TORONTO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL at multiple venues from Thursday (April 30) to May 10. Full schedule and film list at tjff.com. Rating: NNNN
If you still have any space in your brain after Cinéfranco, Images, TIFF Kids and Hot Docs, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival is here for you with a wide range of features, shorts, doc-umentaries and even some televi-sion, all with a vaguely Judaic flavour.
In some cases, “flavour” can even be taken literally. Two food-centric docs, Famous Nathan and Deli Man, delve into specifically Jewish areas of the American diet. The former is about Nathan Handwerker’s storied Coney Island hot dog stand, which became an essential element of New York’s identity. The latter throws a wider net, looking at Jewish delicatessen culture across North America – and featuring Toronto’s own Zane Caplansky, whose deli is co-present-ing that film’s screening. A friendly warning: you will leave hungry.
My brain is telling me there’s a further food connection to be found with the late Al Waxman, who’s being celebrated at this year’s festival… though that might just be because I saw him having a sandwich at Yitz’s when I was a kid. In any case, Al Waxman: A Jewish Everyman provides free screenings of the beloved actor’s TV and short-film work throughout the festival, including three episodes of King Of Kensington followed by a panel with spouse Sara Waxman and the show’s surviving cast and crew.
Also being honoured with a retrospective is American television leg-end Rod Serling. The Mensch Of The Twilight Zone brings Serling’s daughter Anne to town to introduce free screenings of classic television productions like Requiem For A Heavyweight and A Storm In Summer (starring Peter Ustinov as a deli own-er!), as well as one of his most personal Twilight Zone episodes, Walking Distance.
Another filmmaking scion, Samantha Fuller, explores the life and career of her father, Sam, in A Fuller Life, assembling a cast of actors and directors – among them Tim Roth, Buck Henry, Bill Duke and Wim Wen-ders – to celebrate the man who gave the world such pulp classics as Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss and The Big Red One.
And speaking of pulp, anyone who had a VCR in the 80s or 90s will want to check out The Go Go Boys: The Inside Story Of Cannon Films, which resurrects the eponymous exploitation house built by Israeli would-be moguls Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus in all its grainy glory. (The festival is also doing a late-night screening of Golan and Globus’s 1978 sex comedy Lemon Popsicle. It was basically Israel’s Porky’s, spawning eight sequels. C’mon, you know you’re cur-ious.)
More serious cinema is explored in Forbidden Films, Felix Moeller’s look at 40-odd Nazi propaganda films that remain banned in Germany today for their loathsome poli-tics, racist stereotypes and historical distortions. Moeller includes clips from many of the movies and historical context provided by scholars and cineastes – while pointing out that the most hateful titles, like Jew Suss and The Rothschilds, are still prized by neo-Nazi culture today.
There’s also more commercial stuff – Dough, a British comedy starring Jonathan Pryce as an observant Jewish baker whose business gets a shot in the arm when his new Muslim employee (Jerome Holder) accidentally drops some cannabis in the challah mixture and Suicide, about a woman (Mali Levi) yanked into a waking nightmare after her husband does something really stupid. It’s Israeli cinema’s first attempt at a proper Hollywood thriller, so it’s almost ridiculously slick… but the script is clever and the performances solid. You could do better maybe? 3
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
