NOTE: Tickets are $2.75 plus a service charge of $1.50 each, for a total of $4.25. Phone orders costs $3.50.

UPDATE: The 6th Annual Baton Rouge Film Festival is now history. Thanks to everyone who attended, everyone who volunteered their time, everyone who donated funds and everyone who helped make it a success. Now…we start planning for 2013! We’ll keep you posted on our progress. Thanks again!

Everyone loves a good story that is well-told. These stories inspire us by helping us find meaning in our own lives. With this in mind, we have put together the 6th annual Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival. We are bringing you a series of films that inspire, inform, and entertain; above all they reflect the long history and engaging culture of the Jewish experience.

Thanks to audience feedback, we’ve received wonderful suggestions that have helped us plan this year’s lineup of films. This year, as before, the Festival highlights issues, traditions, challenges and characters that hopefully resonate with you, our audience. In addition to comedy, drama, and documentary films, we’ve invited guests—this year, one of the filmmakers — to bring an added dimension to the program.

We believe you’ll find the 2012 Festival the best ever.

We’d like to express our appreciation to filmgoers who have made the Festival such a success in previous years. The Manship Theatre tells us that the Festival is one of the “hottest tickets” on their schedule. So, we look forward to seeing our old Film Festival friends again in January and welcoming new friends. You all won’t want to miss one the best film experiences in the region.

See you at the movies!

Friends of the
Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival

(US, 2010, Color, English, 88 mins. Director: Jonathan Gruber)

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JEWISH SOLDIERS IN BLUE & GRAY is a first-of-its-kind film that reveals the little-known struggles facing American Jews both in battle and on the home front during the nation’s deadliest war. This Documentary reveals an unknown chapter in American history when allegiances during the War Between the States deeply split the Jewish community. It examines a time when approximately 10,000 Jewish soldiers fought on both sides; 7,000 Union and 3,000 Confederate. And we expose General Ulysses Grant’s controversial decision to expel all Jews from his territory. We’ll also tell the stories of President Lincoln’s Jewish doctor serving as a spy in the South, and how five Union Jewish soldiers received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Narrated by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now), JEWISH SOLDIERS IN BLUE & GRAY explores the sacrifices Jews made as they defended both the Union and the Confederacy. Director Jonathan Gruber will be in the theater to take questions after the showing. Click here to purchase tickets now.

(Israel, 2010, Color, Hebrew w/English subtitles, 112 mins. Director: Avi Nesher)

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Avi Nesher’s latest film, The Matchmaker, is the first movie in years with a fresh take on the familiar themes of a boy’s coming-of-age and the shadow the Holocaust casts on Israel. This immensely pleasurable and moving film manages to weave the many strands of its plot to create a portrait of Israel in 1968 that sheds light on the country today, and does so without sacrificing drama to polemics. What shines forth are the characters and the story, and in the end nothing else in the movie really matters. You may not even notice that Avi Nesher has made a complex and ambitious film, one of the most rewarding in Israel in years.

The film focuses on Arik Burstein (Tuval Shafir), a Haifa teen who wants to fit in and dreams of nothing more unusual than becoming a war hero. His father is a Holocaust survivor, but that isn’t something anyone ever talks about, and it isn’t anything Arik is very interested in, anyway. He prefers to hang out with his friend, Beni, and read detective novels. And he’s very interested in Tamara (Neta Porat), Beni’s rebellious cousin who has grown up in America and talks about free love, rock ‘n’ roll and women’s rights.

When Arik gets a summer job working as a kind of detective for a matchmaker, Yankele Bride (Adir Miller), he finds himself in a new world, but one at times uncomfortably close to home. Yankele, a scarred and mysterious figure, knew his father in Romania and is also a survivor. Devoting himself to matchmaking, Yankele says he “specializes in special [needs] people.”

Because of their childhood connection, Arik’s father allows him to descend to the “Lower City,” the sleazy downtown area near the port. There, he meets the dwarves (seven of them, in fact) who run a movie theater that only shows love stories (in fact, there really was such a theater and the dwarves survived Auschwitz because Dr. Mengele experimented on them). Sylvia (Bat-El Papura), one of these dwarves, has hired Yankele to find her a husband, and is impatient. Meir (Dror Keren), the librarian, also turns to Yankele for help finding a partner, but gets sidetracked by Clara (Maya Dagan), a tragic and glamorous figure who is a kind of Marilyn Monroe of the port area. The director sets all these characters in motion and they become more intensely involved in each other’s lives.

While this film may have familiar elements, it’s frequently surprising. Nesher, who became famous in 1979 with The Troupe (Ha Lahaka), doesn’t go for easy resolutions here. One of the most interesting elements is the light he sheds on the disgust and distaste many Israelis felt towards the survivors in their midst, even when those survivors were their parents. We’ve seen many films about survivors and their secrets, but fewer about children who are terrified to uncover what they think their parents are hiding. As he did in his two previous films, Turn Left at the End of the World (which was the highest grossing film domestically ever) and The Secrets, he lets us get engrossed in a particular world, but brings out the universal aspects of that world and draws us in.

This summary makes the film sound heavier than it is. There is a lot of humor here, and even some real comedy. The scenes in the downtown area have a raffish charm, and bring to mind the atmosphere in old noir movies (although the film features vivid, gorgeous color). Arik’s earnest quest to become a writer is the most shopworn element here, but it isn’t given the hard sell and so doesn’t grate. The outstanding acting is what most people will remember when they leave the theater. The film is a breakthrough for Adir Miller, best known as a television comedian, who had his first dramatic role in Nesher’s The Secrets. Maya Dagan, Bat El Papura, Dror Keren, and Dov Navon also do stellar work here. The younger actors are relaxed and natural, although Porat and Shafir have an odd resemblance that makes them look almost like brother and sister in some of their scenes together.

Even if you’ve sworn off movies about the legacy of the Holocaust, make an exception and see this one, which offers varied and unexpected pleasures.

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By HANNAH BROWN
Jerusalem Post

(UK, 2010, Color, English, 105 mins. Director: Josh Appignanesi)

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No matter how many times you see a Jewish man ‘teaching’ a Muslim how to act like a Jew, it’s funny. Especially when the actors in question are The West Wing’s Richard Schiff, Jewish in real life, and Omid Djalili, playing a north London Muslim of Pakistani descent. Djalili’s attempts at the shrug, the oy veys and strangling the language is laugh out loud comedy every time…

The set-up is simple – Djalili is Mahmud Nasir, a British Muslim who works at a London cab firm. He is not the strictest Muslim – he likes his football, the odd drink and would rather play with his two charming children than pray five times a day. He then discovers he was adopted, and not only that but his birth parents were Jewish, and his real name is Solly Shimshellewitz. He befriends rival cabbie Lenny (Schiff) and tries to learn how to ‘be Jewish’ so he can gain entry into the home where he believes his real father lies dying.

Here’s where the heart of the comedy is. Lenny teaches Solly all the tricks of the trade, then takes Solly to a Bar Mitzvah, with chaotic results. However, as Solly is embracing his new Jewish identity, his family are appalled – his gorgeous wife Saamiya (Panjabi) leaves him – she thought he was having an affair, or gay, but this is worse – and his adorable daughter calls him an ‘infidel’. Worse, his son Rashid (Amit Shah) is planning to marry Uzma (Soraya Radford) but her stepfather is a fanatical Muslim who will forbid the bond if Nasir is not strict enough – so Rashid is furious with his dad.

It’s to the film’s huge credit that it takes on this highly sensitive material and makes it funny – writer David Baddiel has said ‘people are terrified, and when they are terrified, what they should really do is laugh’. The gag count is very high and hits all targets equally…

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Mike Martin
MovieMuser.co.uk

(Israel, 2007, Color, Hebrew w/English subtitles, 131 mins. Director: Joseph Cedar)

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War is always hell on the grunts carrying it out. But a war mired in politics takes an additional emotional and psychological toll. Who wants to be the last soldier killed for a discredited policy?

This isn’t Vietnam or Iraq. Beaufort is the “beautiful fortress” (known as Shqif Arnun, “High Rock” in Arabic) that has been strategically and symbolically overlooking centuries of failed policies along the scenic road to Damascus. Originally a Roman encampment, it was built up by the Crusaders in the 12th century, expanded by Muslims in the 13th century, controlled by the PLO during the 1970s civil war in Lebanon, and then captured by the Israeli army in 1982 as they invaded the southern part of the country. Beaufort is set in 2000 as protesting Israeli citizens and Hezbollah fighters pressure the army to retreat.

Bomb expert Ziv Farran (Ohad Knoller, The Bubble’s hunk) arrives by helicopter amidst repetitive announcements of mortar alerts. The hand-held camera follows him into the fortress through the dark, endless, confusing sandbagged tunnels to a confrontation with determined Sergeant Liberti (Oshri Cohen), to whom he insists that the mined road is too dangerous to navigate. But with the enemy also launching increasingly accurate blasts, no supplies are coming in, and no men are getting out until the road is cleared. Tension mounts as personalities clash while the men wait for orders from higher-ups on how to proceed. Visually telling much of the story, Ofer Inov’s striking cinematography captures the smoke-filled redoubts, truck convoys maneuvering in the dark, and the mountain sunrises and sunsets.

The intense waiting highlights the differences among the band of brothers who are intimately restricted to an area as claustrophobic as a World War I-set trench or a World War II submarine. (In the English translation of journalist Ron Leshem’s novel, the living quarters are, in fact, nicknamed “the submarine” by the soldiers). While some of their ethnic, class, geographic, and religious differences are not as clear to non-Israelis as in Cedar’s earlier films dealing with societal stress lines (Time of Favor and Campfire), the soldiers bond around the usual teasing and earthy diversions of young men committed to die for each other.

In a war that’s ironically just a short flight from home, Oshri (Eli Eltonyo) counts the days until his tour of duty is over, with a small U.S. flag reminding him of his girlfriend waiting in New Jersey. But Ziv volunteered for the mission because his uncle was killed taking the mountain, though his father, active in peace groups, demands withdrawal. All are too aware that their split-second decisions are also being watched and argued about at home, as they can see from the Israeli newscasts – that’s how they learn the Cabinet has set the date for their evacuation. While casualties mount as they wait and wait for new orders they are not sure they want to follow, they frankly debate if they are nothing more than just cannon fodder.

Like a diary, the novel is made up of Sergeant Liberti’s vivid first-person impressions over several years. Here, he is an enigma gradually unwrapped to be the film’s emotional center, a powerful portrait of an officer facing up to what it means to serve in an army of a fallible, democratic country that spins an explosive pyrrhic victory. As Norman Thomas said about soldiers in another disputed war, these pawns bleed.

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Nora Lee Mandel,
Film-Forward.com

(Mexico, 2008, Color, Spanish w/English subtitles, 92 mins. Director: Mariana Chenillo)

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José (Fernando Luján) has been divorced from Nora for 20 years. They were married at least as long. Now he keeps an apartment across from hers; she spies on him with her binoculars. And when, just before Passover, she succeeds after decades of suicide attempts, José is convinced she planned for him to discover her body—and the full Seder meal prepared in carefully labeled Tupperware.

Nora’s Will takes place almost entirely in the apartment that José and Nora once shared, where seemingly not a stick of furniture has been bought since he left. There are no teeth gnashed or breasts beat during the mourning period. Rabbi, family, and servants come and go around José, who is ironic rather than visibly bereaved, a lapsed Jew who wolfs ham pizza in front of his abstaining co-religionists. Logistical problems, such as finding a Hebrew cemetery in Mexico City that will accept the body of a suicide, worry away José’s stoicism—along with inchoate feelings stirred up by a stray photograph from 1969, suggesting another lover in the dead woman’s life, as in a De Maupassant story.

Throughout, writer/director Mariana Chenillo and Luján carefully unwrap José’s defensive postures to reveal a hard center of unresolved emotion, shown finally.

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Nick Pinkerton
Village Voice

(German/Hungarian/English sub.) 112 minutes

Gloomy Sunday

Gloomy Sunday is a hauntingly beautiful gem of a movie, a unique blending of romance, drama, and tragedy all compressed under the relentless weight of history. The film lives and breathes, transporting viewers back to 1930s Budapest with beautiful cinematography, a fascinatingly poignant musical component, and the most human of characters. Known as the Hungarian suicide song, “Gloomy Sunday” forms the backdrop for the film and its characters. The film ran for a record-breaking 70 weeks in Boston. 

Deutscher Filmpreis 2000: Best Screenplay
Bavarian Film Awards 2000: Best Director, Best Cinematography

(English) 90 minutes

The Front

The Front, the Festival’s first film retrospective, is a 1976 film about the blacklist during the age of live television written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. Because of the blacklist, a number of artists, writers, directors and others were rendered unemployable, having been accused of subversive political activities in support of communism or of actually being communists themselves. Howard Prince (Woody Allen), an apolitical man who needs money, agrees to become a front, signing his name to scripts submitted to a television network. Combining comedy and pathos, the film enlightens the viewer to the emotional consequences of blacklisting.

1977 Academy Award nominee for Original Screenplay
1977 BAFTA nominee for Best Supporting Actor – Zero Mostel
1977 Glolden Globe nominee for New Star of the Year – Andrea Marcovicci

(English) 98 minutes

Where I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story

Where I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story is a documentary of the endlessly surprising life of this charismatic newspaperman, Vegas icon and real-life Zelig. Greenspun’s epic journey from associate of mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel to maverick founder of the Las Vegas Sun (and its long-running “Where I Stand’ editorial) features a colorful cast of characters including high-rolling businessmen and gangsters, movie stars, politicians, family and wheeler-dealer friends. Following Siegel’s murder in 1947, the crusading Greenspun rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and became a prominent guerrilla figure in Israeli politics and gun smuggling. Director Scott Goldstein combines archival stills, illuminating interviews, rare diary entries read by Anthony Hopkins, and atmospheric music to create a spirited, highly-stylized mosaic of Greenspun’s legendary escapades.

Speaker: Filmmaker Scott Goldstein