Previewing 11 films being screened virtually by the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

Having cleared the onset of Covid-19 in February 2020 with a fully in-person event, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival — Georgia’s largest film festival and the largest of its kind in the world — pivoted to a festival of virtual screenings last year. 

A month before its 22th festival, which kicks off next Wednesday, AJFF organizers make the hard decision, due to the surge of the Omicron variant, to cancel in-person events and offer only virtual screenings over its 12 days. 

Tickets are now on sale, and this year audiences can watch any film in the lineup at any time during the 12 days of the festival. Here are my takes on 11 films that ArtsATL was able to view in advance. General information, film synopses, tickets and more can be found here.

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Charlotte. Even if it weren’t a lovingly animated and moving story, this film could teach you about someone you maybe never knew about: the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who lived her final years in a flurry of work, painting in the south of France as if her time was running out.  It was. She never made it to age 30. Born into a prosperous Berlin family in 1917, Charlotte (voiced by Keira Knightley) ignores her stepmother’s urgings to get a sensible job as a dressmaker, and instead enrolls in art school — though Jewish students are increasingly shunned. As the Third Reich rises, Charlotte flees to the nurturing shelter of the Côte d’Azur and the estate of an American heiress, where she works feverishly on a painted diary called Life? or Theater?: A Song-play. (She likens painting her autobiography to pulling out a splinter — both painful and satisfying.) There’s an interesting tension between the film’s storybook look and Charlotte’s increasingly fraught life. (In addition to Nazis, the young woman had to deal with a family history full of suicide, an emotionally fragile grandmother and a controlling, abusive grandfather.) Despite the dark areas Charlotte goes, the film insists on being life-affirming. Against the odds, it is.

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Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen. You don’t have to remember Norman Jewison’s 1971 film version of the Broadway classic scene-by-scene to enjoy this history of its making. The documentary features enough compelling clips from the movie to keep you up to speed — and, more likely, renew your love for the musical. Maybe one of the funniest moments among the film’s interviews comes when director Jewison recalls breaking it to the film’s producers that, despite his surname, he himself isn’t Jewish. (“Not bad for a goy,” he quipped on receiving the lifetime-achievement, Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Oscar in 1999.) Featuring reminiscences by the three actresses who played Tevye’s marriageable daughters, the film also gives interesting insights into the rigors and choices that went into filming, mostly on real locations in the former Yugoslavia — a place, like the shtetl Anatevka, that is no more. 

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The Levys of Monticello. Most of us think of Thomas Jefferson’s home as an eternal U.S. landmark, sitting in geometric grace atop its Virginia mountaintop. The main value of this documentary is teaching us something many of us don’t know (I didn’t). For a good chunk of its existence (89 years), the home was owned, maintained and restored at great expense by the Levy family. In recounting the story, much of the film can feel a little tired, second-hand — the sort of in-house title you’d find in a museum. But the documentary picks up interest, and historical immediacy, in 1912. That’s when a busybody Christian housewife named Maude Littleton starts a movement to remove Monticello from “alien hands.” Littleton’s campaign failed, and in the 1980s a plaque was placed at Monticello, underlining the importance of the Levys in keeping the landmark safe. That fact didn’t stop those idiots, a stone’s throw away in Charlottesville, from marching in 2017 with tiki torches, chanting, “The Jews will not replace us.” On the contrary, the documentary suggests that Jews are as likely to restore and secure the American history that others are too willing to burn down. 

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Love & Mazel Tov. This lively rom-com would be a lot more fun if it didn’t have one special obstacle: the uncomfortable truth that its heroine Anne (Verena Altenberger) is mentally ill, with an uneasy obsession with her faith. The filmmakers would probably disagree, and call Anne’s quirk a fun little plot engine, but I had a hard time. Here’s the thing: Anne runs a small bookstore in Munich, specializing in Judaica. She volunteers at a Jewish retirement home and helps publicize the writings of one of its residents, a self-proclaimed Holocaust survivor. Though not one herself, Anne is convinced that Jews are smarter, sexier, better in every way than any other kind of people, and she wants to date one. Instead, she winds up involved with a sweet gynecologist (Maxim Mehmet), a Catholic who masquerades as a Jew to maintain her interest. His best pal is another doctor, the only actual Jew of the four lead characters, who’s dating Anne’s easygoing masseuse friend. The movie resolves its romantic dilemmas in satisfying ways by the end, and the tone throughout is resolutely sweet and perky. But try as she might, actress Altenberger can’t make her character’s tribal fetish seem anything but unhinged for much of the running time. 

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Persian Lessons. A powerful Holocaust drama from Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), it shares a theme of deception with both the lightweight Love & Mazel Tov and the hard-edged Wet Dog. Here, deception is a life-or-death necessity that drives the same sort of choices made by the protagonist of AJFF’s opening-night film The Survivor. Nahuel Pérez Biscayart plays Gilles, the French son of a rabbi herded into a Nazi truck in the opening moments. Driven into the woods to be shot with other prisoners, he faints before the bullets fly. When he’s roused, he claims his name is Reza, and he’s of Iranian descent (long story). And it turns out Col. Koch (the fine, mercurial Lars Eidinger of Netflix’s Babylon Berlin) of the local concentration camp is keen to learn Farsi. So, like a male descendant of Scheherazade, Gilles can stay alive only if he spins a fine deception day by day. As he struggles to invent his own cockeyed version of the Farsi language, the plotline could easily be the basis for a comedy. But Lessons is deeply serious, at times brutal. The shifting power dynamic between Gilles/Reza and Koch makes for one of the most interesting relationships I’ve seen onscreen in a while. At its best moments, and there are many of them, this is a harrowing and deeply moving film. 

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Plan A. Based on a true story, but given an alternate-reality twist near the end, the film tells of the plot by Jewish avengers who call themselves Nakam to kill as many German soldiers and civilians as they can in the days after World War II took the lives of 6 million of their own. Max (August Diehl), reeling from the loss of his wife and son in the camps, allies himself with this secretive group as they gather in bomb-ruined Nuremberg with the idea of poisoning the city’s water supply. That’s a compelling, real premise. The problem is, starting with the blunt dialogue (in English, itself a distraction) and including now-familiar scenes of tormented sleep and dream sequences, the movie feels like a dreary retread of something we have seen many times before. I felt the same way about an earlier film by writer-directors Doron and Yoav Paz featured at the festival, The Golem, a good idea handled too heavily. One other minus: The film’s sole female character (Sylvia Hoeks) begins as a fierce warrior but is reduced to a weak, haunted woman by the end. 

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The Specials. From the makers of the 2011 French hit The Intouchables, this fact-based drama throws us into chaos and keeps us there for a while. We meet Bruno (Vincent Cassel) as a perpetual motion machine, charging from hospital to community center in Paris, keeping tabs on some 40 children and adults with special needs, primarily extreme autism. (Some of the film’s nonprofessional actors have disabilities in real life.) Bruno operates an uncertified home for these people, working often with Malik (Reda Kateb), who runs an officially sanctioned facility for similar clients. Bruno is Jewish, Malik is Muslim, and it makes no difference because their values, challenges and heartaches meet on common ground. The film is made with such urgency and scores such vital points about the lack of resources for some of society’s neediest people (in France and everywhere else), scenes that flirt with sentimentality are honestly earned. And Cassel is always a terrific screen presence.  

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The Survivor. First of all, you’ll have to get over the makeup and prosthetics that turn actor Ben Foster into a cross between fat Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and a middle-aged James Caan. Then you’ll be OK. Director Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Bugsy) gives us the true story of Harry Haft, a footnote in the boxing history of Rocky Marciano, but with a much bigger, heartbreaking story of his own. The Polish Haft was sent as a young man to Auschwitz, where his strong physique inspired a Nazi commandant (Billy Magnussen, of No Time to Die, deploying his lethal boyishness) to be a boxer. The poisonous twist? Haft was forced to box fellow prisoners. When he defeated them, they were shot dead. Surviving in that bleak way, Haft migrates to New York after the war, where he continues to box and seek word of his teenage sweetheart back in Poland. He’s aided in this by caseworker Miriam (Vicky Krieps of Phantom Thread) and in the ring by coaches played by John Leguizamo and Danny DeVito. Also, hoping news of his story might reach the ears of his old girlfriend, Haft grants an interview to a journalist (Peter Sarsgaard) explaining how he survived Auschwitz, at the risk of turning the Jewish community against him. Foster’s career-long self-seriousness as an actor has dragged down some of his films, but it works perfectly here. The Survivor is an old-fashioned, well-made Hollywood movie. The joints creak a little, and stories like this have been told with more surprise and innovation in the years since Levinson debuted with 1982’s Diner. (Levinson also chooses that bothersome old cliché, having American actors speak English, with “German” accents.) But it’s a worthy, haunting watch. Of local interest: The film ends with scenes shot on Tybee Island. 

https://youtu.be/I8E5XCZdG0E

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The Swimmer. The ongoing Winter Olympics give some timely context to this sports drama about a handful of male swimmers, competing to be the single athlete chosen to represent Israel in the Summer Games. Instead of geographical or religious tensions found in many Israeli films, here sexuality complicates the story. Alone in his dorm room at the sports complex, Erez (Omer Perelman Striks) dances to Madonna, wearing sneakers with pink shoelaces. He’s not exactly waving a rainbow flag, and purportedly has a girlfriend back on the kibbutz. But his predilections come clear when he starts spending time with another swimmer, and competitor, Nevo (Asaf Jonas). Nothing untoward really happens between the two men; their every move is watched, and Nevo has a girlfriend who appears to be the real item. The push-pull between the two continues, though. It’s only heightened by the suspicions of their coach, who vows to expel any athletes who get too close. Writer-director Adam Kalderon’s  film doesn’t make big, geopolitical statements. But it’s a riveting, well-made character study of a young man determined to win, though his extreme actions at times seem likely to defeat only himself.

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Wet Dog. While the AJFF has featured many films examining bloody strife in Israel and Palestine, this gritty new drama, inspired by a true story, locates those religious/racial tensions in Berlin. At times, it’s a hard watch, thrusting us into the welter experienced by teenager Soheil (Doguhan Kabadayi) who has recently moved from a German village to the city’s Wedding neighborhood, populated mainly by Muslims of Palestinian, Turkish and Kurd descent. And they despise Jews, unaware that Soheil is one himself. That’s a fact the teen hides and even denies (as with two other films on this list, deception and denial drive the plot). Soheil ingratiates himself with the graffiti-tagging, violently macho and casually criminal neighborhood kids. He becomes a thug himself; the movie sometimes makes it very hard to keep identifying with him. The effort is worth it. Soheil’s saving grace is a young Muslim classmate, Selma, who believes their love can overcome tribal animus. Wet Dog, by the end, becomes a sort of Romeo and Juliet, with a marginally happier ending. 

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Women of Valor. This film’s opening on-screen text tells us that more than half a million ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, women live in Israel. No matter their number, while they can vote in parliamentary elections, they can’t themselves be elected to office. The documentary begins in 2015 as women, in the dead of night, plaster a neighborhood with flyers calling for organizing to address this problem. The most pushback they find comes from the Haredi men (and many women) in their own community. The film’s focus is Esty Shushan, one of the main organizers of the Nivcharot movement to address the lack of representation. Director Anna Somershaf’s camera keeps a close eye on Shushan as she goes on talk shows, speaks at international meetings, and raises awareness of her cause, all while defending herself and others as good Haredi women. The film is a strong, nuts-and-bolts look at the way political change happens, step by step. 

https://youtu.be/UY7kwqZjN8U

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. What else is worth watching this month? Catch up to Steve’s monthly Streaming column for February here.