by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

This year's Montreal Jewish Film Festival presents 33 films from 15 countries - a mix of documentary and fiction films - but the movie chosen to kick off the event is Nowhere in Africa, the winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The scenario of this German film was adapted from the autobiography of Stefanie Zweig, and follows the story of a Jewish family who flees Nazi Germany in 1938 and, however haphazardly, builds a life in Kenya.

Other highlights of the festival include A Trumpet in the Wadi, an award-winning Israeli film that recounts the bittersweet love story between Huda, a Christian Arab Israeli woman, and her neighbour Alex, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Although it suffers slightly from low production values, interestingly, this same lack of gloss brings a certain freshness to the film. Despite an overly abrupt ending, it is a frank and engaging look at the intricacies of forming relationships across ethnic divides.

Also concerned with the constraints of ethnic identity, is Shalom Y'all, New Orleans native Brian Bain's exploration of being both Jewish and Southern (as in the United States), when these identities can seem contradictory. He travels throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, visiting Jewish communities that have alternately shrunk to nothing in recent years or exploded with Northern Jews moving South. He interviews a wide variety of writers, musicians (including the sardonic Kinky Friedman of the Texas Jewboys) and community activists about the pressures to assimilate and the role of Jews in the civil rights movement, among other topics. Bain himself is unswervingly upbeat, and the interviews barely touch the issues of power and racial privilege fundamental to a region haunted by the legacies of slavery.

Another documentary to raise the spectre of assimilation is Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII. This extraordinarily moving film is structured around interviews with Jews who, as children, were hidden by non-Jews throughout Europe during the war, as well as with the rescuers who took them in at enormous risk to themselves. The interviewees describe the sacrifices made by parents who saved their children from impending catastrophe by arranging for them to be concealed within gentile families throughout Europe. The two groups also discuss the intense relationships they formed amongst themselves, and the inevitably fraught attempts at reunification that happened at war's end.

Two other documentaries that deal with the post-war era, specifically the McCarthyite period in the U.S. that saw the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, will also be screened, Unknown Secrets: Art and the Rosenberg Era and Michael & Robert. A final highlight is Yossi & Jagger, the love story between two (male) Israeli soldiers, Israel's most successful film of last year.

The eighth edition of the Montreal Jewish Film Festival runs from May 8-15. Info: www.mjff.qc.ca, or call 448-5610/283-4826

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