‘New York Jewish Film Festival’ Boasts Solid Lineup

The 34th annual New York Jewish Film Festival is underway, presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center. The Fest runs through January 29, 2025, and boasts documentaries, narrative features and short films from around the world that examine the Jewish experience. In-person screenings take place at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, NYC.

The lineup showcases eight narrative features, 11 doc features, one miniseries and two short films. Two restored classic films are also included: the 50th anniversary screening of the extraordinary 1975 film, Hester Street, directed by Joan Micklin Silver, which  recreates Jewish immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century, and features Carol Kane in her only Oscar-nominated performance to date (Between the Temples should be her second!!!) as well as Breaking Home Ties, a 1922 classic silent melodrama, once believed lost, which has been digitally restored by the National Center for Jewish Film, and is now presented with a newly recorded score. This one is a real treat.

The Fest opened with Midas Man, reviewed below. The Centerpiece is the potent film Of Dogs and Men, also reviewed below. The Fest Closes with Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, a timely doc directed by Ilana Trachtman recalling a 1960 chapter in the Civil Rights Movement when Black students were joined by Jewish locals defiantly protesting on a merry-go-round in Maryland’s segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park.

The full NYJFF lineup and ticket info can be found at nyjff.org

Below are the films I sampled. Most are terrific and should be seen.

Of Dogs and Men

It’s a sad state of affairs when Festivals are actively avoiding films that show the Israeli perspective on the war in Gaza, especially depicting the atrocities of October 7, 2023. But that is the lunatic, social-media fueled world we’re living in. Kudos to the NYJFF for showcasing a movie like Of Dogs and Men, filmed in late October 2023, just weeks after the horrific attack and slaughter of Israelis, by Hamas terrorists.

Writer-director Dani Rosenberg’s deeply affecting docudrama centers on Dar (Ori Avinoam), a 16-year-old girl, who returns to her decimated kibbutz to try and find her lost dog. We slowly learn that her mother was kidnapped during the massacre and her village devastated. Along her journey, she encounters many figures playing themselves including an animal rescuer, Nora. When Dani asks Nora if she fears going after hostile dogs, her reply is, “Look what human beings did. So, I should be afraid of dogs?”

I’ve read complaints that too much time is given to the Israeli side vs. the Palestinian side in this movie–an outrageous statement since the film is about the direct aftermath of the terrorist attack. Rosenberg had no mandate to show “both sides,” even though she actually does present what was also occurring in Gaza. And those moans via the press is exactly what is aiding to promote this wave of antisemitism worldwide. Also, there are plenty of pro-Palestinian docs around that are being heavily embraced by critics and the Hollywood community. This is one of the very few films we have seen here that chronicles the immediate aftermath of the reprehensible bloodbath of Oct 7th. It deserves to be championed.

This is My Mother

Award-winning writer-director-actor Agnès Jaoui delivers yet another tour de force performance in Julien Carpentier’s engrossing tale of familial strife, This is My Mother.

33-year-old Pierre (William Lebghil) has established a successful flower shop and is in the midst of courting a girl he really likes (Alison Wheeler). One day he gets a call from his grandmother that his mother, Judith (Jaoui) has gone off her meds and escaped from the psychiatric clinic where she is staying. Judith is bi-polar, and Pierre has stayed away for the last two years to protect his own sanity. Now, he is reunited with his hurricane-force mom who promises to upend his life all over again. So begins a deeply affecting whirlwind story of love, pain, grief, anxiety and karaoke bonding.

Lebghil and Jaoui do wonderful work and keep us enthralled. Jaoui is a formidable force in French cinema amassing 6 César Awards for writing and acting as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (The Taste of Others). In This is My Mother, she delivers another award-worthy turn.

Neither Day nor Night

Filmmaker Pinhas Veuillet creates a cinematic morality play with his feature debut, Neither Day nor Night.

Set in Bnei Brak, Israel the film focuses on one French Sephardic family living in an Ashkenazi community. Shmuel (Eli Menashe), the patriarch, is a working-class laborer, but his wife and son long to be accepted by a class-conscious community. Their uber-intelligent 13-year-old son, Rafael (Adam Hatuka Peled) longs to go to a prestigious Talmud school and is devastated when he learns that he will not be accepted, despite his academic prowess, because of his Sephardic lineage. When Shmuel confronts Rafael’s mentor and Rabbi, things go south quickly and Shmuel finds himself in a Woody Allen-esque Crimes and Misdemeanors conundrum he must navigate his way through.

Co-written by Veuillet and Aaron Israel, Neither Day nor Night is a thought-provoking, well-acted gem.

The Spoils

Canadian filmmaker Jamie Kastner’s compelling documentary, The Spoils, examines the ongoing problems surrounding the restitution battle when it comes to the ownership and exhibition of artwork that was either looted or force-auctioned by the Nazis during the second world war. Kastner focuses on one German-Jewish art dealer, Max Stern, who was stripped of all his rights and had to liquidate his gallery in 1937. He escaped to Canada. Decades later there are 400-500 works that he owned that have never been returned to his estate. The doc shows just how the powers-that-be in Düsseldorf, Germany, fought restitution by placing certain people in charge of a planned Stern exhibition. If it walks like antisemitism and talks like antisemitism…

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival

Julie Rubio’s doc, The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival, is an excellent and significant tribute to the bisexual, Polish, Jewish painter Tamara de Lempicka, whose work is finally getting the recognition it deserves. The artist was the subject of the recent, divisive Broadway musical, Lempicka, and several of the creatives, including lead actress Eden Espinosa, chat about the woman’s groundbreaking work which took elements of cubism, surrealism and classicism, but made them her own in an original style that often celebrated women in all their complexities.

Lempicka herself loved breaking rules and defying convention. She created her own brand, before that was a thing and knew how to merchandise her work. She was a survivor, literally fleeing Europe during the rise of Nazism. Today, celebrities like Barbra Streisand and Madonna collect her work. Narrated by Anjelica Huston, this doc is essential viewing for anyone who cares about art.

The Glory of Life

Revered Austrian-Czech-Jewish writer Franz Kafka is said to have burned some 90% of his work. In addition, he specifically instructed his beloved friend Max Brod to set fire to the rest of his unfinished writings (including his novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika). He died at the age of 40. The literary world is grateful that Brod refused his friend’s request. Kafka’s low self-confidence and fear that his work wasn’t good enough is said to be the reasons for his desire to shred his own writings. This truly disturbing fact would have made for a fascinating filmic exploration.

Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann have crafted a period pic, The Glory of Life, adapted from  a book by German writer Michael Kumpfmüller by Maas and Michael Gutmann, about the last year of Kafka’s life that focuses mostly on his love affair with Dora Diamont and the illness (tuberculosis) that consumed him.

Considering the dystopian worlds Kafka created, the filmmaker’s narrative leaves a lot to be desired in its deliberate conventionality. Still, the love story is quite compelling thanks to the heartfelt performances of Sabin Tambrea and Henriette Confurius as Kafka and Dora. And the filmmakers capture the Weimar Berlin period with panache.

Blind at Heart

Barbara Albert’s compelling if erratic adaptation of Julia Franck’s German Book Prize-winning novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blindness of the Heart) enjoys leap-frogging in time, often at the expense of story and character development.

The first half hour of the overlong film spends too much time with Hélène as a young girl. Blind at Heart finally takes off once a now 17-year-old Hélène (Mala Emde) arrives in Weimar Berlin with her sister Martha (Liliane Amuat), leaving her insane mother. Hélène wants to become a doctor and is a bit shocked by the freedoms she’s now witnessing around her. She meets and fall for handsome Karl (Great Freedom’s handsome Thomas Prenn), but tragedy soon strikes, and the Nazis begin their reign of terror. Enter Wilhelm (Max von der Groeben), a one-dimensional Nazi-in-the-making, who falls for Hélène–who is half Jewish. He furnishes her with a new Aryan identity and her woes really begin.

Blind at Heart is a story of survival at all costs and would have been more powerful had the focus been less epic. Still, Emde is terrific as our anti-heroine and makes the cine-journey worth taking.

Midas Man

The reason to see Midas Man, Joe Stephenson’s timid biopic of Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, is the grounded, impressive titular performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (The Queen’s Gambit) as well as a few terrific supporting turns, especially the great Emily Watson as Epstein’s loving and supportive mother, Queenie. It’s a shame the screenplay, by Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham, plays it so safe when Epstein was a rather daring fellow himself, especially when it came to his ravenous ambition managing the greatest rock band of all-time. Epstein came from an affluent Jewish family and was gay at a time when that could mean imprisonment and the ruin of his career. The queer aspect is handled in a wholly cautious and way too cliche manner.

The recent Variety article that published details the production mess, financial insanity and the different creatives involved. It’s such a shame the producers insisted on such a tame and lame approach.

Most awkward and disappointing, the producers could not get the rights to any Beatles’ songs, so we are left with inert scenes where the boys are just about to perform or, worse, forced to sing covers. The finale, where the Beatles are to perform “All You Need is Love,” live to millions is rendered laughable.