Twenty two years have elapsed since Israel’s withdrawal from its self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon. Joseph Cedar’s feature-length movie, Beaufort, is set in an embattled Israeli outpost during this period and recreates the denouement of Israel’s misadventure in that country. Currently available on the ChaiFlicks streaming network, it was shot on location on the […]
Michael McGowan’s drama, All My Puny Sorrows, is shot through with fragments of melancholy, despair and dread. Scheduled to open in theatres in Canada on April 15, it is based on a book by the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and focuses on two accomplished sisters, Yoli (Alison Pill) and Elf (Sarah Gadon), whose lives offer […]
It was an extraordinary love affair that blossomed in the most unusual of places. Nelly Mousset-Vos and Nadine Hwang met in Ravensbruck — a Nazi concentration camp near Berlin set aside for women — in the winter of 1944. Although they were separated in 1945, they were reunited after World War II and lived together […]
Sexual harassment and assault are the overlapping themes of Working Woman, a fine and intricate Israeli psychological drama now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming network. Michal Aviad’s feature-length movie, set in Tel Aviv and Rishon LeZion and starring an accomplished cast, deals with this volatile issue intelligently and sensitively. Orna Haviv (Liron Ben-Shlush) accepts a […]
Eva Husson’s languid British romantic drama, Mothering Sunday, which opens in Canadian theatres on April 8, primarily unfolds during a single day in the spring or summer of 1924, but constantly oscillates between the present, the past and the future. Its chief character, Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), works as a maid in the stately country […]
The first feature-length movie about the French mime Marcel Marceau, The Art of Silence, will be screened at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto, which runs from April 28 to May 8. It was written and directed by the Swiss filmmaker Maurizius Staerkle Drux. Marceau (1923-2007) subscribed to the theory that he did […]
Herbert Gildin was one of the lucky ones. He slipped out of Nazi Germany by the skin of his teeth, finding refuge in neutral Sweden and then the United States. Whether or not he was a Holocaust survivor in the strictest sense of the word is debatable, but Gildin certainly experienced the savagery of a […]
Nearly 80 years have elapsed since the execution of Sophie Scholl, the courageous German political activist who sought to topple Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Hailed as a heroine in contemporary Germany, she was a member of White Rose, a small but militant organization, based in Munich, that conveyed its pointed messages of resistance through trenchant […]
Gerard Oury was clearly influenced by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy when he directed The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, an uproarious and madcap French comedy now being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. Although it was released in 1974, it has not been dulled by the […]
Small Jewish communities in Canada are rarities these days. Since the 1950s and 1960s, they have been disappearing as elders have died and children and grandchildren have moved to big cities like Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. A documentary by Sonya Jampolsky and Michael MacDonald, Minyan on the Mira: The Jewish People of Glace Bay, […]