The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival shakes it up with cinema about Holocaust-related trips and motherhood with a twist

Is there any cultural event that’s more an occasion for soul-searching than a Jewish film festival? Having your religion also considered an ethnicity and an intellectual birthright—well, no one said it was gonna be easy, right?

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival (www.vijff.com/) has extra cause for introspection this time around, having (barely) survived a couple of especially tough years. Even so, this year’s program, which runs March 27 through April 6, is less ponderous than usual.

According to Ian Merkel, the fest’s executive director, the wide range of tones and moods is intentional. “What we tried to do, after a slightly different direction last year, was come up with a combination of approaches,” he said. “There is the usual focus on things with Jewish subject matter, plus some subthemes. This is our 20th year, so a number of titles were brought in from our past, in a retrospective program. And because Israel is turning 60 this year, we wanted to bring in films that show life as it was, is, and perhaps will be.”

Although roughly half of the more than 60 titles here are Israeli-made, the international component is particularly diverse, with titles shipped from the U.K. (Paul Weiland’s Sixty Six), Mexico (My Mexican Shivah), and the Netherlands (Stalin’s Forgotten Zion). There are a number of youth-targeted films, and even a wine-tasting event.

This year, there’s less time spent on the Holocaust, and what there is takes a different tack. “A lot of people, as their memories fade, are coming up with things they’ve hidden until now,” says the South African–born Merkel. “And there’s a new, smaller wave of films relating to preservation of memory.”

Indeed, several titles deal with the physical aspects of that preservation. The British film KZ follows a high-school class through a tour of an Austrian concentration camp. Even more explicitly, the documentary “The Holocaust Tourist” packs a lot of wry, thought-provoking commentary into a terse 10 minutes. The Georgia Straight reached its maker, Jes Benstock, at his London home, to ask about the short’s origins—several trips he made to Poland during the waning days of the Communist era.

“In the early days, there was not much more than the camp itself at Auschwitz,” explains Benstock with a thick Scottish accent. “But after a while, a kind of industry developed. When I heard that there was a kind of kitsch Jewish quarter in Kraków,
created by non-Jews, I had to check that out.”

As the filmmaker travelled to these “dark tourism” sites, he increasingly encountered conflicts between museum directors and tour guides, who were rushing people through too quickly for there to be much impact. “You have to wonder what some people’s motivation is for going to these sites—like the Killing Fields of Cambodia or places in Rwanda. But at the same time, it’s important that the sites themselves be preserved and seen.”

Benstock previously delved into his family’s Jewish roots in a short called “Orders of Love”, but he figures his U.K. side has been influential as well.

“It may relate to my childhood in Scotland, home of many bloody battles. There are strange sites of routs and massacres wherever you go.”

Still, the harsh allure of the Holocaust is unique, and uniquely opaque. Certainly, the public experience of camp life and death has changed greatly over the years, as the 43-year-old discovered when talking to an ancient Polish projectionist who had worked at Auschwitz since the museum opened.

“For many years, they’ve been showing the same black-and-white film explaining the atrocities with really graphic footage. So I asked him what has changed over time. ”˜Well, at first you had to have a nurse on hand,’ he said, ”˜because people would faint or throw up; now they have popcorn.’ ”

While viewers may be increasingly inured to two-dimensional media, Benstock thinks the effort remains worthwhile.

“There’s no doubt that it is more difficult to turn away from this history when you are actually there. Already things have changed since I made this film,” he continues. “They’ve banned flash photography and filming, which is a good thing—although I’m glad they let me do it. It’s going to be very interesting having this discussion in 10 years’ time. This is not just about the death of the victims, but how we are remembering, how we are reshaping memory.”

German filmmaker Robert Thalheim examines that process in And Along Come Tourists, which sets a profoundly poignant story in today’s Auschwitz, where a young drifter from Berlin performs his public service by working for the camp museum. There, he tentatively befriends an aged survivor who gets a small stipend for preserving long-gone victims’ fragile suitcases—an apt metaphor—and by relating his story to school and tour groups. In the end, the old-timer feels like part of a fading carnival act.

“Just play Schindler’s List for them,” he insists. “It has more impact.”

If efforts like these involve taking planes, trains, and taxis to the dark side, other titles—mostly screening at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas, with a few shows at the Ridge Theatre, Oakridge Cinemas, and Norman Rothstein Theatre—find their characters going through more purely entertaining rigours.

The opening film, Three Mothers, is a luxuriously soapy tale of Jewish-Egyptian triplets. The U.S.–made Making Trouble is an informative look at female comedians from Fanny Brice to Gilda Radner. The French Bad Faith stars Cécile de France and Roschdy Zem (also the writer-director) as a French couple whose Jewish and Arabic roots are no big deal until they decide to get married. Unfortunately, the film is too sitcom-obvious to be anything more than passable entertainment.

The last title of the festival, Noodle, is similarly contrived, but so heartfelt, surprising, and well-acted that it hardly matters. Mili Avital—the star of a number of American films (Kissing a Fool, The Human Stain)—plays a 37-year-old flight attendant who gets stuck with a young Chinese boy when her cleaner suddenly disappears.

Surprisingly, writer-director Ayelet Menahemi was opposed to casting such a glamour-puss in the lead role. “I was unhappy about almost all of the casting choices suggested by my producers,” she explains, on the line from her Tel Aviv apartment. “They were all too well known, and too good-looking. But Mili came to me and said, ”˜I’m willing to gain 20 pounds for this part, or whatever it takes.’ ”

She didn’t have to go that far, but Avital does turn in a decidedly unglossy performance in the tale, based on the experiences of a real-life friend of the director. Her character goes to extraordinary lengths to find the boy’s missing mother. But would such an insulated character go to the same trouble for, say, a Palestinian child?

“Yes, she absolutely would,” Menahemi insists. “But my point, if the movie has one, was to show somebody cut off from everyone, reaching out to a person who has almost no way to communicate with her.”

The filmmaker isn’t quite sure what her movie represents about Israel. But she has noticed a trend in her nation’s cinema.

“Israeli movies have been so strong lately, and I am very excited to have been noticed among them. Overall, I think they show people moving away from the weight of history and thinking about themselves—in a good way.”

Apparently, we could all live with a little less introspection. Who wants to be like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, who complained that he flunked his philosophy course because he got caught looking into the soul of the boy next to him? This year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival offers some food for thought, but there won’t be a test.