Arts & Culture | Film

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.

The Jews Of ‘Restrepo’

06/30/2010 | Doug Chandler | Film

His parents gave Misha Pemble-Belkin a pacifist, “hippie” upbringing, forbidding him and his two brothers from playing with toy guns or watching violent films.

But both of them, including his Jewish father, were “very proud” that he enlisted in the Army, says their son, now a sergeant at Fort Polk, La., and one of 11 soldiers interviewed in “Restrepo,” a new documentary about one company’s grueling tour of duty in Afghanistan.