TORONTO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017 from Thursday (May 4) through May 14 at multiple venues. tjff.com.
What with Hot Docs running till May 7, you’d think Toronto has enough documentary programming on its screens. But the Toronto Jewish Film Festival has decided we can do with more.
The TJFF has always screened documentaries. But now that the festival is in direct competition with Hot Docs – its first weekend overlapping with Hot Docs’ second – the stakes seem a little higher. What’s left to show after the largest doc festival in North America has had its pick?
Quite a bit, it turns out. In this 25th anniversary edition, the festival has amassed a decidedly idiosyncratic documentary component, reaching well beyond the usual subjects and offering real surprises.
For example, I didn’t expect anyone to make the definitive study of the Garbage Pail Kids, but here’s 30 Years Of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story (May 7, 5:30 pm, Innis Town Hall). Joe Simko and Jeff Zapata chart the history of the juvenile trading card sensation – co-created by illustrator Art Spiegelman, who went on to write Maus – that survived the 80s to become weirdly beloved by a new generation of fans. It’s disquietingly comprehensive, even interviewing the stars of the terrible 1987 movie.
Staying in the unlikely-arts lane, Monsieur Mayonnaise (May 11, 3:30 pm, Alliance Française May 14, 12:30 pm, Empress Walk) looks at the efforts of Australian filmmaker Philippe Mora (The Beast Within, Communion) to produce a graphic novel celebrating his father Georges’s work with the French Resistance smuggling Jewish children to safety in Switzerland.
Director Trevor Graham follows Mora as he travels the world catching up with the men and women his father helped and discusses his own fascination with the Second World War. And, yes, he tells the story (and it’s a great one) of his father’s nickname, which gives the documentary its title.
Body And Soul: An American Bridge (May 6, 9 pm, Alliance Française May 8, 3:30 pm, Empress Walk) studies the way the enduring jazz standard snakes through the history of both Jewish and African-American art in the 20th century.
Maya Zinshtein’s Forever Pure (May 12, noon, Empress Walk), which played TIFF last year, examines the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team’s decision to sign Chechen Muslims Zaur Sadayev and Dzhabrail Kadiyev in 2012, causing fundamentalist Jews to turn against the team and inviting rage from garden-variety racists and nationalists.
Like the Hot Docs entry Death In The Terminal (May 5, 1:30 pm, Scotiabank), Forever Pure takes a distressing look at an Israel mired in cultural and ethnic tensions, its citizens bristling with potential violence and looking for any excuse to explode.
Along similar lines, Chen Shelach’s Praise The Lard (May 5, 4 pm, Empress Walk May 8, 3:30 pm, Alliance Française) uses Israel’s growing pork industry to investigate the country’s shifting demographic trends, finding a divide between the observant and the secular that’s very simply articulated and only rarely results in violence.
The title is silly, but the message is very thoughtful: if we can’t find common ground on bacon, we’re never going to get together on the important stuff.
There’s much more to this year’s festival than documentaries the TJFF will screen plenty of shorts, features and vintage TV over its run.
I recommend One Week And A Day (May 8, 6 pm, Innis Town Hall May 11, 6 pm, Empress Walk), an unlikely comedy about grief, family and medical marijuana from promising new filmmaker Asaph Polonsky. Don’t ask – just buy your ticket. You can thank me later.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
