When a film festival has a defined focus, it's easy to think of its audience as a bloc with uniform tastes and interests. Not so, says Loretta Saff, co-director of the Nashville Jewish Film Festival, running at four venues through Nov. 15.
"We're challenged with trying to attract different demographics," says Saff, who's been with the festival for 13 of its 14 years. Not only is it often hard to find films with Jewish content, she says — even with 139 Jewish film festivals listed online, from Atlanta to Copenhagen — it's tough to keep programming fresh while satisfying the desires of various segments: matinees for the lunchtime crowd, "racy, sexy" Saturday-night fare for couples.
Sponsored by the Gordon Jewish Community Center, this year's NJFF spans subjects as broad as immigrant life, musical theater, smoked fish, Chuck Norris movies, Mideast military history, and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian tensions. (In the interest of disclosure, I am introducing the Sunday afternoon screening of The Go-Go Boys at The Belcourt.) Saff selected the films with managing director Fran Brumlik and their co-directors Laurie Eskind — who co-founded the fest with the late Kathy Gutow, the namesake of its student film competition — Jackie Karr and Cindy Moskovitz. Some highlights:
Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love (noon Nov. 6, Gordon Jewish Community Center) The prodigious Broadway, film and pop composer's death two years ago during the Nashville test run of his last work, a musical version of Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor, came as an immense blow; Dori Bernstein's doc traces his meteoric career from Juilliard acceptance at age 6 to PEGOT-approved stardom by his 30s — followed by a crippling case of self-doubt.
Aftermath (7 p.m. Nov. 6, Belcourt) Wladyslaw Pasikowski's 2012 thriller sparked controversy overseas by exhuming an infamous chapter from World War II: the 1941 pogrom of the Jewish citizens of the Polish town of Jebwabne — a massacre long attributed to the Nazis, but later found to be carried out by the victims' own Polish neighbors. In Polish with subtitles.
It Happened in Saint-Tropez (6 p.m. Nov. 8, Belcourt) French director Danièle Thompson (Avenue Montaigne) helmed this frothy farce starring Kad Merad and Monica Bellucci, in which a death inadvertently triggered by a pastrami sandwich leads to myriad entanglements from New York to the Mediterranean for two brothers and their dysfunctional family. In French with subtitles.
Peace After Marriage (8:10 p.m. Nov. 8, Belcourt) A porn-addicted Palestinian (writer-director Ghazi Albuliwi) eking out a living as a struggling actor in Brooklyn sees a novel solution to his yen for cash and sex: a green-card marriage to a desperate Israeli (Einat Tubi). Albuliwi's Woody Allen-influenced comedy has gotten good notices on the festival circuit. In English and subtitled Arabic and Hebrew.
The Go-Go Boys: The Inside History of Cannon Films (4:30 p.m. Nov. 9, Belcourt) How two Israeli first cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, founded Cannon Films, the upstart production company synonymous with the cheesiest of '80s action flicks, breakdance epics and sexploitation romps — as well as John Cassavetes' masterpiece Love Streams, Jean-Luc Godard's hotly disputed adaptation of King Lear, and Norman Mailer's feverish pulp noir Tough Guys Don't Dance.
The Jewish Cardinal (7 p.m. Nov. 9, Belcourt) How's that title for a grabber? In this fact-based drama made for French television, Laurent Lucas plays Jean-Marie Lustiger, the child of Jewish parents who survives the Holocaust living with a French Catholic woman and embracing her faith — a decision that causes mounting tension as he rises through the ranks of the Vatican to become a confidant of Pope John Paul II (Aurelien Recoing). Rabbi Saul Strosberg of Congregation Sherith Israel will lead the post-film discussion.
Quality Balls: The David Steinberg Story (7:30 p.m. Nov. 9, Franklin Theatre) No less an admirer than Jerry Seinfeld says comedian David Steinberg has the titular attribute; Barry Avrech's well-reviewed doc profiles the former stand-up who parlayed his yeshiva training into an act that got the popular Smothers Brothers TV show canceled, earned him a place on the Nixon White House's enemies list, and influenced a generation of comics including Seinfeld and Larry David.
The Sturgeon Queens (11:30 a.m. Nov. 10, Belcourt) Good thing audiences will be eating a box lunch before Julie Cohen's portrait of 92-year-old Anne Russ Federman and her 100-year-old sister Hattie Russ Gold — the "daughters" of Russ and Daughters, the fourth-generation Lower East Side lox and herring emporium beloved by customers ranging from Maggie Gyllenhaal to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Under the Same Sun (7 p.m. Nov. 10, Belcourt) Samen Zoabi's feature takes off from an unusual premise: looking back on a near-future marked by an Israeli-Palestine truce, as entrepreneurs representing each side (Ali Suliman and Yossi Marshak) cross the divide to start a business together, with unpredictable results. Special guest for the screening is Rabbi Joshua Kullock, who was formally installed earlier this year at Nashville's 140-year-old West End Synagogue after previously leading a congregation in Guadalajara, Mexico. In English and subtitled Arabic and Hebrew.
Magic Men (7 p.m. Nov. 11, Belcourt) Accompanied by his Hasidic rapper son, a 78-year-old Israeli man (noted actor Makram Khoury) travels to Greece looking for the local who sheltered him from the Nazis several decades before. In English and subtitled Greek and Hebrew.
Little White Lie (7 p.m. Nov. 12, Belcourt) Lacey Schwartz's parents told her as a girl that her dark skin came from her Sicilian grandfather. When her parents divorce and she turns 18, her mother confides a family secret — touching off new curiosity about her true roots. The documentary should make for a lively post-film Q&A with director Schwartz in attendance.
Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force (7 p.m. Nov. 12, Franklin Theatre) Roberta Grossman's documentary, produced by Nancy Spielberg, pays homage to the men of the "Machal" — World War II vets who volunteered their aerial expertise to aid the newly founded state of Israel in 1948. Spielberg — who made her film debut in her brother Steven's teenage feature Firelight in 1964 — will attend both this screening and another the following night at The Belcourt.
Tickets to the films are $10, with special events such as galas and lunches extra; a $200 pass covers the entire festival. For more information, see nashvillejff.net.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
