Holy Land Over Hollywood
Nashville Jewish Film Festival focuses on Israel, with unusually strong results
This year the Nashville Jewish Film Festival has two milestones to celebrate: its own eighth birthday, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. Iran's national cinema may have dominated film discussion over the past decade, but the films from Israel showcased in this year's NJFF—which starts Saturday with a cocktail reception at Cabana and continues through Thursday at The Belcourt—show unheralded vitality, diversity and appeal. Below are three of this year's highlights, programmed with an assist from former Nashville Film Festival artistic director Brian Gordon; for ticket information as well as a full schedule of films, parties and visiting filmmakers and celebrities, see belcourt.org or templenashville.org.
STRANGERS (8 p.m. Oct. 25) From the night a Montague first wooed a Capulet, each generation has found new sets of star-crossed lovers to transgress taboos: Jet-Shark, black-white, cowboy-cowboy. Judging by recent films such as The Holy Land, Only Human and now this sultry romantic drama, the most potent fire-meets-gasoline match of the moment is between Jews and Palestinians. In Berlin for the 2006 World Cup finals, Israeli hunk Eyal (Liron Levo) accidentally swaps backpacks with Palestinian single mom Rana (Lubna Azabal). What could have been an eye-rolling meet-cute turns instead into an erotically charged whirlwind encounter, captivating enough to shake their convictions as well as their ties on either side. Thanks largely to the smoking-hot leads, whose chemistry could power a nuclear turbine, the characters register as individuals rather than social-problem stand-ins: the movie gives off a heady, whirling sexiness that's only enhanced by the glowing skin tones in Ram Shweky's camerawork. Still, as the heroine faces hassles from immigration cops and the hero tastes the scorn of his lover's radical friends, writer-directors Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv show that no matter how far Israelis and Palestinians stray from their homelands, there is no such thing as neutral ground. In English, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German and Aramaic with subtitles. —Jim Ridley
BEAUFORT (7 p.m. Oct. 26) What a pity that the people behind two radically different but equally peace-loving specimens of Israel's increasingly lively national cinema—Beaufort and The Band's Visit—got into a shouting match about which deserved to go forward for Best Foreign Film at this year's Academy Awards. (Beaufort won.) Like many in the current wave of antiwar movies, Joseph Cedar's Beaufort traffics in the mad illogic of battles whose long-forgotten purpose has hardened into mindless routine. But this hushed, atmospheric mood piece, intricately scripted by Cedar and novelist Ron Leshem, is no action picture—unless you count the steady put-put of Hezbollah shells landing uncomfortably close to a small army unit left to guard the 12th century castle that in 2000 is all that remains of Israel's abortive 18-year war with Lebanon. Led by a commander progressively unhinged by the attrition of his and his country's heroic ideals, the men—boys, really—have little to sustain them but their own black humor and the dreary, absurd daily business of watching over nothing much. We learn just enough about the lives and dreams of each soldier to make us weep for the shocking egalitarianism of death, which rides roughshod over the cautious and the reckless alike. Cedar's understated humanism renders all the more painful the unstated coda that, six years after Israel's retreat from Lebanon, the wounds opened all over again. In Hebrew with subtitles. —Ella Taylor
THE CHAMPAGNE SPY (7 p.m. Oct. 29) A former associate tells Oded Gur Arie that his father was the kind of man who could "look the angel of Death right in the eye, never lower his gaze, invite him to a drink, and raise a glass to him"—and by the end of Nadav Schirman's astounding documentary, a true-life Body of Lies, we believe him. Recruited by the Mossad in 1960, at the height of Israel's cold-turning-hot war with Egypt, Maj. Ze'ev Gur Arie went deep cover as a playboy German horse breeder with a cloudy Third Reich past—the better to spy on ex-Nazi scientists bringing their WMD expertise to Cairo. He remade himself as one Wolfgang Lodz, party animal, gallivanting spendthrift and world-class lothario—while back home, his trusting wife and young son were left to contend with his mysterious five-month disappearances. (Oded Gur Arie's post-film Q&A in person should be unusually lively.) Eventually, accompanied by another wife who had no knowledge of his other family, Lodz started to fall victim to his invented lifestyle, no small problem when the occupational hazards included torture and death. Through his son's eyes, the testimony of former comrades, and copious archival footage, a portrait emerges of a bold but remorseless adventurer who was only too well suited to a career using others to his own ends: he was a helluva spy for the same reasons he was a far from ideal dad. The bitter resolution of Gur Arie's life (and the husk he became) recalls the dictum behind Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." In English, French, Hebrew and German with subtitles. —Jim Ridley
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