Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to note the position of the former Indian ambassador to Israel.
When the review committee for the Seattle Jewish Film Festival watched Ajami in October, they knew immediately it should the cornerstone of this year’s event to broach the not-always-pleasant sides of Israeli life and culture.
“This [film] is a complex kind of dialogue between cultures and ethnicities in a democracy that is struggling — 50, 60 years later — to deal with the sort of unseemly sides of itself, as well as the beauty of it,” said festival director Pamela Lavitt.
So when the film was, as Lavitt put it, the “breakaway winner at the Israel Oscars,” and then, on Feb. 2, announced as a nominee for this year’s Academy Awards for best foreign film, festival organizers knew they had something important on their hands.
“We’re thrilled, we feel like this is the linchpin of a dialogue,” she said. “It’s one of the strongest films we’ve ever shown.”
Lavitt described Ajami as Steven Soderbergh’s drug drama Traffic meets Crash, Paul Haggis’s 2004 film about a day in the seamy underside of Los Angeles. Many of Ajami’s characters are played by non-professional actors, and the directors, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, took eight years to see their film to completion.
Ajami is the third Israeli film in a row to receive a nomination, and the main attraction for this year’s festival, which runs from March 11—21. It plays the evening of March 13, less than a week after the Oscar winners are announced. Lavitt hopes to bring the directors to Seattle to help lead the dialogue she hopes the film will start — they’ll be in the U.S. for the ceremony anyway, she noted.
What makes the Academy’s nomination more significant is the festival’s focus this year on films both from and about Israel. But don’t expect a parade of patriotic films featuring smiling kibbutzniks or tourists deep in prayer at the Western Wall.
Where Ajami is the “˜A’ in what Lavitt called “Israel, A to Z,” the “˜Z’ comes in the form of the much quieter Zeruvabel, the first Ethiopian feature film to come from Israel. It is just as jarring, even if it does live in Ajami’s shadow. Both films attracted the attention of the festival committee because of their ability to spark dialogue, Lavitt said, which is an important component of the mission of the festival’s parent organization, the American Jewish Committee.
Rounding out the Israel selections are Jaffa, a tragic love story centered on the beach city adjacent to Tel Aviv that has long been a nexus of Jews, Muslims and Christians. The urban grit and feel of Tel Aviv against the “bucolic, camel-driven” Jaffa, as Lavitt described it, play parts as much as the film’s actors.
Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With the Nazis is a documentary about the man who faced up to Adolf Eichmann and saved thousands of Jews, only to be labeled a traitor in his adopted country of Israel and ultimately assassinated. Director Gaylen Ross will appear to discuss the film.
Another documentary, Voices of El-Sayed, explores the largest deaf community in the world: A Bedouin village in the Negev Desert. The plot thickens when the father of one child decides to have him fitted with a cochlear implant and the ensuing community resistance.
The festival closes with A Matter of Size, a comedy about an overweight Israeli working in a Japanese restaurant who finds his calling as — you guessed it — a sumo wrestler.
The past year on the film festival circuit has seen plenty of controversy surrounding Israel, but it’s unlikely that controversy will make it to SJFF. At the Toronto International Film Festival, a filmmaker objected to the focus on Tel Aviv — Israel had hoped to use the festival as a public relations vehicle — which drew highly publicized attention, in the form of both support and ire, from many Hollywood actors.
Then, at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the screening of Rachel, a film about Evergreen College student Rachel Corrie who died under an Israeli bulldozer while protesting Palestinian rights, resulted in a controversy in that city and others over what should be considered appropriate for a Jewish film festival.
A measure before the area’s Jewish Federation board of directors, supported by community members upset about the screening and a talk afterward by Rachel’s mother Cindy Corrie, would have “[prohibited] support of events and groups that “˜defame’ Israel or partner with those who call for boycotts, divestment or sanctions (BDS) against Israel,” according to j., the Jewish newsweekly of the Bay Area. The measure was voted down almost unanimously.
Beyond her hopes that Seattle’s festival will bring local Jews together rather than divide, Lavitt said she rejected Rachel first and foremost on quality, which she said was too incendiary and unwilling to see more than one side of the story. Unlike the stage play My Name is Rachel Corrie, in which Corrie’s character opens with her head under a sheet and shining a flashlight on her journal, “this film…begins with the body of Rachel Corrie in a morgue,” Lavitt said. “No dialogue could get your head past that.”
Other festival highlights include Rafting to Bombay, which examines the relationship between Jews and India’s historic city from the 1940s through the mid-‘00s. The 2008 attack at the Chabad House in Mumbai will be discussed at a panel that features Dr. Maina Singh, the wife of India’s former ambassador to Israel and a professor at American University, and Nissim Rubin, the AJC’s director of Indian-Jewish relations.
Also expected to attend is Scott Goldstein, director of Where I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story, a chronicle of the life of the late Las Vegas newspaper editor who knocked heads with the mob and ran guns for the Hagana in the nascent Jewish State. Greenspun was, as Lavitt put it, “the last of the real give ‘em hell journalists.” The documentary features Anthony Hopkins as narrator.
Fans of Fiddler on the Roof will rejoice with a presentation — not of the famous 1971 version that featured Chaim Topol — but of the original, a restored copy released in 1939 as Tevye.
“This is the shtetl version,” Lavitt says, “with all its warts and complexities.”
The film starred the biggest Yiddish actor of the day, Maurice Schwartz, and was shot in the U.S. while halfway across the world, the real shtetls were facing the beginning of the end.
“It really is a snapshot,” Lavitt said.
Israel, A to Z
