It’s hard to convey the essence of Judy Berlin (1999), though not the excited reactions it tends to generate. An American-made black-and-white feature written and directed by Eric Mendelsohn, Judy Berlin focuses on the intertwined lives and aspirations of a curious ensemble of characters (some Jewish) living in a Long Island commuter town called Babylon…
Victoria Day: Celebrated author Bezmozgis writes, directs film
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David Bezmozgis, celebrated author of the prize-winning book Natasha and Other Stories, was on skates in North York Centennial Arena recently, along with a camera crew and a group of teenaged actors in skates and hockey uniforms. All were involved in filming a scene from Victoria Day, a feature film that Bezmozgis is directing, based…
Film: Monsieur Batignole
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Monsieur Batignole (France 2002) is a simple, deeply satisfying feature film about one man’s efforts, despite his otherwise unheroic life, to rescue three children from the Nazis. Batignole, a middle-class butcher in wartime Paris, hardly seems to care when his upstairs neighbours, the Bernsteins, are deported for being Jewish; after all, it was his own…
Documentary resumes Oslo-era dialogue despite Intifadah
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Israeli police officer Benny Herness and Palestinian journalist Adnan Joulani had planned to keep in touch after returning from a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace mission to Japan in 2000 that was the focus of the Israeli documentary film “Sleeping With the Enemy.” But the intifadah erupted a week after the film’s debut and the two lost…
Schmelvis: the ‘King’ as Jewish
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Evan Beloff, co-producer of a new documentary that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that American rock idol Elvis Presley was Jewish according to halakha or Jewish law, was only half-joking when he said that the film uses Elvis “as a metaphor for identity — I think it’s a quest film about Jewish identity.” Titled “Schmelvis:…
House of Sand and Fog’s Vadim Perelman
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Vadim Perelman, the Hollywood commercial director who has made a remarkable debut as a feature-film director with the recently-released House of Sand and Fog, grew up in Kiev and immigrated as a teenager with his mother to Edmonton, where he finished high school and attended the University of Alberta. In a recent interview with the…
Exodus Decoded features Toronto’s Indiana Jones
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Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, in conjunction with Ontario-born film producer James (“Titanic”) Cameron, has produced a slick new two-hour television documentary about the Biblical Exodus that has more offbeat theories than The Da Vinci Code and more wizardry than anything you’ve ever seen in Harry Potter. The Exodus Decoded, which is scheduled for viewing on…
Palestinian ‘Paradise Now’ — box office bomb
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There’s “nothing unusual about cinema portraying the psychodrama of real-life events torn from headlines,” Toronto Star writer Rosie Dimanno observed in a January review, noting that many films (such as Monster, In Cold Blood and Silence of the Lambs) traffic “in murder verite and the particular pathology of killers without conscience.” Dimanno was in the…
Earth and High Heaven explores mixed marriage taboo
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Gwethalyn Graham’s novel Earth and High Heaven (1944) is said to bear the distinction of being the first book published in Canada by a non-Jewish author that deals centrally with Jewish themes and characters. Since the former bestseller has been out of print for two decades, its recent reissue by Cormorant Books of Toronto seems…
Prince of Egypt transforms the Exodus story
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Based on the Biblical story of the Exodus, Dreamworks Studio’s visually stunning animated musical The Prince of Egypt opens across North America during the lucrative Christmas market (1998), and the studio hopes to see profits on the $70 million production soon. The first full-length animated film to focus on a Biblical narrative, The Prince of…
