It’s 1989 and Ethiopia is being torn apart by a civil war. The country has sunk into the slough of violence and despair and people, particularly Jews, are desperate to leave. Fig Tree, directed by Israeli/Ethiopian filmmaker Aalam-Warqe Davidian, is set during this tumultuous period. Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Fig […]
Category: Film
For five years, until 2018, the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad besieged Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus populated in the main by Syrians opposed to his totalitarian regime. Following the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Eastern Ghouta was regularly pummelled by forces loyal to Assad. In the summer of […]
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Pain And Glory
In his semi-autobiographical film, Pain and Glory, the 70-year-old Spanish director Pedro Almodovar conducts a critical examination of himself. In this respect, the title of the movie is appropriate. Salvador (Antonio Bandaras), the aging character who portrays him, has amassed acclaim in his industry, but now he suffers from a rash of debilitating ailments and […]
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American Muslim
Adam Zucker’s American Muslim leaves a viewer with a nuanced portrait of Muslims in the United States in the age of Donald Trump. It will be screened at New York City’s DOC NYC, the country’s largest documentary film festival, on November 10 and 12. This impassioned and informative movie tells us that Muslims, comprising one percent of […]
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#Anne Frank: Parallel Stories
Anne Frank, the inspirational Dutch Jewish diarist, would have been 90 this year had she lived through the Holocaust. Anne, of course, was not the only Jewish adolescent whose precious life was snuffed out by the Nazis and their collaborators. Lest we forget, one million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah, a tragedy that […]
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Dolce Fine Giornata
Jacek Borcuch’s drama, Dolce Fine Giornata, which opens in Toronto on October 11, oscillates between the sylvan splendor of Tuscany and the hard world beyond its soft, rolling green hills. Maria Linde (Krystyna Janda), a Nobel Prize laureate of Polish Jewish descent, lives in a rustic farmhouse with her Italian husband (Antonio Catania), her single […]
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The Tobacconist
Nikolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, a German-language feature film set in late-193os Vienna, fleshes out an imaginary friendship between a young Austrian man and the celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Unfolding against the Nazi takeover of Austria, it is a jolting reminder of how easily a tolerant society can accommodate itself to totalitarianism and racism. The main character in The […]
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Where’s My Roy Cohn?
The late Roy Cohn is ruthlessly and relentlessly skewered in Matt Trynauer’s bracing biopic, Where’s My Roy Cohn? A man of many parts, Cohn was a brilliant lawyer with questionable scruples, a fierce anti-Communist who prosecuted the Rosenbergs, a political operative who mingled with Republic Party movers and shakers, a social butterfly who consorted with […]
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The Case Of Johanna Langefeld
Johanna Langefeld was a Nazi war criminal with a difference. A German national, she appears to have been the only known concentration camp guard whom some of her victims actually liked. In The Case Of Johanna Langefeld, a documentary currently making the rounds of film festivals, Wladek Jurkow and Gerburg Rohde-Dahl examine her checkered legacy […]
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Promise At Dawn
Eric Barbier’s biopic of the late French novelist and diplomat Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn, is filled with a succession of melodramatic moments befitting his intense and picturesque life. Based on his eponymous best-selling autobiographical novel, it unfolds mainly in Poland and France — where he was formed as a boy and a man — in […]