Just like
last year, I bought a young professional's pass to the
Washington Jewish Film Festival (or this year called "JxJ"). This meant I could see almost as many movies as I wanted. Unfortunately I didn't make it to as many as I had hoped, but I figured as long as I saw at least four movies, I had gotten my money's worth. I'm away this weekend, so I won't be seeing any more of the films.
Here are the films I ended up seeing:
The Einstein of Sex
This movie was about the life of
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a gay Jewish sexologist. We briefly see him in childhood, and then he becomes a young man in medical school who wants to prove that homosexuality is not a disease. He tried to use his work to gain equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community; he even founded the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which was the first LGBTQ+ rights organization ever. As a man who played such a big role in this kind of work, I am surprised that I had never heard of him before.
This movie was difficult to watch for several reasons. Although this movie came out in 1999, it looks like it's from the
1970's. I am not sure if this was an artistic decision, or simply a
matter of funds and resources. But these days, when we are used to high definition and digital effects, seeing a grainy picture almost makes it hard to take a film seriously. Not to mention the scene with nude calisthenics: men exercising out-of-doors naked together is just over the top. And I have no problem seeing men kiss each other, but the actors clearly weren't into it; I wasn't convinced of their passion for each other. And speaking of actors: the idea that
Kai Schumann is supposed to age to look like
Friedel von Wangenheim proves poor casting for one of (or both) roles. Other than learning about this famous man, I didn't really like anything else about the film.
Wild Kids
This documentary is about several children in Israel who are part of a group called "
Wild Kids" who create animated films. The movie shows them making noises and sounds for their films, drawing the characters, or acting themselves in stop-motion. This seems like a great creative outlet, and the students are quite talented. But, most of the animations they made seemed dark and depressing. One of the children even talked about a character who doesn't care about anything, and how he wants to go to a school and kill everyone because he doesn't care; he even admits to not having a "happy feeling" in this world, but only in the worlds of his imagination. That is a huge red flag in my eyes, and I hope he gets the therapy (and perhaps medical attention) he needs to not become the next mass shooter. I was rather disturbed, and I was very happy that this film lasted less than an hour.
The Mover
This movie is based on the true story of
Zanis Lipke and how he helped Jews escape from the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. At first one of his Jewish friends asked him to help save his Jewish daughter, and Lipke had said no. But as the situation got worse, he had a change of heart. He started helping Jews sneak out of the ghetto, and they would live underneath the barn in Lipke's backyard. In the end, he helped save 40 Jews (their names were listed at the end of the film, which I thought was cool). But the movie never explained how the Jews left the barn and actually got out of the city; that part is never clear, other than you assume they go by truck. So I wish more had been revealed on that.
City of Joel
I love the number of historical films that this film festival features, but this was a more contemporary documentary. In Orange County, NY, north of New York City, there is a roughly a 1-square mile community of Hasidic Jews called
Kiryas Joel. Kiryas Joel is named after the late
Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, and the community was established in this particular location in the 1970's when Brooklyn became too expensive. Now there are more than 20,000 people there, and the population is exponentially growing, because historically Hasidic Jews have large families.
The film is all about the political battle between Kiryas Joel and the neighboring town of Monroe. Because of the growing Jewish community, the representatives of Kiryas Joel wanted to annex more land in order to build more homes, etc. But many of the locals are against annexation: they moved out of New York City to enjoy the quiet and nature, but annexation would mean the destruction of that. Throughout the film, any rebuttal to those who were against annexation immediately turned to antisemitism. I think this is unfair: from what we saw in the film, those against annexation were simply trying to protect their way of life, not trying to suppress Jews or Judaism specifically.
I found it interesting how much power this specific Jewish community had. It sounded like many of the families are quite wealthy, although how they made their money was not disclosed (They were "businessmen." What does that mean?). The main figures in Kiryas Joel made relationships with the larger political heads of Monroe/Orange County as a whole, and that power allowed them to sway political decisions. For example, the members of the Kiryas Joel community do not use public schools because they have their own schools. Therefore, they were able to convince the local politicians to take money away from the public school system (one thing the people of Monroe were very upset about, understandably).
I'm a bit confused about how this insular community relates to the United States as a whole. Do these people pay taxes? Are they allowed to keep others from renting or buying apartments within the community (and if so, how is that legal)? I kept thinking of the Amish (I grew up not far from an Amish community in Delaware) and wondering how these two religious communities are similar but also different. They still interact somehow with the rest of the world, but in small ways. For example, in the film, a young woman was interviewed who left the community and can never return; similar things happen with the Amish community, too. It would have been interesting to learn more about how a community like this exists in our modern world.
In the end, there was a compromise: Kiryas Joel did annex some surrounding land, but not all of the acres that they had originally hoped to get. But something makes me think that the community will continue to fight for all of that additional land and then beyond.
Back to Maracanã
This was the only fictional movie I saw over the festival. It is about a grandfather, his son, and his grandson traveling to Rio for the World Cup soccer tournament. There is some dysfunction in the family. The son is divorced and is not particularly close with his son (the grandchild); he also doesn't have a lot of money and is living with his father (the granddad). Both the grandfather and his son
love soccer, but the grandson does not. When they learn that the boy's mother is traveling to Rio for the World Cup, these three men decide to go to Brazil, too. On the trip you learn more about the family's past: the grandfather's dad wasted all of the family's money on a soccer bet, and prevented the grandfather from becoming a soccer star even when recruits came to visit him. In that way, soccer was a curse on the family, but it was also a blessing in bringing these three generations of men closer together.
In general I liked the movie. I thought it was fun, and the dysfunction wasn't so bad, like family members hating each other or anything intense like that. And I liked watching the relationships grow and blossom between the different generations. The film had both funny and serious moments, so it was a well-rounded story.
The Accountant of Auschwitz
Like many Jewish people, I have a morbid fascination with the Holocaust: wanting to learn more about it and hear survivors tell their horrible memories, almost like a masochist wanting to hurt and cry and relive pain that I myself (and even my family) never endured.
So this was the one film I went to that focused on the concentration camps. This documentary was about the trial of
Oskar Gröning, who had been a bookkeeper at Auschwitz as a young man. The film was all about how to go about holding Nazis accountable for what they did. Right after the war, some Nazis were tried and went to jail. But the film highlighted these numbers:
of 800,000 members of the SS, fewer than 200 Nazis ever went to prison. Today, there are not many Nazis who are still alive, and those who are around are in their 90's. So there's a statute of limitations argument: there is no limit when it comes to crimes against humanity like genocide, but is there any point to sending a 90-year-old man to jail for something he did decades and decades ago? The film made the point that this particular trial would set a precedent: if Gr
öning were to be convicted, this would show the world that anyone who participates in horrible acts like this, even if only indirectly, will be punished, no matter how many years later.
While the trial process was going on, the film also showed other stories. It highlighted the trial of
John Demjanjuk, another Nazi who was tried as an old man. He faked illness and frailty, claiming he could not go through a trial, which sounds like common behavior of criminals like this. We also got to hear first-hand from four Auschwitz survivors (all of whom had been children in the camp). One story hit me the hardest (I and the woman next to me were crying): Hedy Bohm described how she was separated from her mother when they first got off of the trains at the camp. She tried to get to her mother but was stopped by an SS guard. She called out to her mother, and her mother turned around; her mom didn't say anything and just turned away. The heartbreak of what Hedy as a little girl must have felt in that moment (and continued to feel decades later) is so terrible to imagine. That's why it amazed me that a fellow survivor, Eva Mozes Kor, said she forgave Gr
öning and the Nazis.
WHAT?! Perhaps forgiveness was her way of coping with what happened. But the fact that she said that, and on top of that hugged Gr
öning, infuriated many survivors as well as other Jews in general. I know I was flabbergasted.
In the end, Gr
öning was convicted, and was given four years in prison (Bill Glied, one of the survivors, said something like, "It wouldn't have been any harder for the judge to sentence him to 100 years rather than just four."). But the point was moot: Gr
öning died during the appeal process, having never been in jail. BUT the precedent has now been set, so the world knows what will happen to criminals who are involved, directly or indirectly, with crimes against humanity, even if it's half a century or more later.
