Arts & Culture | Film

Foreigners But Not Strangers

02/09/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

To read the Israeli papers is to see a steady stream of stories bemoaning the country's public education system, especially those citing Israeli students' low test scores in science and math.

But American filmmakers Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman found a unique south Tel Aviv school that is doing all the right things with a dizzyingly diverse student body. Their documentary about the Bialik-Rogozin school, "Strangers No More," was just nominated for an Oscar in the documentary short category.

For Jewish-Kashmiri Filmmaker, ‘Identity Is Never Fixed’

02/08/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Tariq Tapa had a complicated childhood. Not unpleasant, mind you, just unusually busy.

‘Confidence’ Man

01/25/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

More than many filmmakers, Istvan Szabo understands issues of fear and trust viscerally. He and his parents, both of them Jewish doctors, survived the Holocaust in Hungary because friends hid them.

A Gentler Richler In ‘Barney’s Version?’

01/19/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Published four years before his death at 70, Mordecai Richler’s last novel, “Barney’s Version,” has a certain valedictory feeling, a summing-up at the end of the journey that is uncharacteristically devoid of the nasty edge of early works like “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.”

Realistically Speaking

01/18/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Sometimes, after watching a really good documentary, I find myself wondering why anyone would want to make a fiction film when reality is so much more compelling, frightening, entertaining, funny and so on. I had that feeling several times while watching films from the last week of the New York Jewish Film Festival, and never more so than after viewing “Crime After Crime,” “The ‘Socalled’ Movie” and “Black Bus,” three of the strongest non-fiction films to turn up at this event in many years.

Jewish Film Fest’s ‘Open Destiny’

01/12/2011 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

In one of her short stories, Grace Paley writes, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” Such a splendid statement, the quotation turns up twice in Lilly Rivlin’s splendid new documentary on Paley’s life and work, “Grace Paley: Collected Shorts,” which plays in this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival. The sentiment behind the sentence is so open-handed and wholehearted that it could be applied to the best films in the festival, including Rivlin’s own offering.