A lighter Jewish Film Festival?
Annual series seeks to balance heavier dramas with rom-coms, Hollywood documentaries.
What do the jazz standard “Body and Soul” and the Christmas carols “White Christmas” and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” have in common?
They were all written by Jewish composers, which happens to be the subject of the opening and closing night movies of this year’s Donald M. Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, which kicks off tonight.
This 28th annual festival – the fifth under the direction of Ellen Wedner – will feature several films about Jews in the arts, who have enriched the culture far beyond the Jewish community. In addition to films about these songwriters, there are documentaries about performers Sammy Davis Jr., film star Hedy Lamarr and the many Jewish singers and dancers who populated the Bollywood films of India when Hindu and Islamic women were forbidden to be seen on screen.
Assembling a successful film festival, and perhaps especially a Jewish festival, is a precarious balancing act. “Some years I struggle because it all seems so heavy to me,” sighs Wedner. “And you need a balance, because it’s not a one-off, it’s a week. People probably don’t want to come for a week and be depressed.
“So this year, I was just shocked and happily pleased that we could have some rom-coms in the more traditional sense, that covered topics that were diverse and different. That we were able to do some big things with biography films, profiling some really interesting people, including some entertainers.”
No, not all of this year’s films are lightweight, but Wedner concedes that she sensed this was a good time to ease up on the heavy dramas and documentaries. “People are in a crazy place now, so we were real careful when we picked the documentaries that they had some lightness to them,” she says.
American films are in the minority in the festival, but Wedner could not resist including “The History of Love,” starring Elliot Gould and Derek Jacobi. “How could I not do an Elliot Gould movie? Is it the most Jewish film I have? No. But it’s a Jewish sensibility and something that will appeal to my over-55 community, to this market, absolutely. It’s fun, it’s light, it has an amazing message about fathers and sons. And who could think of Elliot Gould as anything but a New York Jewish father?”
The 2018 festival will run through Feb. 11, screening 35 international films from such countries as Germany, Japan, Poland, Hungary, Denmark and, of course, Israel at six different venues in Boca Raton, Delray Beach, West Palm Beach, Wellington and Palm Beach Gardens.
Finding the right film to launch the festival is crucial to its success, says Wedner. “The key word is
‘upbeat.’ We show several Holocaust films during the festival, but I will not do one on opening night. I try to show something that will give food for thought but also be a really positive way to start things off.”
It is “Body & Soul, An American Bridge,” which focuses on the early performance history of the jazz standard. Written by Jewish composer Johnny Green in 1929, the song was introduced on Broadway by Jewish torch singer Libby Holman and ushered into the jazz canon by Louis Armstrong the following year. The film, both entertaining and educational, explores the cross-cultural bridge between African-Americans and American Jews.
Wedner was not really looking for another musicbased film to conclude the festival, but in September she got a new submission.
“Even before it was finished I knew that it was one of the cleverest documentaries I’ve ever seen,” recalls Wedner. “It’s ‘I’m Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas,’ how Jews really created the world of secular Christmas music. There’s some obvious songs – ‘Winter Wonderland,’ ‘White Christmas’ – and some I didn’t know came from Jews – ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’
“While the film is entertaining – and it’s really entertaining – it talks philosophically about what it was these Jews were creating, this perfect holiday that we didn’t celebrate. And what it looks like from the outside in. It’s so clever because it’s set in a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Day, and every time the songs come up, it becomes like a music video with the patrons and the waiters singing. So it’s really a documentary musical, the first one that I can think of,” says Wedner. “I think it’s really going to be a wonderful way to end the festival.”
Wedner is also high on a new biographical documentary called “Bombshell” that has already opened in New York and Los Angeles for Oscar consideration. Still, she was assured that it would not open locally before the festival so she would have the bragging rights to the Palm Beach County premiere. Its subtitle is “The Hedy Lamarr Story” and, yes, the Hollywood star of the ’40s and ’50s was Jewish, born Hedwig Eva Kiesler.
“(She) makes this amazing scientific discovery about code breaking,” says Wedner, “but no one believed that it could be right, because of who she was, so they didn’t use it during the war. After World War II, they realized that it was revolutionary and could have stopped the war earlier. She was so amazingly beautiful, so no one would have thought her capable of this. And she went on to invent other things as well. There was this whole scientific bent to her.”
Wedner is hesitant to identify her favorite films in the festival, but she is clearly a fan of “Shelter,” by veteran Israeli director Eran Riklis. “Eran did ‘Lemon Tree,’ which was very controversial, but he also did ‘Syrian Pride’ which was one of those quintessential box office hits, a beautiful film. It’s about two spies, but the spies are female so it’s a whole different take. In terms of Hollywood, this is a pure thriller,” she concedes. “With all the red herrings and the whodunit and everything you expect in a typical Hollywood thriller. But there’s definitely a political edge. So I was really happy to get that one.”
And that’s just a few of the films in this year’s 28th annual Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, a diverse collection of Jewishthemed movies, something for every taste. “If you love documentary films, we have such an assortment, you could come just for those. If you love the American Songbook, you’re going to love our opening and closing night films,” says Wedner. “How could you not? If you were a fan of the Rat Pack, how could you not come to see the Sammy Davis, Jr. film?
“If you don’t want to come to Holocaust films, we have so many other choices. If you only want to come to Holocaust films, we have so many choices.”
“We don’t care if you’re Jewish. We care that you like good films. That you like to be engaged, that you want to learn something new. Nothing makes me feel better than to close up the theater and we still see people standing outside talking about the film. We know that we’ve engaged them.”