Omri Givon’s Seven Minutes in Heaven works on two diametrically opposed levels, the real and the hallucinatory. To be presented by the Toronto Jewish Film Society on Oct. 20 at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Al Green Theatre (750 Spadina Avenue), this psychological drama from Israel blends terrorism, trauma and romance. A year after […]
Myopically enough, Hollywood failed to fully grasp the significance of the rise of Nazism in Germany, even though the American motion picture industry was largely in the hands of Jewish Americans. They underestimated the Nazis, assuming that the national socialists were a passing phenomenon, writes Thomas Doherty in Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939, published by Columbia […]
You name it and they’ve designed it. Massimo and Lella Vignelli, born in Italy and based in New York City, are master graphic artists, having been instrumental in defining the landscape of contemporary design. Their motto is: If you can’t find it, design it. And so they have done to international acclaim. The Vignellis, a married […]
When World War II broke out, Sweden teetered on the fence, declaring neutrality while maintaining trade with both sides in the conflict. It was not the first time Sweden had chosen to remain neutral. In World War I, Sweden had adopted a similar policy. Now, in 1939, the Swedish government resolved yet again to remain […]
From approximately the 1930s to the 1960s, the idyllic Catskill Mountains in upstate New York occupied a special and unique place in the American travel industry, being the single largest resort area in the United States. With its multitude of hotels, the Catskills attracted a mainly Jewish clientele who were drawn to the food, lots of […]
Wadjda is a cinematic rarity, the first Saudi Arabian feature-length film to be directed by a female Saudi woman. Haifaa al-Mansour’s movie, shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most closed and theocratic societies, is ostensibly innocuous. Wadjda (Waad Mohammed), a spunky 1o-year-old Saudi girl, has her heart set on a green bicycle. […]
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida explores a dark and miserable period in Poland’s history: the Holocaust. Polish films have embraced this theme with increasing frequency since the end of the communist era, as scholar Marek Haltof has written. Ida, which was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, is part and parcel of this genre. Filmed […]
Fifty six years after the appearance of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky serves up a movie remarkably like it with respect to theme, content, spirit and locale. The Railway Man, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, is based on a true story by Eric Lomax, […]
A Russian joke from the 1970s: How many Jews are there in Russia? Six to eight million. How many Jews would leave Russia? Twenty to twenty five million. During the communist era, when Russia was known as the Soviet Union, emigration was generally not permitted. Restrictions were loosened in the early 1970s, allowing a trickle […]
A camera pans over an expanse of impenetrable jungle before zooming in on the boughs and leaves of a soaring tropical hardwood tree. Birds chirp and trill, and in the distance, an airplane trailing smoke and fire crashes into a body of water in a fiery explosion. It is 1942 and the Japanese army is […]