Desperate times call for desperate tactics. Vadim Perelman’s skillfully-crafted feature film, Persian Lessons, which opens in Canadian theaters on June 16, explores this theme from a unique perspective. Supposedly inspired by true events, and based on a short story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, it unfolds in Nazi-occupied Europe and turns on an extremely unusual relationship between […]
Prora, a Nazi resort in northeastern Germany, was intended to be the world’s largest vacation playground. Consisting of eight functional buildings stretching 4.5 kilometers along the sandy shore of the Baltic Sea, it was designed to accommodate 20,000 vacationers. Construction was halted when World War II broke out in September 1939, dooming Prora to oblivion […]
Leon Prudovsky’s My Neighbor Adolf, which was screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, is a dark, corrosive comedy on the lingering effects of Nazism and the Holocaust. It is set mainly in rural Colombia in 1960, the year Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by the Mossad in Buenos Aires and secretly […]
It is a rite of passage for some senior Israeli high school students. In brief trips to Poland designed to heighten their awareness of the Holocaust, they visit museums, open and closed synagogues, and former Nazi concentration camps. Asaf Saban’s The Delegation focuses on a group of Israeli teenagers who participate on such a trip. […]
Giuseppe Piccioni’s appealing Italian-language movie, The Shadow of the Day, unfolds in a small town in late-1930s fascist Italy against the backdrop of a highly improbable love affair. It will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 10. Luciano (Riccardo Scamarcio), the middle-aged manager of a fine restaurant in Ascoli Piceno, is […]
The mail-order bride business in Israel is entertainingly portrayed by Michal Vinik in Valeria Is Getting Married, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 8. Droll yet tense, and set in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, this enjoyable movie underscores the intermittent joys and pitfalls of the transactional, […]
Israeli casualty notification officers may well be saddled with the most emotionally draining job in Israel’s armed forces. Their solemn and wrenching duty is to inform next of kin that their loved one has been killed. Since Israel is almost constantly at war, they are often busy. Knock on the Door, an intensely moving Israeli […]
Ofir Raul Graizer’s soulful drama, America, explores the complex friendship of two men who love the same woman. Scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 5, this heart-felt Israeli movie unfolds in the United States and Israel over the course of about two years. Eli (Michael Moshonov), a swimming coach […]
Rafi Nelson was a character par excellence, a legendary Israeli entrepreneur whose Red Sea beach resort was synonymous with a bohemian, hedonistic lifestyle. Rafi Nelson’s Holiday Village was located in Taba, a one square kilometer enclave in the northern Sinai Peninsula adjacent to Israel’s border with Egypt. It attracted an eclectic clientele of ordinary and […]
Hebron, with population 250,000, is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank containing a Jewish community. The 800 Jews of Hebron are religious nationalists and live along the length of Shuhada Street, barely coexisting with their Palestinian neighbors and protected by a phalanx of Israeli soldiers. Their small urban enclave, known as H2 under […]