by MATTHEW HAYS

The hats have got to come off for Jewish Film Fest founder and director Susan Alper. Every year for the past nine she's managed to pull together a fascinating and intriguing cross-section of films, long and short, fiction and non-fiction, from across the international Jewish diaspora. (This despite a shoestring budget.) Varied in theme and topic, the films Alper presents at the Montreal Jewish Film Fest harness complexities surrounding Jewish identity with passion and history.

This year is no exception. The documentary presentations alone are enough to keep non-fiction fans sated. Nathaniel Kahn's Oscar-nominated My Architect: A Son's Journey finally gets screened here. The film involves the filmmaker's personal search for clues about his deceased father, the famous architect Louis I. Kahn. When Kahn died, homeless in a New York train station, he left behind three families with three different women. The filmmaker, one of many offspring, decides to investigate this man's life and try to get beyond the mystery. Fascinating personal filmmaking, like last year's Capturing the Friedmans, that involves tricky family dynamics. Another deeply autobiographical doc comes with Divan, Pearl Gluck's examination of ancestral history as told through the prism of a couch. Yes, a couch. In this case, Gluck travels from the Hasidic community of Borough Park, Brooklyn, to Hungary, tracing the history of an heirloom. Through this piece of furniture and its/her journey, Gluck works to mend the rather tormented relationship she has with her conservative Hasidic father. Gluck will be present to introduce the screening of her film.

Members of the once-thriving Iraqi Jewish community are profiled in Samir's Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - the Iraqi Connection. After Israel was founded in '48, most of the Jewish population of Iraq fled there. But as filmmaker Samir finds, many of the Iraqi Jews had trouble relocating and fitting in to Israeli society. The people interviewed, now in their seventies, were all members of Iraq's sizable communist party. A continent away is Valerie Lapin Ganley's Shalom Ireland, a film about that nation's small but influential Jewish community. Ganley will be present to introduce the film. Filmmaker Dov Gil-Har will also be present for his Behind Enemy Lines, a doc that brings an Israeli police officer and Palestinian journalist together to examine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both sides of the divide.

In the fiction department, an odd and quirky feature from Israel, Nir Bergman's Broken Wings, will open this year's fest. Family trauma is again moving the plot forward, as the grieving Ullman family works to overcome the loss of their father/husband. Maya Maron, who plays the daughter who keeps the family from coming apart at the seams, has been singled out as a major new thespian talent in Israel, due to the strength of her performance here.

The Montreal Jewish Film Festival screens from today, Thursday, May 6 until May 13, at the MMFA, NFB, Cinémathèque québécoise and Ex-Centris. Info: www.mjff.qc.ca

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