Shorts People

The Jewish highlights at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival are not the features, but the under half-hour set.

Agnese Luse, left, Rosa von Praunheim (in baseball cap) in the National Historical Archive Latvia, in “Two Mothers,” which tells the autobiographical story of von Praunheim’s search for his real family after his mother tells him he was a child of the Holocaust.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

It looks like a lot of the Jewish action at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which opened on Wednesday, is in the shorts categories. There are at least three significant films that touch on themes of interest to readers of this newspaper, but there are five shorts, and they are quite choice.
“Roads,” “Mandatory Service” and “Willingly” are all fresh from Israel, and each is a testimonial to the impact of increased funding and the rising number of film schools in the country.
“Roads,” directed by Lior Geller, who grew up in New Jersey but went to film school at Tel Aviv University, is a 22-minute drama about a 13-year-old Arab boy who works as a mule for the biggest drug dealer in Lod.

Ismayil (Waseem Nur Habshi) is a smart, alert kid who dreams of being a world-class soccer player but, as he says, “In Lod, drugs come before soccer.” Although he believes his boss is “the only one who loves me,” he develops a strange attachment to a Jewish man, Daniel (Daniel Chernish, a Colin Farrell look-alike). An ex-soldier who was traumatized by an incident during the last Lebanon conflict, Daniel takes a huge risk to guarantee Ismayil’s safety. The result is a brief but effective parable on loyalty and love, shot like an episode of “The Wire,” an effective introduction to Geller and a great calling card for Habshi, who is one of the most poised adolescent actors I’ve seen in a long time.
“Willingly,” like “Roads,” is an Israeli entrant in the Student Narrative competition at this year’s festival and it, too, is a splendid audition piece for filmmaker Pazit Lichtman. It is essentially a two-hander focusing on a feuding young Orthodox couple that goes to Jerusalem for a divorce. Although Yoni (Avital Abrigel) wants the divorce, Michal (Sharon Friedman) is determined to work things out. It isn’t entirely clear where the problems in the relationship lie, which actually makes their sparring more interesting, and the film’s open-ended conclusion makes one curious to see Lichtman build this sketch into a more developed narrative. Her use of screen space is adroit and the acting is excellent. Another promising appetizer.
The third Israeli short in the festival, “Mandatory Service,” is a documentary about the militarization of Israeli culture as seen through the eyes of young artists. Some of them, rock musicians Gilead Vital and Avraham Tal for example, did their mandatory service in the army. Vital looks back on his time in the West Bank with distaste, recalling, “Stones were thrown at me. I hurt people.” By contrast, his band mate Tal says that the experience toughened him and prepared him for the difficulties of life as a professional musician.
But the key figure in “Mandatory Service” is Zohar Shapira, a dancer who also served in the Territories and who has made a strong anti-war statement through his choreography and dancing; more than that, Shapira is a founder of the group “Combatants for Peace,” which is composed of combat veterans from both sides of the conflict. And that is where director Jessica Habie should have focused her film. Shapira’s is by far the most compelling story, the most dramatic and visually exciting, and in a 19-minute film it is a mistake to waste valuable screen time on lunkheads like the illustrator of the “Gonzo Guide to Getting Out of the Military.” “Mandatory Service” is either too short and unfocused or too long and unfocused; Habie needs to think about what a feature-length documentary using some of this material would look like.
By comparison, the two North American shorts “Baghdad Twist” and “Beginning Filmmaking,” are just about the right length. Joe Balass, director of “Baghdad Twist,” is the Canadian-raised son of Iraqi Jews who came to America in the 1950s. Using a generous helping of his family’s home movies and photographs from before and after their emigration, as well as his mother’s eloquent testimony, Balass paints a picture of a seemingly idyllic Jewish community that was severely dented by the establishment of the State of Israel and finally shattered irretrievably by the Six-Day War. He uses slow superimpositions and dissolves to suggest the burden of history and environment that haunts his family even now. “Jewish-Arabic, that’s my mother tongue,” his mom states emphatically. “I was Iraqi, I was a Jewish Iraqi; the two always went together.”
“Beginning Filmmaking” is definitely the comic relief in this quintet, a brief chronicle by the excellent avant-garde filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt of a year spent trying to teach his 4-year-old daughter Ella how to make movies. At 18 months she had expressed an interest in following in Daddy’s footsteps and Rosenblatt takes her at her word, perhaps a mistake with a 4-year-old. On the other hand, Ella seems wise beyond her brief lifespan and while it is hard to evaluate her directorial style — perhaps best summed up by two admonitions from her father, “Don’t lick the screen” and “Why are you filming your pants?” — as an on-camera personality, she may well be the next Abigail Breslin (of “Little Miss Sunshine” fame).
Andrzej Wajda and Rosa von Praunheim are two European filmmakers whose work has always been distinguished by their concern for the twisting paths of history as it has buffeted their nations, Poland and Germany, respectively. Wajda is, of course, the best-known and probably the greatest filmmaker to come out of Poland and one of the giants of East European cinema. Praunheim is less known in the United States, but was a significant figure on the fringes of the New German Cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s, a loud, funny and inventive spokesman for the emerging German gay left. Indeed, his 1971 film, “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation in Which He Lives” was a landmark in the birth of Gay Liberation Movement in Germany. There is a 16-year gap in age between the 82-year-old Wajda and the 66-year-old Praunheim, and that age difference is reflected in the difference between Wajda’s rather severe classicism and the rowdy modernism of Praunheim’s best films. That is apparent even in a comparison of “Katyn,” Wajda’s latest, and “Two Mothers,” Praunheim’s new documentary.
Wajda’s film opens with a chaotic scene that sums up the dilemma of the Poles at the outbreak of World War II. A group of refugees is crossing a bridge in an effort to escape the oncoming German army; the refugees are met head-on by another group, equally determined to escape the forward rush of the Russians. That, in a nutshell, is the situation facing Poland, and one of its most sinister effects is the massacre of Polish military officers by Soviet troops in the Katyn forest. At the center of the film is Anna (Maja Ostaszewska, in a masterful performance that holds the entire film together), the wife of a Polish cavalry captain who is transported by the Russians to the Soviet Union, where he will die. Wajda follows Anna’s desperate attempts to find her husband and the gradually diminishing hope that afflicts her and seemingly the whole city of Krakow, where she spends most of the war, trying to evaluate the competing claims of the Nazis and the Russians, each of whom blames the other for the mass murder.
The film ends with a massive reconstruction of the massacre, brilliantly staged by Wajda and eerily lit by Pawel Edelman, whose cinematography is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Like most of Wajda’s films, “Katyn” is a somber, deliberately paced work, one that trembles alternately with remorse and indignation. “Katyn” is not up to his best works, “Man of Iron” and “Danton,” but it is a creditable film from one of the great masters of the art.
Praunheim’s film is much more modest, an 87-minute documentary that explores his search for his biological family. The film begins when he celebrates his mother’s 96th birthday; she takes him aside afterwards and tearfully tells him “You’re not my son. I found you in a children’s home in Riga.” Needless to say, Praunheim (whose real name is Holger Mischwitsky, or so he believes at the outset of the film) is shocked and, when his mother dies shortly after, he resolves to find out who his real family was. This quest takes him to Riga and into a detailed examination of the Holocaust in the Baltic states, including a powerful recounting of the mass murder by shooting of Riga’s Jewish population. I’m not giving away any secrets by telling you that he does, in fact, find out who his real mother was and comes to a fairly reliable conclusion about his father. “Two Mothers” is an intelligent and warm portrait of the filmmaker as dutiful son and, at the same time, a potent reminder of yet another crime of the Shoah that has gone largely unremembered outside of the place where it happened.
Finally, it is very hard for me to write objectively about Judd Erhlich’s entertaining documentary on the life of New York Marathon founder Fred Lebow, “Run for Your Life.” During some 15 years as a sports writer, I interviewed Lebow many, many times. It was Lebow who needled me into taking up running in my 30s, and he was a constant presence on the New York running scene. Ehrlich captures his ebullience in a balanced portrait. The only drawback to the film is one that Lebow himself imposed from beyond the grave: we never learn about how Lebow (ne Leibowitz) escaped the Nazis in Europe, because he never would tell anyone that story. n
The Tribeca Film Festival runs through May 4 at venues all over the city. For information, go to www.tribecafilmfestival.org.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization