Erez Laufer’s revelatory biopic, Rabin In His Own Words, paints an expansive portrait of Yitzhak Rabin, one of Israel’s most distinguished public figures. Assassinated by a right-wing fanatic in 1995, he was twice prime minister, minister of defence, ambassador to the United States, and chief of staff of the armed forces. He served his country […]
Stefanie Zweig and her assimilated secular Jewish family were hounded out of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. For the next decade, they lived in remote areas of Kenya, a British colony. With the defeat of the Nazis, she and her parents returned to Germany, where she became a journalist and best-selling author. One of […]
Syrian refugees by the tens of thousands have poured into Canada in the past few years as the civil war in Syria has continued to rage. Peace By Chocolate, a Canadian feature film by Jonathan Keijser, empathetically explores this wave of immigration through the eyes of a Muslim family from Damascus. Based on a true story, it […]
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 […]