Arik Rotstein’s moody Israeli film, Antenna, is ostensibly about a minor dispute concerning a cellular antenna. In actuality, it’s about family dynamics. The movie — scheduled to be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation’s Chai Tea series on Sunday, December 10 at 12:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, 5095 […]
Passions erupt and flow like red-hot lava in Woody Allen’s 48th film, Wonder Wheel, which opens in Canadian theatres on December 8. Set in the 1950s amid the honky-tonk atmosphere of New York City’s Coney Island amusement park, this dark, high-strung drama delves into the lives of four people who touch each other’s hearts profoundly. […]
What would Christmas be like without iconic Christmas songs such as White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Sleigh Ride or Chessnuts Roasting on an Open Fire? Larry Weinstein asks this intriguing question in his film, Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, whose world premiere takes place on the Documentary Channel on December 3 at 8 p.m. CBC TV […]
She was the essence of beauty and brains. She was Hedy Lamarr, the alluring Hollywood actress and brilliant amateur scientist whose secret communication device ushered in the brave new era of cell phones, WiFi, drones, Bluetooth technology and GPS guidance systems. One of the most glamorous movie stars of the late 1930s and early 1940s, she’s the […]
You wouldn’t think that Israel, a nation besieged by enemies, lends itself to comedy. Think again. As Jews know from bitter experience, comedy defuses tensions and is tailor-made for people and countries under siege. Which brings us to Holy Air, a film written and directed by Shady Srour, a member of Israel’s large Arab minority. […]
One of the most disgraceful incidents in modern Poland took place in Kielce on July 4, 1946, when a mob murdered 42 Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The pogrom, a watershed event signifying the persistence of antisemitism in Poland, prompted tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate. During the Communist era, this murderous incident […]
Women in Switzerland did not win the right to vote in federal elections until a 1971 referendum finally settled the issue. Petra Volpe’s exceptionally fine feature film, The Divine Order, which opens in Canada on November 3, examines this socially-charged topic through the eyes of several courageous women in a remote Swiss village in the […]
There are two shining beacons in the bleak darkness of the Holocaust. Amid a miasma of cruelty and violence, a pair of Nazi-occupied countries shielded Jews. Bulgaria, an ally of Germany, passed antisemitic laws and sent 11,000 foreign Jews from Macedonia and Thrace to Nazi extermination camps. Bulgaria, however, resisted German pressure t0 deport its […]
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose headline stories on the burgeoning Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to become the first U.S. president to resign while still in office, obtained their explosive information from an anonymous source known as Deep Throat. For years, Deep Throat’s identity was shrouded in mystery, but in […]
Jerome David Salinger’s iconic novel about adolescent angst and alienation, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold 65 million copies in 30 countries since its publication in 1951. Acclaimed as a masterpiece of American literature, it catapulted its author to fame, a status he categorically rejected as he withdrew from the limelight. Having moved from […]