Film

For Pip Chodorov, the link between being an experimental filmmaker and a Jew is surprisingly straightforward. He finds his position as the former — caught between an unresponsive art world and a disdainful film industry — comparable to that of the Jew in the diaspora.

Chodorov, whose delightful film “Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film” opens on Aug. 3, harkens back to period before Emancipation, a time of both oppression and, yet, a certain freedom for the Jews of Europe.

Sometimes a film’s first few shots tell you almost everything you need to know. Consider the case of “Off-White Lies,” the 2011 directorial feature debut of Maya Kenig, playing here Tuesday, June 12. In the film’s first shot we see a close-up of Libby (Elya Inbar), an adolescent girl dragging a suitcase and carefully carrying a potted plant across an air terminal, her face a mix of uncertainty and determination. Kenig cuts to an overhead shot that isolates the girl in the frame; she is surrounded by the unreadable space of the terminal’s featureless floor.

Seen together, filmmakers Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi could be one of those clichéd “odd couple” pairs so beloved of unimaginative contemporary Hollywood action comedies. Davidi is Israeli, tall, thin, weedy, mercurial. Burnat is Palestinian, shorter, solid, graying and insistently sober in demeanor. The peculiarly theatrical atmosphere of a morning with them is amplified by the central object in the chic quiet of their Midtown hotel — a large cylindrical aquarium filled with exotic fish.

The story of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky is a classic American success narrative. Although they were born only a few miles apart in “the middle of a Ukrainian nowhere,” as their grandson Michael Tilson Thomas puts it, they met in Baltimore when he was performing with a traveling Yiddish theater troupe and she was a star-struck girl working in a tobacco factory. They went on to fame and acclaim, stars of the Yiddish theater from the late-19th Century until the Depression.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commenting on “Follow Me,” a documentary film opening here this week on the life of his heroic older brother, Yonatan, told The Jewish Week: “This film will show an American audience about Yoni’s humanity, his leadership, and his commitment to Israel.”

Yonatan Netanyahu, a highly decorated Israeli soldier, was killed leading the Entebbe rescue in Uganda in 1976 that saved the lives of more than 100 Israeli hostages.

Imagine a biopic about Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Talk about a dream team. But the match-up is a wild dream that the accomplished Israeli director and former Hollywood filmmaker Shimon Dotan got one step closer to realizing last month. 

When he began working with his father, Percy Adlon, on the script for their new film “Mahler on the Couch,” Felix O. Adlon felt a heavier than usual weight on his shoulders.

There are times when you are out walking that a kind of hypnotic paralysis overcomes you. You are enwrapped in the rhythms of your gait, the pleasant sameness of the countryside, and you become oblivious to anything but the forward motion, the almost imperceptible bobbing of your gaze.

It’s not a very large painting, not much more than a square foot of oil on canvas. But Egon Schiele’s portrait of his beloved mistress Walburga Neuzil shook the art world in ways that the Austrian painter could never have imagined. This earthquake had almost nothing to do with the quality of the painting, “Portrait of Wally,” and everything to do with the sinister intersection of the sometimes shadowy world of art dealers and the black hole that was the Shoah.

Amos Kollek is back in New York. Although he has lived in the city “for long periods,” he says, he is now living in Israel full time, and is back for what he suggests is a fool’s errand: supporting the May 4 opening of his latest film, “Chronicling a Crisis.”