arts & entertainment Honor :Albanian Muslims keep Holocaust- ra 'promise' in terrific , documentary. Rexhep Hoxha and his son Ermal at the Western Wall in Jerusalem Glass, simultaneously honors the broader efforts of the entire population to protect its Jews from the Nazis. These days, Albania is looked down on n important challenge for 21st- as the most broke, backward province in century documentary filmmakers Europe, but the country deserves a better is connecting what is becoming rep. Just before Mussolini's troops invaded the distant history of the Holocaust to today and drove him into exile, King Zog granted and making it relevant for younger audi- citizenship to every Jew living in Albania. ences. Following their beloved king's More often than not, it's the lead, and in keeping with their children and grandchildren of highly developed code of honor, the survivors, rescuers and perpetra- populace assumed the responsibil- tors who supply the necessary link ity of sheltering its Jews. Some 70 between the past and the present. percent of the Albanians who saved In her riveting, revelatory and Jews were Muslim, and Besa: The profound Besa: The Promise, Promise is intended in part as a director Rachel Goslins depicts rebuke of the conventional wisdom Filmma ker an Albanian man's extraordinary Rachel Goslins that Muslims and Jews are natural efforts to fulfill the vow his late and eternal enemies. father made to the Jewish couple Admittedly, Albania is a small he hid during the war. This marvelously country, and we're not talking large num- crafted film, with a fine score by Philip bers of Jews, but every life and every act Michael Fox Special to the Jewish News A New World Sequel was a decade in the making. George Robinson Special to the Jewish News T en years ago, when his film Yossi and Jagger was released to wide acclaim, Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox had no thought of a sequel. Well, almost no thought. "It dawned on me that I left this character in a very difficult place," Fox said in a tele- phone interview from Tel Aviv. "This charac- ter was important to me. I wanted to go back and save him:' At the end of the earlier film, Yossi Gutmann, played memorably by Ohad In Yossi, Ohad Knoller plays a closeted, conflicted cardiologist. Knoller, had just lost his lover and lieuten- ant, Jagger, in a catastrophic firelight on the Lebanon-Israel border. Since neither of the young soldiers had come out as gay, none of the film's other characters knew how much Yossi was suffering. of conscience counts. That's the attitude of Norman Gershman, a tireless American who embarked a decade ago on a campaign to find, photograph and extol the Albanians who aided Jews. Besa: The Promise artfully weaves the his- torical overview and the aging Gershman's solo crusade with the fascinating, nearly unbelievable persistence of an unassuming toy seller named Rexhep Hoxha. Born in 1950, he grew up hearing his father's story of hiding a Bulgarian Jewish couple and infant during the war. When the Abadjens fled, they left three prayer books —treasured family items that would have betrayed their Jewishness if they were stopped en route — in their benefactor's care. He promised to return them after the war, but to his dismay he was never able to locate the family nor did they or their children ever show up to reclaim them. After his father's death, Rexhep inherited the "besa." What gives the film its tension is the mys- terious behavior of the Jews, whose inexpli- cable failure to seek out and thank their res- cuers after the war (of greater importance, arguably, than recovering their property), contrasts with Rexhep Hoxha's unwavering, Internet-aided persistence. The trail eventually leads to Israel, where we watch apprehensively to see if the people of the book will be embarrassingly and insultingly cavalier about Rexhep's remark- able commitment to return their precious books, or if they will match the singular character of the Albanian (and his son) we've come to admire. Goslins, a lawyer-turned-filmmaker who graduated from UC Santa Cruz and is married to Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski, has made a terrific, galvanizing film. One wishes, though, that she hadn't gone all Ken Burns with slow zooms in on Gershman's mesmerizing black-and-white portraits and had the faith in her audience to allow us to absorb the quiet power and beauty of his compositions. That's the smallest of quibbles for a rare film that lets us spend an hour and a half awed by the best qualities of human beings and inspires us to manifest our own. ❑ The JCC's Lenore Marwil Jewish Film Festival screens Besa: The Promise, preceded by Belarus, local filmmaker Alex Gorosh's documentary about a fam- ily trip of a lifetime, at 3 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts in West Bloomfield; (248) 661-1900 or www.jccdet.org . Besa: The Promise also will be shown at 2 p.m. Monday, May 6, at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor; (734) 971-0990. Fox, the openly gay writer-director who had created him, knew, and it nagged at him. "I wanted to start a process for him where he can realize where he is and start dealing with that and changing it; Fox explained. It took the filmmaker a decade to do that, and he says it wasn't an entirely self- less act. "It was also a way for me to go back and examine myself when I was a young- er man; Fox admits, "to look at how I've changed, where I am today as a person, as a film director. It was a manipulation I used on myself' If so, it was a relatively harmless one. The Yossi we meet at the outset of the new film is a promising young doctor, still in the closet and still emotionally repressed. (He's also still played by Knoller, the only cast member still around from the first film.) If Yossi is 10 years older and, at 34, a bit calmer, so is his situation. There is a world of difference between combat in wartime and even the most fraught hospital cardiac unit. Those differences are reflected in the style of the film. Yossi is a surprisingly and rewardingly understated film, the kind of film in which much of the emotional stress is conveyed through our view of the back of the protagonist's head, the stolid glumness of his face and the extraordinary effort required to coax a smile from him. Where the Yossi of a decade ago was stoic, the Yossi of today is downright somber. It is no small credit to Fox and Knoller that he is never dull. "I wanted to revisit myself, on a per- sonal level and on an artistic, professional lever Fox said. "When we made the first film, I wanted to do something rough and documentary-style. This film looks more self-aware, formalistic. It's more grown-up, more adult. As a filmmaker, I have different films New World on page 50 April 11 • 2013 53