When I was a teenager, I would sometimes join my mother on her weekly shopping trips to Steinberg, her favorite supermarket in Montreal. She liked it because it was big, bright and bulging with an amazing variety of reasonably priced food and household goods. If shoppers accumulated a sufficient number of Steinberg pink coupons, which […]
Prodigious and prolific, Irving Layton was one of Canada’s most accomplished poets when Donald Winkler of the National Film Board of Canada was assigned to direct a documentary about him. Fifty two minutes in length and released in 1986, Poet: Irving Layton Observed will be streamed online by the NFB in May during Canadian Jewish Heritage […]
Nineteen years before Mordecai Richler’s death in 2001, the National Film Board of Canada made a short documentary about this prominent Canadian novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Mordecai Richler: The Writer and His Roots, directed by Claire Helman, was released in 1983. This 21-minute film can be accessed online during May, in honor of Canadian Jewish […]
Leonard Cohen, the acclaimed Canadian poet and novelist, was only 30 when Donald Brittain and Don Owen of the National Film Board of Canada decided he was worthy of a biopic. Ladies and Gentlemen …. Mr. Leonard Cohen was released in 1965, and in honor of Canadian Jewish Heritage Month, this spare and affecting 44-minute black-and-white […]
Sixty four thousand women and their children are stranded in a bleak refugee camp in an area of northeastern Syria controlled by Kurdish militias. The wives of Islamic State fighters who were either killed in battle or imprisoned after being captured, they yearn to go back to their homes, but their governments have banned them […]
Misha Defonseca’s Holocaust survival story is incredible, beyond belief. At the age of seven, in Nazi-occupied Belgium, she trudged through a forest and kept herself alive by joining a pack of wolves that protected and provided her with scraps of food. In 1997, Defonseca’s memoirs, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was published and […]
Maya Sarfaty’s absorbing and affecting movie, Love It Was Not, brings to light a singular story from the depths of the Holocaust. Scheduled to be screened online at the forthcoming Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs), which runs from April 29 to May 9, it sweeps over the landscape of a love affair that crossed all […]
To its Palestinian inhabitants, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is a source of anger and humiliation. Israeli checkpoints curtail their freedom of movement and Israel’s settlements, military camps and roads divide the West Bank into archipelagos of isolated enclaves, rendering the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state all but impossible. Farah Nablusi’s film, The […]
Danish career diplomat Henrik Kauffmann was one of the unsung heroes of World War II. A fervent anti-Nazi, he generated newspaper headlines when he declared Denmark’s embassy in Washington independent of the Danish government following Germany’s invasion of Denmark on April 9, 1940. With Denmark cooperating with the German occupying force, he decided he could […]
I missed Green Book when it was released in 2018, but thanks to Netflix, I was able to watch this hugely entertaining and uplifting movie. A drama with comedic overtones, it takes place in 1962, when Jim Crow racial laws were still deeply embedded in U.S. southern states. During this era, African Americans driving through […]