This year’s Toronto Jewish Festival, rebranded as the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, runs from May 4-14. The five films reviewed here are eclectic. They’re about a Polish village which once had a substantial Jewish population, an Israeli couple whose marriage grows more stale by the year, an ultra-Orthodox woman who runs for a seat in […]
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from May 4 to 14. To mark this milestone, the festival is rebranding itself as the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. This year’s edition offers a rich and eclectic selection of movies — feature films, documentaries and shorts — from around the world which will […]
Francois Ozon’s romantic drama, Frantz, moves between national borders seamlessly. Languidly unfolding in Germany and France in 1919, a year after the end of World War I, it’s based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 movie, Broken Lullaby. Scheduled to open in Canadian theatres on April 7, Ozon’s spare and affecting film is at once sweet and bitter. […]
Bassem Youssef was the Jon Stewart of Egypt, a whip smart comedian who skewered authority and promoted the tenets of democracy in a country accustomed to authoritarian rule by despots. From 2011 to 2013, he hosted The Show, closely modelled after Stewart’s The Daily Show. A former heart surgeon, he was immensely successful, his nightly […]
Tomer Heymann’s Mr. Gaga, a fast-moving and absorbing documentary about one of the world’s finest choreographers and dancers, takes flight from almost the moment it begins. As the camera pans on the protagonist, Ohad Naharin, he coaches a dancer in his studio. “Really beautiful,” he says before instructing her to loosen up and “let go.” A man […]
In the spring of 1945, as World War II was winding down, the British government commissioned a documentary about the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The supervising director would be the Hollywood auteur Alfred Hitchcock. The screenwriter would be Richard Crossman, who would go on to become a British cabinet minister. The […]
There are now 225 Jewish settlements and outposts in the West Bank, conquered by the Israeli army during the 1967 Six Day War. Since then, Israel and the West Bank have morphed into a single geo-political unit. This inescapable reality has enormous ramifications on the long-simmering Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel’s armed presence in the West Bank […]
Reinhard Heydrich, one of highest-ranking German SS officers, was posted to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to stamp out its resistance movement. Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust, dealt crushing blows to it. As a result, the London-based Czech government-in-exile decided to assassinate him. Two operatives, Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, were parachuted into Czechoslovakia to carry out […]