Inspired by a true story, Trevor Nunn’s espionage drama, Red Joan, unfolds, in part, against the backdrop of two major events — World War II and the Cold War — and is set in Britain and Canada. The central character, Joan Stanley, is modelled after Melita Norwood, the longest-serving Soviet spy in Britain. Recruited in 1937, […]
Category: Film
Categories
Film Charts Persecution Of Jews In Italy
Giorgio Treves’ sobering documentary, 1938-Different, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 3 and May 6, lays bare the devastating impact of fascism on the Jewish community in Italy. In 1938, Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime enacted antisemitic laws that rendered 45,000 Italian Jews second-class citizens. The German invasion of Italy […]
Categories
A Biopic About Hollywood Star Lauren Bacall
Femme fatale Lauren Bacall was a star during Hollywood’s golden age in the 1940s. Strikingly beautiful, with a slim figure, a long mane of hair, seductive eyes and a low, husky voice which could set hearts aflutter, she was a complete unknown when she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart, her future husband, in the 1944 film To […]
Categories
Voyage Of The St. Louis
Eighty years ago next month, the St. Louis, a luxury German passenger liner carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees, left the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. The passengers, possessing valid Cuban visas, expected to be admitted to Cuba, but their hopes were cruelly dashed. The Cuban government turned them away and the vessel […]
Categories
The King of Borek
Sami Alkolombris, a Bulgarian Jewish baker from Jaffa, earned a small fortune and achieved a measure of fame in Israel by selling mouth-watering boreks, or bourekas, a flaky Middle Eastern/Balkan pastry made of phyllo dough and filled with stuffings ranging from salty cheese and spinach to potatoes and meat. Sami initially sold his wares from […]
Categories
Tel Aviv On Fire
The Arab-Israeli conflict is no laughing matter. But in Tel Aviv On Fire, which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 2 and May 4, Sameh Zoabi, a Palestinian director, breaks this mould by means of black humor, using Israel’s long-running dispute with the Palestinians as a source of biting satire. […]
Categories
My Polish Honeymoon
The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors usually have some kind of an affinity, if only a superficial one, with their parent’s or grandparent’s homeland. This is particularly true in the case of Poland, whose prewar Jewish population of 3.3 million was virtually annihilated by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Elise Otzenberger draws on […]
The Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been consigned to purgatory since the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. This theme is fleshed out in Gaza, a sad and expressive documentary by Gary Keane and Andrew McConnell scheduled to be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 30, […]
Lea Tsemel, an Israeli criminal lawyer, is a polarizing figure in Israel. Critics vilify her as a devil’s advocate. Admirers describe her as a champion of human rights. Rachel Leah Jones, the director of Advocate, a documentary scheduled to be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 28, April […]
Categories
Sunset: Europe On The Cusp Of Upheaval
Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes brought the unimaginable horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp uncomfortably close up in Son of Saul, which won the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 2016. Now, three years later in Sunset, which opens in Canada on April 5, Nemes transports us to fin-de-siecle Budapest on the eve of World […]