Film

What is the perfect dish to enjoy while watching a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It must be a pastry marrying a saffron- and rosewater-scented kataifi base (a Turkish delicacy) topped with a New York-style cheesecake.

The price one pays for being an artist is frequently sizeable. The call to the arts is often rooted in alienation and a sense of difference. To follow that path is to risk ostracism and penury. And other than your fellow artists, who else will understand your choices?

LOS ANGELES (JTA) – Jewish actors, directors and screenwriters scored well in nominations for the 2011 Golden Globe Awards, auguring well for the upcoming Oscar picks.

Two top favorites for best motion picture honors, “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” announced earlier this month, led the field with seven and six Golden Globe nods respectively.

Sometimes all it takes to make a short film work is a strong central metaphor. Consider the fascinating pairing of short documentaries about German history, “Rabbit a la Berlin” and “Loss,” opening at Film Forum on Dec. 8. Each is structured around a single overriding conceit and both rise or fall on the strength of that spine. Happily, both films are pretty effective and as a pair they complement one another surprisingly well despite a wild disparity in tone.

Steven Jesse Bernstein only lived 40 years, but to judge from the new documentary about him, “I Am Secretly an Important Man,” which opens on Dec. 15, his four decades were a whirlwind that encompassed enough writing, performing, sex, drugs and alcohol for a small army, and ended with an inexplicable but unsurprising suicide. That makes it all the more surprising that his advice to other poets, performance artists, musicians and, most of all, to himself was six simple words: “Just go and do your job.”

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- An Israeli war movie about the First Lebanon War won two awards at the European Film Awards.

"Lebanon," based on director Samuel Maoz' memories as a tank gunner during the war, won the discovery award for the director and an award for cinematography at the awards ceremony in Tallinn, Estonia, on Saturday.

Claude Lanzmann is in a bad mood. The director of “Shoah” is here to publicize the 25th anniversary re-release of that classic documentary and, whether he is jet-lagged or bored or subject to the cantankerousness that frequently befalls a man less than a week shy of his 85th birthday, he is in a bad mood and making no effort to conceal it.

‘Eichmann,” a drama about the interrogation of the Nazi war criminal by an officer of the Israeli police after his capture in 1960, has been sitting on the shelf since 2007. Once you have seen the film it is not hard to understand why. What is harder to understand is why someone has actually chosen to release it.

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- An Israeli movie took the grand prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

"Intimate Grammar," based on the Israeli novel "Book of Intimate Grammar" by David Grossman, was awarded the $50,000 Sakura Grand Prize Film Award on Sunday.

The film, directed by Nir Bergman, is about the son of Holocaust survivors growing up in Israel in the early 1960s.

 Jay Rosenblatt’s parents would probably have wanted him to be a doctor. After all, that’s what Jewish parents of baby boomers usually wanted for their kids in Sheepshead Bay. And Rosenblatt, born there in 1955, almost accommodated them. He was a mental health therapist for several years, working in hospitals and leading group therapy sessions. He was working towards his master’s degree in counseling when the lightning bolt hit him.