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April 22, 2004

Filmmakers Bring Maturity to Cinema

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Israeli filmmaker Shemi Zarhin is a gourmet cook and baker, whose diet-defying cakes, especially, soothe the vilest temper.

"I cook Sephardic style, Ashkenazi and Japanese," Zarhin said in a phone call from Tel Aviv. "Next time you’re in Israel, come by and I’ll show you."

Not by chance, the 16-year-old title character of his film, "Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi," cooks up a storm. Besides the family meals, he also does the laundry, cleans up, tries to make peace among the shouting family members and bathes his French-speaking grandfather, who greets him every morning with the film’s title.

Shlomi of the film, played with absolute veracity by Oshri Cohen, is not exactly Shemi, its director and writer, but they are at least closely related. Both of their families originally came from Morocco and Tangiers and grew up with the mindset that they were part of Israel’s underclass.

"I was born in Tiberias, which could be a very beautiful town, but the reality was hard, there were lots of unemployed," Zarhin recalled. "My family arrived in Palestine 200 to 300 years ago. The Ashkenazim were here only 100 years, but they were the upper class."

Shlomi keeps the family going, but is considered none too bright. He is flunking out in school and with the girls. When he suggests to a classmate that they "upgrade" their relationship — a wonderful Hebrew slang term introduced by Zarhin and equivalent to having sex — the girl "freezes" him out.

Zarhin, now 42, did not detail his own childhood, but, he said with emotion, "I was miserable. Childhood is a waste of time."

Perhaps as an escape, "making films was my dream from the beginning," he said. "But it was not easy to get the money and to leave for a big city like Tel Aviv."

However, he graduated from the film school at Tel Aviv University, taught there and is now on the faculty of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television College in Jerusalem.

He started out making TV commercials, and nine years ago he wrote and directed his first film feature, "Passover Fever," which did very well in Israel and foreign film festivals. Zarhin followed up with the thriller "Dangerous Acts," and "Bonjour" is his third feature.

The main problem with "Bonjour’s" Shlomi, who turns out to be a remarkably gifted youngster, is not just that people consider him stupid, but that he has internalized that evaluation himself.

"The contrast between a person’s outer image and his inner truth has always interested me," Zarhin said. "It takes two outsiders to open Shlomi’s eyes to who he really is."

"Bonjour" is considerably more cheerful and wide-ranging than just a dissection of adolescent angst. For one, it represents a slice of Israeli life unfamiliar to most Ashkenazim, here or in Israel.

For another, the film has considerable humor and some nongraphic sex, though the language, even in subtitles, is quite vigorous.

"Someone told me that I had made a comedy with tears," Zarhin said.

The producer of "Bonjour" is Eitan Evan, who will be honored on opening night with the Israeli Film Festival’s Cinematic Award.

Described as "a major force in the Israeli film industry for the last 25 years," Evan produced two of Israel’s best-loved movies, "The Summer of Avia" and "Under the Domin Tree," both with Gila Almagor.

Evan, an old friend of director Zarhin, recalled in a phone call from his home in Herzliyah that "Bonjour" came together so smoothly and quickly, "It seemed to have a life of its own."

"Shemi, who had written ‘Bonjour’ in five days, showed it to me, though he wasn’t sure whether it would be film or a novel," Evan said. Funding was guaranteed almost immediately, itself a minor miracle, and the film wrapped in four months, about one-third the normal timeline in Israel.

One reason for the quick turnaround was that the project generated an early buzz, so actors vied for auditions. Another reason, said Evan, was that "Shemi and I work so well together, we can read each other’s thoughts."

Evan, the son of Hungarian immigrants, took a degree in economics at the Hebrew University and then went to England for further study.

"There someone gave me camera and I was hooked," he said. "I decided on a career transfer, went to film school in England, returned to Israel and first worked on two American films being shot in Israel."

Evan formed his own company in 1977 and has since produced such titles as "Wooden Gun," "Clean Sweep," "On the Edge," "Family Secret" and "Dangerous Acts."

In the early ’90s, he was the Israeli producer for two American TV films, "Held Hostage" and "Charlton Heston Presents the Bible."

Evan, an upbeat kind of person, is optimistic about the current and future state of Israeli films and their greater acceptance in the United States.

"Our films are becoming more mature, we have better production values, and we’re getting a new crop of talented young directors," he said.

Film festival viewers will see a more urban aspect of Israeli life in Amos Gitai’s "Alila," set in a rundown Tel Aviv neighborhood, bordering Jaffa.

Gitai has populated a shabby apartment building with a dozen characters who battle each other and their surroundings for survival and small share of happiness.

As Israelis of diverse backgrounds, they naturally fight and stick their noses in each other’s business, but when the chips are down they pitch in and come to their neighbor’s aid.

"Alila" is Gitai’s 30th film feature or documentary in as many years, which include, most recently, "Kedma," "Eden," "Kippur" and "Kadosh."

At 53, Gitai is arguably the most controversial of Israeli filmmakers, who insists on pressing his countrymen’s most sensitive nerves. As a British journalist put it, "Gitai is a director with a mission to tell the country of his birth the truth about its intolerance, its insecurities and its willingness to bowdlerize its own recent history."

In an interview with The Journal a couple of years ago, Gitai accepted the description, adding, "I have great compassion and passion for Israel, but I want it to remain as human as possible. I will never legitimize what Israelis may do wrong, just because I belong to them."

In the strife-ridden Middle East, Gitai sees movies as a possible bridge between Arabs and Jews.

"To me, cinema is not just a commodity to be sold like hamburgers, but it represents a form of dialogue," he said. "Beneath the surface, there is already an undercurrent of cultural dialogue in the Middle East.

"For instance, Israeli music is affected by Arab music," he continued. "When the time comes for a real peace agreement, it can’t be just a piece of paper. There must be, at the same time, a cultural dialogue."

Filmmakers Bring Maturity to Cinema Read More »

How to Pick a Film That Translates

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How do you plan an Israeli film festival to screen in American cities? Very carefully, according to Paul Fagen, program director of the 20th annual Israel Film Festival.

Although the event kicks off April 29, his work actually began late last year, when he and festival founder Meir Fenigstein launched their annual hunt for the best Israeli features, TV movies, series, documentaries and student shorts.

High on their list were movies that had received "buzz" at the Jerusalem Film Festival, that had obtained a U.S. theatrical release or that had swept the 2003 Israeli Film Academy awards, Israel’s Oscars. Also considered were submissions from Israeli distributors and TV production companies. By early this year, Fagen had amassed a stack of approximately 85 videotapes.

"I’d just camp out and watch four to five movies a day," said the programmer, who also produces celebrity events for the American Film Institute. He jotted down impressions and rated submissions on a 1-10 scale.

"To be considered, a film has to rate at least a 6.5," he said.

Fagen, an intense and focused man, watches every minute of every film: "Many programmers who have voluminous submissions only watch the first 20 minutes of a movie and continue only if it interests them," he said. "I’ll only turn something off if it’s so dreadful it turns me off completely."

Eventually Fagen scheduled 43 entries, including 11 new features and seven classic films for a retrospective section. He selected the 11-time Israeli Oscar winner, "Nina’s Tragedies," as the opening night film, a virtual no-brainer. It rated a nine on Fagen’s scale.

But choosing other movies proved trickier.

"It’s not just, ‘Is it good,’ but ‘Does it translate?’" Fagen said. "A movie can’t just be relevant to Israelis but to festival audiences, which are both American and Israeli."

Comedies, in particular, can be problematic, because "humor comes through much better in one’s native language," he said. In a way, it helps that he does not speak Hebrew, because if subtitles don’t make him laugh, they won’t make other Americans laugh, either, Fagen added. "Some films are universally funny, and some aren’t."

One comedy that easily passed the Fagen test was Yuval Granot’s "Pretty Yardena," about a haughty dancer who returns to her small town after she fails to make it in Tel Aviv.

"She’s essentially like the prom queen who has to crawl back home, because her dream didn’t work out," he said. "Americans can certainly relate to that."

A pricklier problem Fagen sometimes encounters is that while he aims to showcase the best of Israeli cinema — without any kind of censorship — he is careful about films that present the Arab-Israeli conflict in a propagandistic or inflammatory way.

However, what seems inappropriate one year can be OK the next. An example is the TV movie, "Purim," which revolves around the repercussions of a suicide bombing on Arab and Israeli bystanders. The movie was initially submitted for the 2003 festival, which was delayed due to the Iraq War.

"Including it would have felt sensationalistic," he said. "Because there was so much going on in the news about terrorism and bombing, I shied away from putting too much of that in the festival."

When the political situation calmed down a bit, Fagen decided to include the drama in the 2004 lineup.

Like one-quarter of festival entries, "Purim" is a product of Israeli television, a fast-growing market since the advent of cable and satellite TV in the Jewish State in the 1990s.

"We began including TV in the festival about nine years ago, because the Israeli movie output is so small, only about a dozen films a year." Fagen said. "Many of the best feature directors also work in television; the product is pretty good compared to what we see in our American commercial TV."

This year’s festival includes episodes of a successful Israeli dramatic series, "Jerusalem Brew," which presents religious-secular conflicts within the microcosm of one family. The show revolves around an observant household struggling to hold on to tradition (one son is a talented musician who grapples with whether he should perform on Shabbat). Other festival entries reflect societal changes, such as the decay of the kibbutz system.

While such features are made for well under a million dollars, Fagen said they don’t have shoddy production values.

"In general, Israeli directors know how to work within their budgets," he said. "They’re not going to go out and build a village in the middle of nowhere; they choose simple locations. They tell straightforward, human stories. And that’s something everyone can relate to."

How to Pick a Film That Translates Read More »

Complex Heroines Mirror Director

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Since actress Michal Bat-Adam became the first woman to direct an Israeli feature film in the late 1970s, she’s created some of the most striking heroines in Israeli cinema.

"Moments" (1979) tells of an intensely charged friendship between two young women, "The Thin Line" (1980) recalls Bat-Adam’s childhood with her mentally ill mother, "Boy Takes Girl" (1991) depicts a youth’s struggle to adapt to life on a farming cooperative and "Life Is Life" (2003) involves a troubled adulteress.

If her heroines are often or independent, so is the director. As a child, she lived on a kibbutz, without parents, because her bipolar mother was unable to care for her at home. Practicing the violin for hours each day "was a bit of a compensation for not having parents," she said.

Upon leaving the kibbutz, Bat-Adam earned her living in the orchestral pit of musical theater productions and "felt quite jealous of actresses on the stage." To "get rid of the acting bug," she applied to the prestigious Beit Zvi drama school; after graduation came choice roles with Israel’s esteemed Habima theater. It was on the stage, around 1972, that she caught the eye of filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi, her future husband.

In his Oscar-nominated "I Love You, Rosa," Bat-Adam portrayed a 20-year-old widow who doesn’t go with the flow when she is betrothed to her 11-year-old brother-in-law. She went on to depict other free thinkers in films such as Mizrahi’s "The House on Chelouche Street."

While living in Paris in the late 1970s, she also thought for herself when roles eluded her due to the language barrier. Bat-Adam wrote a screenplay with a part for herself but decided to direct it instead.

The result was her controversial "Moments," which angered some feminists for its depiction of jealousy between two modern women. In response, Bat-Adam said she "wrote the movie because I saw that some supposedly liberated women lived inside their heads, not their hearts, and I didn’t like this way of ignoring how we really feel."

Since then, she’s directed eight more features, including "A Thousand and One Wives," which dissects complicated women.

"I know that sometimes people say of my work, ‘Oh, it’s a film of Michal Bat-Adam,’" she said (translation: it’s a chick flick). "But I don’t think you can create a female character just to be a plaything for the men. You have to tell her story as well, to make her a full human being."

Complex Heroines Mirror Director Read More »

Chicks in Flicks Play Big Role in Israel

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Just as Charlize Theron had her "Monster," Ayelet July Zurer has "Nina’s Tragedies," the opening night film of this year’s Israel Film Festival.

A year and a half ago, Zurer, like Theron, was a 20-something actress who had done some modeling — in her case, in TV commercials — seeking a splashy role to showcase her talents. Then she read Savi Gabizon’s tragicomic screenplay, "Nina’s Tragedies," revolving around an impetuous widow. "I immediately felt she had to be mine," Zurer told The Journal by phone from Tel Aviv.

"Nina is someone who needs to be filled by love; if she is empty, she needs to be filled again, immediately," Zurer said. "I connected, because I had just found love in my life — I got married during a break in the film’s rehearsal process — and I knew what made her tick. I imagined that Nina was like water: very emotional, never thinking too much."

For her standout performance, Zurer earned best actress awards from the Jerusalem Film Festival and the Israeli Film Academy, her country’s Oscar. She’s now one of Israel’s most recognizable actresses, although she will continue earning paychecks in the thousands of dollars, not millions like Oscar-winner Theron. Not that she’s complaining.

Although the Israeli industry is small, churning out only about a dozen movies a year, the films often feature strong roles for women, she said. It’s a far cry from Hollywood, where emphasis is placed on macho action and effects flicks that appeal to the youth market.

"In a way, Israeli actresses are lucky that our industry is so poor and that most films are made for well under a million dollars," Zurer said. "We can’t afford thrillers, car chases, fancy effects, so films must focus on human stories, which usually involve women. There are roles written for the kind of movies you in America call ‘chick flicks.’"

Yael Abecassis, who stars in Amos Gitai’s "Alila" and Michal Bat-Adam’s "Life Is Life," agreed.

"It’s a good moment for Israeli actresses," she said.

The trend is evident in other movies playing at the 20th annual Israel Film Festival April 29-May 13, many of which feature complex heroines. In 2003’s "Life Is Life," Abecassis plays an unstable, 30ish woman embroiled in an affair with an older, self-absorbed writer. In Yuval Granot’s charming "Pretty Yardena," Zurer portrays a 28-year-old dancer who returns home to take a college entrance exam — on her old flame’s wedding day. In 1994’s "Aya, An Imagined Autobiography," actress-director Michal Bat-Adam essentially plays herself, a filmmaker directing a movie about her troubled childhood.

Actresses have come a long way since the 1980s, according to Katriel Schory of the Israel Film Fund. Around 1985, Schory recalled, famed Columbia executive David Putman visited the Jewish state and observed that movies were "a man’s domain."

Because the directors were male, "the stories they wanted to tell dealt a lot with the army, with the soldier’s life and where the allegiance of soldiers should lie," he said.

Actress Gila Almagor ("Fortuna," "El Dorado"), considered the grande dame of Israeli cinema, described the consequence for actresses: "In the early years, most of us were relegated to playing soldiers’ girlfriends or mothers," she said.

Along with Bat-Adam ("I Love You, Rosa"), Almagor was one of a few actresses to regularly land weightier roles, although her phone stopped ringing during the heyday of 1980s military cinema. After six years of virtual unemployment, she fell into a deep depression.

"For five days, I didn’t stop crying, I didn’t comb my hair and I stayed under the blankets," she said.

It was only when she feared she was turning into her mother, a Holocaust survivor who had suffered acute mental illness, that she came out of her funk. In a 10-day white heat, she wrote an autobiographical novel, "The Summer of Avia," about her childhood relationship with her mother. The book became an acclaimed 1988 film that starred Almagor and resuscitated her career.

But for most actresses, the change didn’t come until the 1990s, when movies became more personal than political, said Dan Fainaru of Israel’s Cinemateque magazine.

In the past five years, even more female roles have emerged as filmmakers have explored their ethnic roots, courtesy of the new Israeli focus on multiculturalism.

"These films often revolve around families, which require actresses," Schory said, citing Georgian director Dover Kosashvili’s 2002 hit, "Late Marriage," as an example.

Almagor, for her part, sees another reason for the good news: the emergence of female writer-directors such as Bat-Adam, Tzipi Trope and Julie Shles ("Afula Express"). While only Bat-Adam and Trope have made more than four features apiece, the filmmakers have made an impact.

"When women started to become immersed in moviemaking, they brought their problems, their world to Israeli cinema," Almagor said.

Bat-Adam explained it this way: "Because I’m a woman, the stories I tell involve women," she said. "Even in ‘Life Is Life,’ which [ostensibly] centers upon a male author, you feel his lover is equally important; that it’s her story as well as his."

In the current cinema, actresses earn as much as actors and roles are available for women in their 50s, as well as their 20s, Schory said.

"It’s not like America, where actresses are finished at 40," he said. "We don’t have a Meryl Streep-Jessica Lange problem here."

Because Israeli cinema isn’t focused on the youth market, he added, not all ingenues have to be gorgeous, although they do need to possess solid acting skills. "Most actresses are alumni of the best Israeli drama schools," he said.

Yet Almagor, 64, believes she did encounter an ageist glass ceiling. "Now that I’m over 60, they don’t write good movie roles for women my age," she said. She intends to remedy the problem by writing a new part for herself, just as she did with "Summer of Avia" in the 1980s. "I won’t sit home and wait," she said.

Despite Zurer’s success with "Nina’s Tragedies," she plans to follow Almagor’s example.

"If at a certain age acting becomes more of a problem, we women need to create projects for ourselves," she said.

For tickets and information about festival screenings of "Nina’s Tragedies," "Alila," "Life Is Life," "Pretty Yardena" and "Aya, An Imagined Autobiography," call (877) 966-5566.

Chicks in Flicks Play Big Role in Israel Read More »

Israel’s New Wave Brings Diverse Voices, Stories to Screen

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Fresh winds are blowing through the Israeli cinema these days.

The change is apparent, particularly on the international scene — which never had much time for the typical parochial Israeli productions that couldn’t possibly interest anyone outside their own hometown.

In the course of the last year, Israeli films have made appearances and garnered awards at festivals around the world from Cannes to Tokyo, Berlin and Mar del Plata, Karlovy Vary and Tribeca, Venice and Toronto, Amsterdam and Pusan. The festivals helped the Israeli films find distribution channels they had never known — to wit, the American release of "Broken Wings," "James’ Journey to Jerusalem" and "Yossi and Jaeger," received distribution deals, with others, such as "Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi" and "Walk on Water" to follow soon.

What’s going on? Simple: a new generation of filmmakers have arrived on the scene. This is the generation that had television as their babysitter, their parents’ video cameras documenting every birthday and their own bar mitzvah footage to work on. By the time they went to an accredited film school — and there are plenty of those around — they already knew more about filmmaking than most of their lecturers, who had grown up only 10 to 15 years before, in awe of cumbersome film cameras, which they were hardly ever allowed to touch.

For this new generation of filmmakers, there is nothing particularly sacred in making movies; as far as they’re concerned, it’s a natural process. They aren’t committed to making a new major statement with each new picture. And they are far more concerned with their own personal experiences than they are with the future of the nation. Since they deal with subjects that are intimate and familiar to them, they are closer to their characters, and their stories are more immediate and therefore ring more authentically in the ears of the world. And with the backing of a recently installed Cinema Law — which offers basic support to kick-start their projects — they have plenty of chances to express themselves.

Some of the themes they tackle have been kicked around in Israel for a long time — ethnicity, for instance. But in their hands, it’s taken a new turn. Once upon a time, ethnic comedies were a sure recipe for the local box office, particularly when they sent up the conflict between flabby, overfed, self-contented European Jews who were playing the straight men, and the lean, mean, rough and resourceful Asian Jews, who provided the comedy, with an across-the-tracks Romeo-Juliet romance thrown in for a good measure.

Nowadays, filmmakers themselves are from varied ethnic communities: Russian, Sephardim and others make films, breaking the Ashkenaz monopoly.

Dover Kosashvili can afford to deal exclusively with his own Georgian community in "Gift From Heaven," just as he previously did in his enormously successful "Late Marriage." No need for a straight man to help with the laughs.

And the same goes for Shemi Zarhin’s coming-of-age drama, "Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi" or David Ofek’s multilayered portrait of the Iraqi emigration, "The Barbecue People."

Thankfully, other once-popular film genres have been exported to commercial television, which is eager to pick up shows about teenage romps and candid-camera idiocies and air them alongside soap operas, on which quite a few new film directors cut their teeth. That is, before they went to cinema, for some pretty painful probes into generational conflicts and dysfunctional families, like Nir Bergman’s earnest and moving "Broken Wings" or Savi Gavison’s black satire, "Nina’s Tragedies."

But don’t expect that this new wave has disappeared, turning its back on the main issues Israel is facing right now and comfortably retreating into its own intimate problems. True, the spiraling escalation of terror has left very little room for fiction or imagination to embroider on, and when sometimes the political situation serves as a backdrop, it is mostly in films made by the older generation, like Amos Gitai’s "Alila," in which a young man called up by the army refuses to go.

Yet, where fiction has primarily avoided the thorny political situation, documentary cinema takes it up with a vengeance. And there is plenty of it around. Documentaries are easier and less expensive to access than fiction, and the modern techniques offer the option to react immediately to everything that happens. As television channels eagerly lap them up, Israeli documentaries have established a solid reputation around the world for their unflinching determination to look reality in the face: From the grim routines of road blocks in Yoav Shamir’s "Checkpoint" (best film at the prestigious Amsterdam Documentary Festival), to Ofek and Yossi Maimon’s investigative "No. 17 Is Anonymous" (recently shown at the New Directors series at New York’s MoMA) –which display the spectrum of the population affected by a suicide bomber, while trying to identify one dead body no one claims — to "Sewing for Living" by July Schles and Doron Zabari, which deals with unemployment and the economy crisis that no amount of official government statements can dissimulate. Not very pretty pictures and not the kind cherished by the official state channels.

To show that Israeli cinema hasn’t lost its bite, as it has been accused of in some quarters, it might have switched fronts and changed tactics, but it is still as angry and belligerent as it ever was.

Israel’s New Wave Brings Diverse Voices, Stories to Screen Read More »

Behind the Festival: Poogy the Producer

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How do you go from being a member of one of Israel’s most popular bands to being the creator of a vibrant film festival in America?

Well, the story is a long one, and if you’ve got some time, Meir Fenigstein will be sure to tell it to you. But on the eve of the 20th anniversary of Israel’s film festival — opening Thursday, April 29 — Fenigstein hasn’t much time to discuss the last two decades of his roller-coaster ride in creating the festival. But if you’re willing to put up with numerous interruptions from "emergency calls" from overseas filmmakers and local hoi polloi and who knows whom, you might find out about the man behind the festival.

Fenigstein started the first festival in 1981 in Boston — but really he was just helping someone screen some Israeli movies. They showed six films to 3,000 people. Two years later, the official festival began in New York, and now, 21 years later (he took a year off), the Israeli Film Festival shows 43 films to more than 45,000 people in four cities. How it went from zero to 60 is the story of one Israeli’s chutzpah, perseverance and luck.

"What made me decide to start the film festival?," Fenigstein ponders the question aloud, as if he’d never really thought about it. "I’ll give you a little background," he says, and then begins 53 years ago, with his birth in Tel Aviv to Holocaust survivors.

The story gets interesting when he joined the army and got to Lehakat Hanachal, the Nachal unit’s entertainment troupe, which used to be a starting point for some of Israel’s most famous singers, such as Chaim Topol, Arik Einstein and Yehoram Gaon. (The story of the musical group is immortalized in the 1978 film, "Halehaka" — "The Troupe" — which Fenigstein stars in; next week on the film’s 25th anniversary, it is being released on DVD and shown in Israel as part of Independence Day festivities.) Fenigstein, a drummer who acquired the nonsensical nickname Poogy, joined up with other soon-to-be-famous musicians like Danny Sanderson and Gidi Gov to form Kaveret (Hebrew for beehive).

If you’ve ever been to a religious wedding, you probably have danced to one of Kaveret’s most famous songs, "Yoya," whose humorous lyrics can be roughly translated as such: "I received a harsh punishment/they sentenced me to death./I sat in the electric chair/and said goodbye to my car./If only I could have at least/switched my chair./Because you know what they say,/you change your place, you change your luck."

But Poogy’s luck did change. After three albums, one North American tour, one performance at the Eurovision song contest (they lost to ABBA) and almost four years together, the beehive fell apart. And life for Poogy — now back to being Fenigstein — was never the same.

"I was disappointed," he says, the enthusiasm fading from his voice. "Don’t forget, we started when I was in the army, so I was pretty young then." Kaveret was more than just a band, it was a creative family — they did sketches ("Poogy Tales"), radio, television — which in a small country like Israel is a sure guarantee for widespread fame. "For every good thing, there’s an end," he laments.

Shooting stars must land somewhere, and after Fenigstein dabbled in acting for some years in Israel, he found himself in Boston. It was there he met a Tel Aviv University film professor on sabbatical who asked him to bring a couple of films from Israel.

Now comes the part of the story when pluck and luck coincide: Fenigstein went to his friend, megaproducer-director Menachem Golan, to ask for the films, and someone said, "Are you going to make a festival?"

"What do you mean?" Fenigstein asked the guy, because he’d never heard of a film festival. While these days it seems that every other neighborhood is starting its own film festival, especially a niche festival like "shorts" or "Jewish" or "Irish," back in the ’80s there was no festival circuit. But Fenigstein went to one of the nascent fests — Toronto — which today is one of the biggest, along with Sundance and Berlin. It inspired him to create one of his own.

"I didn’t know what I was doing," Fenigstein says. He called it, "The First Annual Israeli Film Festival in New England," and produced an eight-page booklet (today, the booklet is over 200 pages). A week before the festival opening, he woke up, sweating, shaking — basically having a panic attack. "I asked myself, ‘Look what happened, are you willing to die for this?’ And I didn’t believe the answer. Yes, I was willing to do it."

Once he knew what was in his heart, there was no stopping him. Not that it was easy.

Israelis didn’t understand what he was doing. They asked him, "Why do you want to take my film? Why would I want to give it to you? How are you going to promote it?"

Fenigstein hooked up with partners and took the films to New York and by the first "official" festival in 1983, he had doubled his audience to 6,000 people. In 1986, he held the one-city fest in Los Angeles, at the Nuart in Santa Monica. It was only a decade ago that the festival became permanently bi-coastal, and in the last four years, he’s added Chicago and Miami to the roster.

In today’s competitive film industry, the Israel Film Festival is an agent for the growing but small Israeli film and television market. In Hollywood tradition, in order to bring in the stars, he honors celebs (this year Norman Jewison and Gale Anne Hurd) and tries to bring in distributors for tachlis: to get the movies picked up in America.

Over the last 25 years, Israel and the United States have had a close relationship, but conflicts have been many in the political arena. Like much art, The Israel Film Festival provided America with a view beyond the headlines.

Yet Fenigstein didn’t do it to be a publicist for his country: "It wasn’t a mission for Israel. It was something that I needed to create for myself, after Poogy, to create my new spine," he recalls. "I didn’t know I was going to do it 10 years later…. I didn’t know that I was still going to be here 20 years later."

Behind the Festival: Poogy the Producer Read More »

Q & A With Jonathan Kirsch

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With best-selling books like "The Harlot by the Side of the Road" and "Moses: A Life," Jonathan Kirsch has been pioneering an unusual genre that combines themes religious, historical and literary, written with a Jewish sensibility. Kirsch, 54, who divides his time among the practice of law, writing books and reviewing books for the Los Angeles Times (and serves as pro bono legal counsel to The Jewish Journal) recently spoke with Sandee Brawarsky about his latest best-seller, "God Against the Gods: The History of War Between Monotheism and Polytheism" (Viking Press, $25.95), a book that powerfully evokes Rome and Palestine of antiquity and recently snagged a spot on the Los Angeles Times Best-Seller List.

Sandee Brawarsky: What inspired you to take on this subject?

Jonathan Kirsch: "God Against the Gods" started with a remarkable but mostly overlooked figure in history, the fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian. He came to the throne after Constantine had embraced Christianity, revealed himself to have been a secret pagan and vowed to undo the revolution that Constantine and his sons had worked in the name of monotheism. For that, he is called "the Apostate" in Christian tradition. But Julian was a remarkable man, charismatic and visionary, and he sought only to re-establish the freedom of religion that was the hallmark of classical paganism. Indeed, he even promised to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem at his own expense so that the Jewish people could resume the practice of their faith as described in the Torah. Julian reigned less than two years before dying in battle against the Persians; his reign is what I described as one of the great "what ifs" of history. If Julian’s pagan counter-revolution had succeeded — and if freedom of religion had been re-established at that early date — could we have avoided the excesses of true belief that stain the history of monotheism, including the Crusades, the Inquisition and countless martyrdoms in the name of the One True God?

SB: How does the book fit in with your other works on biblical-historical themes?

JK: All my books share a common point of inquiry: Where do our sacred texts and religious ideas actually come from? Who were the real men and women who created them? What did they know, what did they believe, what did they aspire to achieve?

SB: What will surprise readers?

JK: "God Against the Gods" is full of surprises about what I call "the dark side of monotheism and the bright side of polytheism." Monotheism offers a set of sublime and elevating moral teachings, and — thankfully — that’s what we have embraced and preserved. But there are moments of terror and strains of violence and intolerance in the Bible that we ignore at our peril. At the same time, I try to remind readers that some of the ideas and values that we cherish and struggle to protect — including the fundamental idea of religious liberty, the freedom to choose between one religion and another religion, the freedom to combine many different beliefs and practices, the freedom to believe in no god at all — is actually a pagan idea!

SB: Do you think that some readers may discover that they’re actually polytheists at their core?

JK: I am confident that readers may come to recognize that they’re in sympathy with the pagan idea about God: "It is not possible that only one road," as the pagan orator Symmachus puts it, "leads to so sublime a mystery."

SB: How do you define paganism?

JK: Paganism cannot be defined as a religion in the sense that we define Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Rather, it was a marketplace of religious beliefs and practices from which one could select any number and combination of religions. One of the misconceptions I try to correct is the notion that paganism was always essentially crude, primitive and demonic. In fact, the benchmark achievements of human civilization that we praise as "classical" — art and architecture, literature and philosophy — originate in the world of classical paganism.

SB: Why is the book particularly relevant today, in light of all the terrorism carried out in the name of religion?

JK: The horrors that we read about in the headlines — religious violence in the name of the One True God — are not unique to militant Islam. Rather, they are expressions of an idea that is written deeply into the very idea of monotheism.

SB: Is the war of "God Against the Gods" an ongoing battle?

JK: Tragically, it is still going on. And, ironically, it is being waged by monotheists against each other. For example, the extremists who carried out the atrocities on Sept. 11 were convinced that they were striking against the faithlessness and corruption of Western civilization, which they regard as the "Great Satan." But the same refusal of some monotheists to credit their fellow monotheists with good faith can be found in all of the three great monotheisms.

SB: How did your Jewish background lead to your interest in religious history and literature?

JK: My Jewish background is compounded in equal measure of religious Judaism and labor Zionism, each of which, in its own way, has encouraged me to see how Jewish identity and destiny express themselves in history. Indeed, the Torah itself is the best example of how the Jewish people have, quite literally, written ourselves into history.

Q & A With Jonathan Kirsch Read More »

The New Color of Rock

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Does New York’s Orthodox Jewish rock band Blue Fringe have groupies? “It’s not really sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” lead singer Dov Rosenblatt, 22, said. “One father e-mailed us and he wrote it reminded him of ‘Beatlemania.'”

About 4,000 fans attended the Yeshiva University-originating quartet’s Passover weekend performance in South Florida.

Rosenblatt told The Journal that the group’s style is “pop rock with a lot of funk influence. The lyrics are Jewish, but the music could be stuff you hear on the radio.”

Blue Fringe performs at a Yom Ha’Atzmaut concert April 26 at Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, followed by a May 29 appearance at a Southern California regional Shabbaton of the National Council of Synagogue Youth. Blue Fringe’s debut album last year, “My Awakening,” sold 10,000 copies.

Rosenblatt, one of Jewish Week Editor Gary Rosenblatt’s three children, studies psychology and music at Yeshiva University. Two and a half years ago, an invitation to play at a Jewish student event at the University of Pennsylvania found Dov Rosenblatt forming Blue Fringe with Yeshiva University psych major/drummer Danny Zwillenberg, music major/guitarist Avi Hoffman and psych major/bassist Hayyim Danzig. They played last month at Yeshiva’s “Pesachpalooza,” and also have performed in Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue.

The group joins Jewish-identified bands such as Soulfarm and Moshav in advancing Jewish rock.

“We’re sold in Lakewood, [N.J.], which is a yeshiva community,” Rosenblatt said. “And then we get e-mails from kids who say they don’t listen to Jewish music at all, but they like us. There’s no reason why high school kids can’t have in their CD book Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses and all of us.”

The April 26 performance at Beth Jacob, 9030 W. Olympic
Blvd., Beverly Hills, begins at 7 p.m. with doors opening at 6:15. For tickets,
$18, call (310) 248-2450. For more information on the Shabbaton, call (310)
229-9000 ext. 2. For more information about the group, visit The New Color of Rock Read More »