Foreign Letters is a film about the healing power of friendship. Set in the pre-email era of the 1980s, young Ellie, newly arrived to the United States from Israel, anxiously waits for letters from her best friend back home. Suffering from homesickness, language difficulties and rejection at school, life brightens when she meets Thuy, a Vietnamese refugee her age. As the two bond and become inseparable, they share secrets, eventually hurt each other, and Ellie must find a way to restore their trust.
Footnote is a story of insane academic competition and the very complicated relationship between a father and son. Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik are both eccentric Talmudic scholars, dedicated to their work. The father, Eliezer, fears the establishment and has never been recognized for his work. Uriel, the son, is an up-and-coming star endlessly seeking recognition. When Eliezer learns that he is to be awarded a valuable honor for scholarship, his vanity and desperate need for validation are exposed. In a darkly funny twist, Uriel is forced to choose between his own career and his father’s. Will he sabotage his father’s glory?
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.
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.
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.
