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Jerome
Deschamps in
a scene from
"Je Suis
Vivante et je
Vous AimelThn
Alive & I Love
You," (France,
1998), directed
by Roger
Kahane.

■ 4.

S

;1 2°."

Left: A still from
"Delta Jews,"
(United States,
1998), directed by
Mike DeWitt.
Above: Laura Fraser
and Isabella
Rossellini in a scene
from "Left Luggage,"
(The Netherlands,
1998), directed by
Jeroen Krabbe.

‘xv..
„1/4

,

Above: Actor/director Mel Brooks in
a scene from "The Twelve Chairs,"
(United States, 1970).

Left: A scene from "The
Harmonists," (Germany, 1997),
directed by Joseph Vilsmaier.

The Eighth Annual New York Jewish Film Festival offers
a diversity of old and new "good Jewish films."

LYNNE KONSTANTIN
Special to The Jewish News

M

el Brooks, Harvey
Wang, Groucho Marx,
Jeroen Krabbe: Sound
like a surreal trip
through the annals of Jewish film? No
need for time travel, just a visit to
New York City, where the Eighth
Annual New York Jewish Film Festival
will be taking place from Jan. 17-27.
Rachel Chanoff, the festival's cura-
tor — who also works on program-
ming for the Sundance Film Festival

Lynne Konstantin is a freelance writer
based in New York.

1/8
1999

7_ 8 Detroit Jewish News

— says the criteria for eligibility
required that each film "be about a
Jewish theme or by a Jewish filmmak-
er, and be a good movie" — which
made choosing the films a difficult
task indeed.
"We had a big selection of really
interesting films this year," says
Chanoff, "with an extraordinary range
of subjects."
Taking advantage of that range of
subjects, this year's selections traverse
topics from Jews in the Mississippi
Delta and Finnish Jews forced to fight
alongside Nazis to big features such as
The Harmonists, which hearkens back
to the musicals of the 1940s, and
revivals of old classics.

.

One of Chanoff's favorites, My
Mother's First Olympics, is a son's docu-
mentary about his mother, a blind
lawn bowler champion in Israel. "It's a
triumph of the human spirit," says
Chanoff, "but it's also about a rela-
tionship between a mother and son,
antithetical to the typical Jewish
mother/son relationship."
Though it may seem difficult to
discern exactly what constitutes a
"Jewish film," according to the stan-
dards of the festival, any film made by
a Jewish filmmaker is a Jewish film.
Says Chanoff: "It's a huge area. And
rather than ghettoize it, the festival
throws the doors wide open." The fes-
tival is presented by the Jewish

Museum and the Film Society of
Lincoln Center.
Here is a roundup of the films to
be screened.

SCENES FROM A LOST WORLD—
SOVIET JEWISH FILM:
Features four classic silent films
from the Soviet Union and a modern-
day Mel Brooks classic.
Against the Father's Will (1927) —
An adaptation of Sholem Aleichem's
novel of the 1905 revolution, In the
Storm.
Suburban Quarters (1930) — A
modern Jewish girl flaunts her tradition-
al parents to marry a Ukrainian boy.
Seekers of Happiness (1936) —