In the United States there are now more than 80 Jewish film festivals with The New York and San Francisco Jewish film festivals considered the best. Given its venue at the Lincoln Center, the large Jewish population of the New York metropolitan area and the upscale educated audience it attracts the NY Jewish film festival plays a special role. A large program with a balanced mix of features, documentaries, shorts as well as panels and master classes as offered this year by Amis Gitai and the international provenance of production selected enhances the importance of the fest. The partnership between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum results in the collaboration of many film experts broadening the reach of the fest. Held from January 13-26 the 25^th edition of the fest the program’s lineup offered 38 features and shorts from 12 countries with many world and U.S premieres. It included a retrospective, a panel and other special events.

The festival opened with the Oscar nominated foreign language film LAMB by Yarek Zeleke (2015, France Ethiopia, Germany, Norway) a superbly executed ethnographic study of Ephraim, an Ethiopian boy and his passage from the father, who has to leave to find work, to his distant uncle’s family which ekes out a living in subsistence farming, barely making enough food to survive. Ephraim brings his beloved sheep along trying to save it by all means when his uncle wants to sacrifice it for the upcoming religious Easter fest. Set in the context of a poor Coptic family the film introduces the tensions of a setting shaped by traditional customs and loyalties. His uncle’s daughter a literate student fails to enhance her father’s farming skills given his opposition to modern methods. Ephraim knows nothing about farming and prefers to use his excellent cooking talent, skills firmly rejected by the uncle since as he argues women cook and man farm, though Ephraim earns money selling samosas in the market. This semi-biographic coming of age story of the nine-year old boy shows displacement into hard labor farm life; fight for survival of his friend the lamb, loving maternal figures immured in tradition, and contradictions with the encroaching modern life. Ephraim eventually leaves his sheep in the care of a girl tending animals and tells the uncle that it has been stolen. Without providing commentaries the film introduces us to the impoverished family and its life style, a setting totally alien to the Western way of living. It also offers great images of the extraordinary Ethiopian landscapes.

It is a credit to the fest that Andrzej Wajda‘s Holy Week (Poland, 1995) was selected for this year, a rarely shown dramatic film though it is a superb artistic work. Staged during the first three days of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in October 1943  the film depicts Irena’s fate who is harbored by an old friend Jan in his house whose brother Jurik is part of the Polish resistance. She can see the Ghetto burning from her room and grows close to Ana Jan’s wife who has empathy with the suffering of the Jews while Jan remains somehow detached. With some exceptions the resentment of Jews is openly shared by some people in the film. A woman living in the basement claims that “we suffer from the captivity only to die for the Jews” and in Jan’s office an apparent functionary declares “... we may be grateful to Hitler. He did a whole lot of unpleasant hard work for us... otherwise we’ll have to liquidate the Jews after the war. Poland must be free of Jews”. Only one fellow worker opposes the view which is shared privately by Jan with his boss. When  Irena is spotted and reported to the landlord that as a  Jew who is endangering the community which is under constant guard by the Germans, he states that human life should be respected but forces Jan to find a new place for Irena. When he does learn that the people he looked for had been arrested by the Germans he is trapped and shot. Irena is blamed for the accident of a little girl, cursed and decides to leave for the ghetto. Wajda shows through persuasive exchanges and imagery the fractured positions Poles had about Jews during the war and the implication those convictions had several decades later. The film is also rather convincing because of excellent acting and staging.

In a neo-realistic  approach Efrat Coren presents in BEN ZAKEN (Israel, 2014) an unblemished portrait of Ben Zaken who lives with his family in a deteriorating housing project in a small city. This is a view of the Israeli underclass rarely shown in features in the United States. There is no humor or other relief in Ben Zaken’s struggle taking care of his 11-year old daughter Runi. He is underemployed sometimes resentfully working for his older brother and endures a conflictual relation with a mother who calls her granddaughter a little bitch. She has constant fights with Runi and wants to get rid of her. His brother Leon suffers from a possessive love relations which he can’t break and is troubled by uncertainty about his religious orientation. There are few traces of emotional support and attachment in this film which is dominated by a fractured dysfunctional family life. Efran Cohen conveys effectively the family breakdown and the socio-economic background carrying it.

The feature THE LAW provides a an eye opening  investigation of the struggle the French health minister Simone Veil  had overcoming in the fall of 1974 the opposition to her proposed law to legalize abortions. Including her presentation in parliament and court appearance she had to fight sections of her governing party, the Catholic Church and the opposition. For Veil, a survivor of the concentration camps, legalizing abortion was a public health rather than a feminist issue and she had to face personal and slanderous attacks. She was called a Nazi and a swastika was painted on the walls of her building.  At that time an estimated 300 000 women had an abortion each year performed underground with 2500 women dying, primarily victims from the poor sections of the population. Those objecting to the law considered abortion as a death industry, a license to kill and even played the heartbeat of a fetus during the parliamentary debates sometimes arguing that the measure was a threat to population growth. The photojournalist Diane secured persuasive images from a hospital where secretly abortions were carried out. By working out compromises such as deleting state funding for abortions and mandatory obligations for medical doctors Veil overcame most opposition and her bill was adopted on January 17 1975. Funding for abortion was established in 1982. Based on fact and real people THE LAW is a superlative example of a fact based docudrama teaching history, parliamentary procedures and party politics as well as the power of an individual who persists in her endeavor. The audience can follow the reenactment and arguments of the principle protagonists, Jacques Chirac, Michel Debre, Edgar Faure and Michel Poniatowski, to name but a few.

One of the highlights of the festival was RABIN, THE LAST DAY by Amos Gitai (Israel/France 2015) a compelling reconstruction of the context and causes of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 after a political peace rally in Tel Aviv. The features effectively combines reenacting of the Shamgar commission’s inquiry into the assassination, archival footage and interviews and illustrates the  violent subculture leading to his murder and the link to  current policy makers who indirectly provided support for the rise of violence. In rightwing religious services Rabin was cursed before the assassination and radicalized settlers openly demanded that Rabin be killed. Obscure interpretations of the Talmud justified violence against Palestinians and the rejection of the Oslo accords. Mass demonstrations were held with leaders from the Likud part to oppose the government because Rabin’s policy was a threat to the expansion of the settlements in occupied areas and maintenance of the hold over all of Jerusalem.  A right wing clinical Psychologist went so far to label Rabin as suffering from a schizoid pathology and a Rabbi imposed the Kabbalistic death curse "Pulsa Dinura” on Rabin. In right wing demonstrations preaching upheaval of the government Rabin was shown wearing a Nazi uniform. There is no question that Likud and its leaders including Netanyahu were responsible for creating the socio-cultural basis for the violence.  The writing for Rabin’s murder was clearly on the wall with no action taken by the authorities. For Rabin’s widow Leah interviewed in the film, Likud’s leaders shared responsibility for the growth of violence and hate speech, a condition which is characteristic for much that happens currently in Israel.

Claus Mueller, filmexchange@gmail.com