And the Nominees Are…
If you think the Academy Awards are unfair, biased and arbitrary, wait until you see what we\’ve come up with for our first Jewish film awards.
If you think the Academy Awards are unfair, biased and arbitrary, wait until you see what we\’ve come up with for our first Jewish film awards.
In Roger Hanin\’s semi-autobiographical film, \”Soleil\” (1997), 13-year-old Meyer is kicked out of school for being Jewish in Vichy North Africa. It is a sign that things have changed for his family in Algeria, where Jews had peacefully lived for centuries amid the Moslems. Now, Meyer\’s communist father must go into hiding; his mother, Titine (Sophia Loren), must raise her children alone, charming black marketeers into giving her food. She manages to talk authorities into keeping Meyer out of jail when he is caught writing anti-government graffiti.
It was 1942 when 29-year-old Eli Leskley, a Czech-born Jew, was sent to Theresienstadt, a fortified ghetto 50 kilometers from Prague. As a visual artist, he was assigned to the sign workshop, where he had access to paper, paint, ink, pencils and other art supplies. With what must have been a combination of remarkable courage and an overpowering need to document what transpired there, Leskley secretly painted dozens of prison-life scenes, mostly with watercolors and ink on office-sized paper taken from the workshop.
The sounds of heaven and earth merge when David De\’or and Shlomo Bar, two internationally acclaimed Israeli artists, combine their musical talents.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Alfred Uhry, 61, is a Southern Jew who defines himelf as someone who grew up in a community of genteel Southern Jews who wished they were Episcopalian.
Rabbi Stewart Vogel and Dr. Laura Schlessinger devoted nearly a year to working on \”The Ten Commandments\” — no small feat, considering their busy schedules.
The Jewish Community Library is used to catering to the literary needs of groups of school children, Yiddish scholars and day-schoolteachers. But seldom does it get a call for Talmudic texts to grace the set of a sitcom.
The $32 million movie is Beatty\’s baby. He produced, wrote, directed and, of course, is the on-screen linchpin of this outrageous caper — made, ironically, for the ultra-conservative Rupert Murdoch, who owns 20th Century Fox.