Arts & Culture | Film

'Hana's Suitcase' A Well-Traveled Tale

04/12/2012 | George Robinson | Film Critic | Film

It’s an unprepossessing object, a battered, rather ordinary valise, with a name, date of birth and the German word “Waisenkind” (orphan) painted in broad strokes on its side. But the most neutral objects acquire meaning through association with people and events, and this particular suitcase carries a lot of history along with its meager contents.

In Search Of Simone Weil

03/21/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

The life and thought of Simone Weil present numerous paradoxes and pitfalls for a documentarian brave enough to take her on. She was a secular Jew who was taken with Catholic thought, a pacifist who bore arms in the Spanish Civil War, a member of the Resistance whose final act of defiance was to starve herself, enabling tuberculosis to triumph over her body. It’s a tangled story made more so by the passage of time, which has swept away almost everyone who knew her.

From A Rabbi’s Talking Cat To The Contested West Bank

03/20/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

The annual New Directors/New Films program, now in its 41st year, brings together a program of more than two dozen films from all over the globe, and the only common ground between them is work by fairly new directors who show promise. The programming results in some wild juxtapositions. This year’s event, which opened this week, is typical.

Echoes Of ‘Casablanca’

03/13/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Although the film “Free Men” was made in France last year and opens here on Friday, March 16, it feels a lot older. In some ways, that’s not a bad thing. Director Ismail Ferroukhi turned to the straightforward, linear narrative style of the place and period in which the film is set, Paris under the Nazi occupation, and to a subdued palette that gently suggests the black-and-white films of the era.

The New Ronit Elkabetz

03/13/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Last year’s edition of the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival was an informal tribute to Ronit Elkabetz. This year’s event, the 16th annual festival, crowns her successor, Reymond Amsalem.

‘Belonging To The Land’

03/07/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Gideon Koppel bristles a little when you call his lyrical debut feature film ‘sleep furiously’ a documentary.

“For me the film is a fictional construct,” he says. “I’m at loggerheads with the way in which many academics and critics use the word ‘documentary.’ For me [the documentary] has always been linked to the world of the lyrical, the poetic and the avant-garde.”