Hebrew hoedown

>>A stable of acclaimed and lesser-known recent Israeli films is spotlighted at the third annual Festival du film Israélien de Montréal

by MALCOLM FRASER

The Festival Séfarad de Montréal is a cultural celebration with a peculiar, if perhaps well-timed, political twist—this festival of Jewish culture is aimed at a francophone audience. Its cinematic envelope, the Festival du film Israélien de Montréal, showcases 15 recent Israeli films, including nine North American premieres and a handful of international festival favourites.

Ayelet Menahemi’s Noodle, winner of a special jury prize at last year’s World Film Festival, is the story of Miri (Mili Avital), a 37-year-old El Al flight attendant who has lost not one but two husbands. Her life is transformed when she finds herself caring for an abandoned Chinese toddler whose mother, a migrant worker, has been deported from Israel.

Jonathan Paz’s The Galilee Eskimos tells the tale of 12 kibbutz-dwelling seniors who awake one morning to find that they’ve been abandoned by the younger folk, who’ve left the kibbutz under threat of financial ruin. The spirited oldsters decide to seize the day and reclaim their home. The film won an audience award at last year’s Berlin festival.

Speaking of the Berlin fest, they gave Joseph Cedar a Best Director prize for Beaufort, which was also nominated for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Oscars. A 22-year-old army commander (Oshri Cohen) experiences professional and spiritual disillusionment as his unit prepares for the 2000 military withdrawal from Lebanon. A Golden Palm nominee at this year’s Cannes fest, Raphaël Nadjari’s Tehilim portrays a Jerusalem family shaken up by the mysterious disappearance of the father after a car crash.

Other selections have as yet flown under the international radar, but all the more reason to take this rare opportunity to see them. A few of them won acclaim at the Haifa Film Festival, the spunky cousin to the more established Jerusalem fest. Tzahi Grad’s Foul Gesture is a conspiratorial thriller about an ex-I.T. worker who gets caught up in a web of institutional corruption after reporting a road-rage incident. David Dazanashvili’s Maftir is a film noir about a recently released convict out to avenge his brother’s murder, diving into the underbelly of the Israeli and Russian mafias. And Yuval Granot’s Julia Mia, winner of the Best Film prize at Haifa, is the bittersweet tale of a Tel Aviv B-movie director who meets a Julia Roberts look-alike and promptly casts her in an Israeli remake of Pretty Woman.

Other standouts include Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s Le voyage de James à Jérusalem, the tale of an African man who makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mushon Salmona’s Vasermil, about a multicultural group of disadvantaged teen soccer fans, and Michael Grynszpan’s Les réfugiés oubliés, a documentary about the thousands of Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries over the course of the 20th century.

The fest is strictly for the bilingual, or multilingual—the films are presented in Hebrew with French subtitles only. But if you can reasonably accommodate this linguistic mix, it’s a good chance to check out some otherwise hard-to-find films, and get a glimpse of Israeli culture beyond the polarized media portrayals.

The Festival Séfarad de Montréal
runs June 2–18. For more
information, see www.sefarad.ca

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