Arts & Culture | Film

Out Of Europe

07/12/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

The outsider’s perspective is generally a fresh one, especially if the outsider in question is a great artist. That certainly is the case with two excellent new documentaries that will have their U.S. theatrical premieres at Film Forum in the coming weeks. The translator Svetlana Geier and the painter Anselm Kiefer have unique, unusual viewpoints on the bloody 20th century, and in “The Woman With Five Elephants” and “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” those viewpoints are given particularly cogent visual expression.

A Down Syndrome Jewish Actor’s Breakout Role

07/12/2011 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Film

Three years ago, when Justin Lerner decided to give his friend, Evan Sneider, an actor with Down syndrome, a small role in his master’s thesis film, he did not know Sneider would eventually become critical to the launch of his own career.

Oy Romeo, Romeo!

07/06/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

In its own daffy way, “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” is as much a documentary as it is a comedy-drama. The film’s cast consists of alienated chasidic youth re-enacting their own pasts as runaways, scam artists and street kids. The film’s writer-director, Eve Annenberg, plays a nurse, which is what she is in her day job, who becomes involved in the lives of these kids when, as part of her graduate work outside the medical world, she is commissioned to create a modernized Yiddish-language version of the venerable Shakespeare romantic tragedy.

Seeking Justice For Deborah

06/28/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

We pray the words every day, but they probably don’t register: “matir asurim,” who frees the captive. Perhaps they are too familiar, our recitation too rote. But the commandment, like the instruction to seek justice, is one of the essentials of Jewish thought and life.

A French Jewish-Muslim Romance

06/21/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

The original French title of the new comedy “The Names of Love,” which opens on June 24, was “Le Nom des Gens.” That loosely translates as “the name of people” and, for a film that is very much about the nature of identity and self-definition, it is a more apt title. On the other hand, since the film is a sweet-natured romantic comedy, maybe things are best left as they are.

A ‘Righteous’ Lens: Genocides Then And Now

06/14/2011 | Steve Lipman | Staff Writer | Film

During his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania, Samuel Goldberg, an Upper West Side native, day school graduate and English/filmmaking major in college, was weighing a career in philanthropy or entertainment.

Then he saw “The Last Survivor.”