A Quick Additional Note on Ajami and a Very Important Retrospective

Just got an e-mail about a special screening of Ajami, to which I want to draw your attention. The Other Israel Film Festival, of which I have written frequently, is presenting a special evening at Film Forum featuring a showing of the film and a discussion of the state of Israeli cinema as depicted therein on February 15 at 6:30 p.m. If you were planning to see the film anyway -- and you should -- here's an opportunity to do so while helping out a worthy film event. Advance tickets can be purchased here; the special discount price attached to this offer is only good for advance tickets.

(And I can't believe I actually used the word 'therein.')

Elsewhere in town, hold some days and evenings free in early March. The Museum of Modern Art is presenting a mid-career retrospective of the films of Jia Zhangke beginning March 5. Jia will be attending a Monday night event, the star of The World, Zhan Tao will introduce a showing of that excellent work, and the program will include all of Jia's films to date. In little mor than a decade, with only eight features and a half-dozen shorts to his credit, Jia has re-invented Chinese cinema. At a time when Zhang Yimou can honestly say with a straight face that he is still an independent director -- as if the maker of the odiously Stalinist apologia Hero were some kind of dissident -- it is nothing less than thrilling to see work like Jia's and be reminded what a really beautiful risk-taking and fearless film looks like. I hesitate to recommend any of the films to the exclusion of the others, but if you can only see a few, you should definitely get to Platform, The World and Still Life. The last is a sublimely contemplative and deeply felt work, a stunning rebuke to the Chinese leaders who preach fealty to the past while destroying material reminders of it.

A Busy Fortnight

Well, we've been a busy boy lately. Lots of Jewish-themed goodies in town, so you can find me all over the place at Jewish Week. This year's Oscar-nom Israeli-Palestinian film Ajami is definitely worth a look; my review is here. The 14th annual New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival has a strong slate of documentaries. And Anthology Film Archives has resurrected the rarely shown Susan Sontag docu about Israel, Promised Lands. In some ways, the last is the most interesting, for reasons I note in my review.

Then there's the rest of the film world. As usual, I'll skip anything that has Luc Besson's name attached to it, but the Red Riding trilogy is quite an interesting experiment, rewarding in all sorts of ways that I'll talk about later today.

"A Lie That Speaks the Truth"

Andre Techiné is quite simply one of the best filmmakers working regularly in the world today. His films are methodical, deliberately paced and highly intelligent. He takes on important issues but doesn’t let them force him to oversimplify or preach.

His latest film, The Girl on the Train, opens Friday and it is a must. I had a brief phone interview with Techiné last week and the article that resulted can be found here.

New York Jewish Film Festival, Round Two

My second piece on the NYJFF is already up on the Jewish Week website. This has been a particularly rich festival, and several of my favorite films are opening theatrically very soon. Eyes Wide Open, which I wrote about last week, opens in NYC on February 5 at the Cinema Village. The festival itself is just starting, and I highly recommend a trip to the Walter Reade, the Jewish Museum and the JCC in Manhattan.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting documentaries in the series didn't make the cut in the edited version of my piece, so let me draw your attention to "Gevald!" Co-directed by Ron Ofer and Yohei Hakak, the 49-minute film is a rare look at the vehemently anti-Zionist Haredim, as exemplified by Shmuel Chaim Pappenhym, a newspaper editor and activist who we see urging Orthodox Jews not to vote in the 2006 Israeli election. The film smartly counterposes Pappenhym, chubby, boyish, earnest, guileless and hopelessly awkward, with the late Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, a Knesset member for 20 years. Ravitz is warm and fatherly (and his American-born wife is a pistol!), but makes no effort to disguise the nature of political horse-trading in a modern parliamentary body. Absolutely riveting and, as far as I can recall, unique.

Also well worth a trip to midtown Manhattan, Amos Gitai's newest film, Carmel, is going to play at MoMA for a week. My review is here, and the film is quite fascinating, particularly if you are a follower of Gitai's work.

On the Barricades

It is frequently remarked that because it takes a year or so for a feature film to make it from conception to completion that it's not a great medium for addressing the issues in that morning's newspaper. Of course, there is some truth to that, but with the rise of HD video and so on, a filmmaker can be more timely in her responses than was the case in years past. I offer, for your delectation, a piece from the New York Times showing how Iran's filmmakers have taken the point in the march against their fraudulent "elected" leaders. And even though the old year has ended and you can't claim donations on your 2009 taxes, I urge you to contribute to organizations that fight for freedom of expression.

Some Year-End Housework

No, I'm not posting my ten-best list. Those of you who are frequent readers know that I won't do that until just before the Ira Awards, so you'll probably be waiting for a few months. Same thing with my ten-best films of 2009. Courage.

But I do want to draw your attention to a couple of non-film items of interest. As regular readers know, I am a firm believer in and on-line champion of non-English literature in translation. Of course language in translation accounts for about three percent of the American book market, which is why any sign of movement in a positive direction is cause for celebration. I have frequently drawn your attention to Words Without Borders, which does a splendid job of disseminating new writing from around the world. I want to add a few more webpages to your bookmarks/favorites file on the subject before the year ends:

The Literary Saloon --a literary blog attached to the excellent Complete Review website. Both are excellent sources of information and reviews on contemporary writing in translation from just about anywhere you can imagine. As a clearinghouse alone, Saloon is an absolute necessity.

Open Letter Books -- a new publishing venture supported by the University of Rochester, specializing in literature in translation. There's a nicely judged piece on the press by Larry Rohter of the New York Times that sets the tone. Open Letter's subscription plan is an innovative way of selling their wonderfully variegated list, too. They also have a blog, Three Percent.

African Writing Online -- a web journal of new writing from a region that has yet to experience a much-deserved and -needed equivalent of the Latin American "boom" of the 1970s. Covers the whole impressively wide range of African literary writing and darned well. Issue 8 is currently up.

Now, goddamit, go buy some books for the new calendar year. Buy 'em from an indie bookstore near you.

From Israel, With Tsuris

. . . which can be loosely translated as agita for all you non-Jews-or-New-Yorkers out there. (Hey, as Lenny Bruce said, if you're from New York you're Jewish even if you're goyish, if you're from Montana you're goyish even if you're Jewish.)

Actually, this year's Israel Film Festival, which kicks off on the 5th, is the usual mixed bag, as festivals of new film generally are. The good seems to outweigh the bad -- hey, I didn't see everything they're showing -- but that is to be expected in these halcyon days for Israeli film. So there really isn't much tsuris, except of course for the constant low-level aggravation that comes from living in the midst of an embattled place like the Middle East. At any rate, you can find my two pieces on the Festival in Jewish Week, here and here.

Incidentally, one of the most exciting prospects from the festival, a three-hour documentary History of Israeli Cinema by the excellent Raphael Nadjari (director of Tehillim and Avanim, two terrific films) isn't reviewed in those two articles; the only screeners available didn't have subtitles. I hope to add something on that and two other films from the event that arrived the day after my deadline in the next few days right here. (And that was the tsuris, entirely mine and I'm not passing it along, you should only live and be well, dah-link. But why don't you call more often?)

A Film That Really Shook Me

I see an absurd number of films every year, compared to the normal person. And the vast majority of them, good or bad, don't leave that much of an impression any more. So when a movie stirs me to the point that I throw my notes across the room and start screaming at the video screen, you can bet something is going on.

Yoav Shamir's Defamation, an elegantly structured documentary about the political uses of contemporary anti-Semitism, had that effect on me. My review of it is here. I hope that if you see it, it affects you as strongly.

The Price of Filming

I'd like to draw your attention to an article in today's Independent.

This is the price of filming in a police state. I have written about this before in this space. Unfortunately, I will have to write about it again. It's not a problem that ever goes away.

However, if you want to do something concrete to help, you can connect with the Committee to Protect Journalists and Cineastes sans Frontieres.