been many films that explore the pathology and sociology of fascist movements. It’s a subject perhaps better suited to documentary than to fiction simply because the issues are a bit too complex, the strands of race, ethnicity, class and “tribal” allegiance too densely interwoven for dramatization within the allotted time of a conventional feature film.

Samuel Maoz’s 20 Years’ War

08/03/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Samuel Maoz was only 20 years old when the first Lebanon War broke out. He was a gunner in a tank crew and at 6:15 a.m. on the morning of June 6, 1982, he killed a man for the first time in his life.

Chaplin’s Splendid Audacity

07/27/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

I believe it was William L. Shirer who said that if someone had pulled down Adolf Hitler’s pants in public in 1923 he never would have become Reichschancellor. Ridicule, in the right hands, is a powerful weapon. That was probably what was going through Charles Chaplin’s mind when he began work on “The Great Dictator” in 1938.

‘I’m Always Hiding Behind My Stories’

07/20/2010 | Steve Lipman | Staff Writer | Film

For the first years of his life in communist Romania, Radu Mihaileanu couldn’t understand why his grandmother, who lived with his family, prepared her own meals in her own pots and pans.