Beyond The Toronto Jewish Film Festival...

An Interview with Helena Yaralova, co-star of Five Hours from Paris

2011-06-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

(above:) Helena Yaralova in Five Hours from Paris

NINA ZASLAVSKY
The Russian Film Festival
STUART HANDS
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival

Director Leonid Prudovsky’s Five Hours from Paris (2009) is a poignant love story about a divorced cab driver, Yigal, who meets Lina, a music teacher and married woman on the brink of leaving Israel to join her husband in Canada. Neither is looking for romance, but somehow they find themselves drawn to each other, and their conventional lives are radically transformed. As Lina, Russian-Israeli actor Helena Yaralova gives a nuanced but mesmerizing performance.

Helena Yaralova was born in 1964 in Kiev, into a doctor’s family.

As a child and adolescent, she enjoyed dancing and figure skating, which blossomed into a career beginning in 1987 at the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre.

She immigrated to Israel in 1993.

As an actress, singer and one of the organizers and founders of the Malenki (Russian for “small”) Theatre, she was nominated for the Abraham Ben Yosef Award for Excellence in the Performing Arts.

In Israel, Helena Yaralova dedicated more than 13 years to the Yiddishspiel Theater, and also appeared in films such as Kedma (2002) by the well-known Israeli director Amos Gitai. She is also the host of the TV program, Female Territory, on the Russian-Israeli channel Israel Plus.

In October 2009, she was in a serious car accident and was severely injured; however, in 2010 she was back to work, performing on stage and in the cinema.

You were in Leonid Prudovsky's short film, Next Year in Toronto (2007), in which you play a similar role to the one you play in his feature film, Five Hours from Paris. How much were you involved in the development of the character you were to play in Five Hours from Paris?

With Next Year in Toronto, Leonid Prudovsky was training before the big jump. When making this short movie, he was thinking about the character and where he could go with it. The role of the main heroine in Five Hours from Paris was written specifically for me.

When I decided to act in this movie, I wanted to choose my co-star myself. I only wanted to do the movie with Dror Keren because there is a very strong chemistry between us. I knew that with another actor the movie would have been a simple love story, without the passion Dror and I could bring to the scenario of a married Russian woman meeting and feeling a spark with an Israeli guy. I wanted to bring the expression to a higher level—a meeting of cultures and true love. Leonid and a scriptwriter told me that they knew everything about [the male character]. Well, as it was written by men, we initially didn’t have a clue about her. And so I understood that the responsibility for this character rested solely with me. I needed to show the audience that she’s not a simple woman or a simple pianist, but that she’s something much greater……And it seems to me that I succeeded. I love this movie and this image [of her]. I would also like to say that Dror was amazing.

(above:) Yaralova with Dror Keren in Five Hours from Paris

You have made several films with Leonid Prudovsky [Five Hours from Paris, Next Year in Toronto and Dark Night (2005)]. Can you talk about the working relationship that you have developed with him?

When I first received the script for [the short film] Dark Night, I refused the role. I didn’t want to play a Palestinian: this was not me. But Leonid rewrote the script a few times and came to me again and again. In my own mind, I had already decided that I would do the film, although I kept insisting that I did not want to do it. Then one day, Leonid came to my apartment and was talking, explaining, convincing… I was listening to him and thinking, he is so young, so persistent, meticulous in his work and so obstinate. And finally I agreed, surprising even myself. After he left, I got upset as I asked myself, why did I agree? But it was done and I couldn’t change anything. Today, Dark Night is my favourite movie. When we finished working on this project, Leonid asked me if I would like to work with him again in the future. And I answered: Lenechka, in any project, always.

Could you talk about your experience working with Amos Gitai on Kedma

Amos Gitai is very different. He has a special approach to filming. He likes to make spur-of-the-moment changes on the set, which at first, had actors in disbelief and shock. He has his own order of doing things, which to others, appears to be a big mess. From him, I learned that you must always be true to yourself and defend your beliefs, but that you must also respect others and their opinions. I am a very freedom-loving person, but I understood, that when he demanded something from me, I would have thirty seconds to hear his command, [process it] and act.

And thanks to him, I have already experienced the red carpet, thousands of spectators and a luxury hotel at the Cannes Film Festival – the dream of every movie actor.

(above:) Yaralova in Amos Gitai's Kedma

Can you talk about your training and experience at the Moscow Art Theatre?

I went to school at the Moscow Art Theatre studio, and after my graduation, worked at the Sovremennik Theatre. This theatre is one of the five best among numerous Moscow theatres. That’s where I gained the classical old school experience—that’s where the Stanislavsky system was born and developed. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre. That’s where everything began. By the way, Habima (one of the best Israeli theatres) started from The Moscow Art Theatre. Study is a process, and without a structured educational process there are no positive results.

What made you move to Israel?

During the time I worked in Moscow at the prestigious theatre, I became a movie actress and had a baby. Everything was fine, except for my marriage. I got divorced, and knew that I needed to find my purpose in life. There was no Zionist motivation. I was an only child and pretty naïve. However, the moment had come for me to make a decision. My grandmother and aunt had already moved to Israel by that time. This was around 1993. People were able to travel to Israel as tourists, but they would come back and say, it’s impossible to live there—it’s a spa à Shangri-la. I decided to visit this country with my child, as a tourist, just for two weeks. From the very first day, it appeared to me that there were disadvantages and advantages to living in Israel. I came back home, filed the application and… The funny fact is that I was right about both the advantages and disadvantages which were waiting for me.

Can you talk about how you were able to adapt to Israeli culture, and Hebrew?

There one thing I realized about Israel – either you accept this country the way it is, or you don’t. [The country] mirrors your attitude and if you accept Israel, it will accept you as well.

The same thing with the language. At first, it seemed that all my efforts disappeared like water in the sand. For example, when a house is being built, one starts with digging a hole and then the foundation is poured before the house is actually built. And so when I thought that everything was disappearing in the sand, I soon realized that I was building a base. When I heard Hebrew and its intonation, I found it to be very logical. There is a lot more to this language than meets the eye, in terms of speaking and understanding. I love languages - Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, all languages. Every language has its own philosophy. “Ya" (the Russian word for “you”) begins with the last letter of the Russian alphabet. In Hebrew, the word “Ani” (the Hebrew word for “I”) starts with the first letter of the alphabet. Here is the difference between Russian and Hebrew cultures. In Russian culture, there is no respect for the individual, and the letter in the alphabet expresses it. In Hebrew, on the other hand, the person gets respected; it is more positive and it is reflected in this letter as well.

Can you talk about the type of training that you received during your years at the Yiddishspiel Theatre?

I was very lucky to find myself working in this theatre. My Dad and Grandmother spoke Yiddish, but we didn’t use it at home. I was born in Kiev and didn’t want to speak Yiddish, as I didn’t want to seem different among typical Russian girls.

For the past 13 years, I have worked on learning Yiddish. It is an amazing language which has so many words that define happiness and misfortune. It is similar to the words used by [Inuit] people to define snow. They are not just words, there is depth in their meaning.

I acted in many plays in this theatre but one day I woke up and knew that I needed to do something new for my soul. [So in 1997], my ex- husband, Michael Teplizki, and I decided to create a new theatre: the Malenki Theatre. Today this is a well-known theatre, which has received various prizes from the Israeli academy.

Do you find that you still get typecast in Russian-speaking roles?

What roles should I play? This is the reality: I play Russian characters. I cannot play a pure Israeli woman: Why should a director cast me for that, when there are so many remarkable Hebrew-speaking actresses? Once I was asked to audition for the role of a typical Sabra from Jerusalem. But the people who were born in Jerusalem speak differently than people from Tel-Aviv. I wasn’t accepted for this movie. But I was cast for a different film, where the director decided to change the character from the Sabra Yael to the Russian Elena. I can work on my accent every day and get the perfect “r” and “het”—but what for? I prefer to stay with my Russian-speaking roles because again, I have a right to choose what I want to do.

(above:) Yaralova in a production of the Malenki Theatre

An Interview with Eytan Fox, director of Mary Lou

2011-05-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

POSTED BY
ALLEN BRAUDE
Programmer
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

Eytan Fox's musical miniseries, Mary Lou

Mary Lou is the most recent film by acclaimed Israeli director Eytan Fox (Yossi and Jagger, Walk On Water, The Bubble, and the television series Florentine).

TJFF Programmer Allen Braude spoke with Eytan Fox about experience directing Mary Lou.

Allen Braude: Let me begin by congratulating you on Mary Lou. I find it to be fun and entertaining but also very moving with emotional depth. What inspired you to make this film and why did you choose to tell the story in four parts?

Eytan Fox: Thank you. To tell you the truth, this was one of the only projects that I’ve directed that I didn’t really initiate, it wasn’t my idea. I was approached by a cable television channel in Israel called HOT. They contacted me and said they wanted to do a musical miniseries, which is a format that is not done often. Today there are musical television series such as Glee, but a miniseries that is a musical is currently not very popular. HOT is a channel that produces a lot of miniseries. They obtained the rights to all the music of this Israeli pop icon named Svika Pick, and wanted to take these Israeli pop songs and create a story around them, like Mamma Mia does with Abba’s music or like other contemporary musicals. Their aim was to produce the most entertaining and meaningful project or film, based around Svika Pick’s songs. So they brought me into the project, which was already in development with an amazing woman named Shiri Artzi, who wrote the story. We clearly fell in love (laughs) and we worked on this together and created something we are very proud of. And now Mary Lou is starting to leave Israel and travel the world, and I’m very happy that it is reaching all sorts of places I didn’t expect it to reach.

AB: When I watched Mary Lou, I was not familiar with Svika Pick’s music but I enjoyed the songs very much. How important is Svika Pick to Israelis?

EF: I’m trying to think of who the North American equivalent would be, I’m mean aside from the fact that he looks like Ozzy Osbourne (you can see him in a cameo role in Mary Lou), but that’s not the comparison to Svika Pick I want to make. I’ll tell you that my first slow dance—in what was the seventh grade or something—with a girl, was to a Svika Pick song. For anyone who grew up in Israel in the 1970’s or 1980’s, his music is part of their score, part of their growing up score, part of their life score. And like Abba for that matter, he keeps having a comeback every few years. The last three years he’s been a judge on Israeli idol—that’s a big comeback—and an earlier comeback back was in 2002 when the National Theatre of Israel put on a theatrical stage musical which featured Svika Pick songs, and I went to see it. Everyone was very upset, saying how could the Israeli National Theatre Company—the theatre of Shakespeare and Chekhov—put on a musical based on pop songs, no matter whose music they were using. But it was a very big success, it was the theatre’s biggest commercial success. So the Israeli channel HOT saw the success and wanted to show it on television. However, while they were inspired by its success, they really didn’t like the play itself. It was the silliest play you can imagine. So, instead of filming the play, they obtained the rights to the songs and decided to create a new project. I’m happy that they decided that it would not just be something light and fun; so we had a chance to take these songs and create a story that has intelligence and something to say about serious issues, that has depth and multi-layered characters and discussions about sexuality. Mary Lou looks at attitudes towards transsexuals, sexuality between friends, bisexuality, leaving your hometown as a boy and coming back as a woman, and then coming out to your father—all this very serious stuff. I’m glad we had the opportunity to do this and to turn it into something that is more than just an entertaining commercial musical. You know Svika Pick is an artist who has very commercially successful songs, and it is great that he is so supportive of this project and that he let us use his music to discuss all these issues.

Whenever I make a film and take it abroad, I’m nervous about how it will do, how people will react. Will people appreciate that I am trying to tell a different story? Will people like the characters I’ve created, and will they understand the situations I am trying to talk about and the subtleties in the work? And with Mary Lou you add an extra layer—all these Israeli songs that people abroad aren’t likely to know—so it’s frightening to present it. I recently presented the film in Paris at the Forum des Images as part of a festival of television work, and we had a very good screening of all four episodes. It was in a big cinema, over 500 people, and it was a beautiful day in Paris but people chose to spend three hours in the theatre to see it and it was full. The audience really understood it and appreciated how the songs were used and enjoyed the variety of song styles. Everyone had a wonderful time and the audience enjoyed it tremendously, so I hope it will have the same success in Toronto.

AB: How did you cast your lead actors? Did they do their own singing?

EF: Yes, the lead actors did their own singing. I’m very proud of them because you have examples of good actors who are not able to sing well—for example Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia—and you also have examples of actors not singing themselves such as of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story; in these cases other women did the vocals as the actresses did not have great singing voices, which worked wonderfully.

In our case, all of the young actors are people who have good voices. When we were casting it was very important that they could sing, not Broadway calibre singing, not super-professional voices, but that they could carry a tune and do it well. I was looking for actors who were able to take on a character and were comfortable and believable when they start singing—because it’s fun, because it is part of what’s happening—and comfortable to join others who are singing and dancing. It is the same with the dancing. We were not looking for super-professional dancing from the actors, but more than what I would call ‘walking dancing’. We wanted the characters to show they could join the people dancing and do it well for that matter. We wanted the audience to be able to relate to and be inspired by the singing and dancing, not just the lesbian and gay community, but a wide audience so that even shy boys would want to move their feet.

Ido Rosenberg as Meir/Mary Lou

Secondly, when casting the lead actors, I was looking for very young people, not teenagers, but actors in their early 20s who look young. We found these wonderful young actors working in Tel Aviv, and talked to them about being involved and committing themselves to the project and putting their hearts, souls and bodies into the work. For example, the actor who plays Gabriel, he’s a very handsome young man and he’s gay. And he made a point out of coming out to me. You know I’m an advocate for people coming out—actors and public figures coming out—but I said to him, are you sure about this? This is your first big role, and maybe you should wait a bit. No, he said, this is who I am and I’m tired of lying and pretending I’m someone who I’m not. I’m proud of whom I am. This is a person who grew up on a kibbutz in a macho environment with a tough father and who served in the army, who did all these tough things and now is singing and dancing and is an out gay youth. I’ve very happy for him and proud of him.

AB: That shows how times have changed, how people are less worried about the impact on their careers and are more interested in living as the person they want to be.

EF: Yes you’re right, and in Israel especially. I’ve been coming for many years to film festivals in North America, Jewish Film Festivals, Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, International Film Festivals. One of my first tours of these festivals was with my first television series, Florentine. That was the television series that portrayed the first gay love story between two men on Israeli television, it showed the first gay kiss, and a lot of other taboos were dealt with or broken in that series. And back then it was a really ground breaking. Now after many years, maybe I’m pushing the envelope a little further, using Svika Pick songs which are very straight—well not exactly straight, but well-known by everyone in Israel and loved by many—and I’m bring them to a world that is, maybe, a little more difficult for a large audiences. I remember coming to all these Jewish film festivals and Gay and Lesbian film festivals with Florentine, and people were surprised and said, you mean you are able to show this on Israeli television? And I remember that at that time it was a difficult thing to do. But today is different, and I think that I was part of the whole change with my films and my television work. Now it is much easier for me, my generation and young people in Israel to make these kinds of films: they’re appreciated, they’re loved, and the actors who are gay can come out and it doesn’t necessarily harm their career. We have many openly gay artists in Israel—men and women who are out and still very popular.

Eytan Fox (middle) with the cast of The Bubble (2006)

AB: Mary Lou is not as political as your last film (The Bubble) but still addresses important social issues such as homophobic bullying in high schools. How serious is this issue in Israel?

EF: First of all, I think almost everything has a political side. So you do have these political subtexts in Mary Lou, such as the one boy (Meir) who decides not to go into the army, which is very unusual in Israel, and then becomes a drag performer in Tel Aviv. And then you have the other boy (Gabriel) who does the traditional thing and becomes a paratrooper in the Israeli army and then they have this conversation where Gabi, the soldier, refers to the dress that Meir, the drag queen, is wearing, and asks him, do you usually wear this costume? And Meir answers, do you always wear this costume, referring to his army uniform, which is a very radical statement, because no one in Israel thinks of the army uniforms as costumes. Being in the army is something which is very much part of the whole nature of who Israelis are, and the uniform is like our skin, you know this is our traditional role, and the uniform is not a costume. In Mary Lou, I try present to present an equation where both the uniform and the dress are costumes: they are choices made by people about what to wear and who to be. So that’s one political thing that the series does.

Secondly, Israel, like many countries, has a growing acceptance of gay and lesbian people, and gay and lesbian culture and so on. However, like many other places with such strong acceptance, we still have problems which includes being gay and out in high school. While we were shooting Mary Lou, we had this terrible incident of this young man walking into the Gay and Lesbian Youth Centre in Tel Aviv and shooting and killing 3 youths and wounding others. The centre was a relatively popular place and we started getting all these phone calls on set because everyone was trying to figure out who was there and who wasn’t there, who’s safe and who’s not safe. This was an unfortunate reminder that what we were doing was relevant and how important it was to tell this story. You think you are living in a liberal and open-minded place, but when you have this kind of tragedy, you realize that you have to continue making these kind of films and shows, and that you must be vigilant and not let your guard down.

AB: Can you tell us a little bit about your next project?

EF: Well, I’m having a very busy year: I’m shooting two feature-length films, which doesn’t happen often in Israel, which has a very small industry. Right now I’m finishing shooting on a very small independent film, which is somewhat of a sequel to Yossi and Jagger. It’s 10 years later and it features just Yossi, who’s still mourning his lover and the film tries to understand what happened to him, how he changed, how Israel has changed, and how he tries to deal with his post-traumatic personality. So that’s the film I’m shooting as we speak. It’s very intense, it’s a very small film that I have a very strong urge to make. And then later on in August, I’m shooting a completely different film—a feel-good, happy film about a group of women who form a pop group. They are different ages—the oldest is 55 and the youngest is 22—and they have been chosen to represent Israel in the Eurovision song contest. So I’m very happy about that. And I’m really happy that Mary Lou is going around the world and that film festivals, such as the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, are showing it.

Author and Comics Scholar Paul Buhle on Who Framed Roger Rabbit

2010-06-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

During its 18^th Festival last April, The Toronto Jewish Film Festival presented a sidebar series entitled People of the Comic Book, which celebrated the Jewish pioneers and creators of comic art and animation. As part of this special programme, author Paul Buhle (Jews and American Comics and The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics) provided a special introduction to the American animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), contextualizing it as a Hollywood phenomenon of a distinctly Jewish character.

Author Paul Buhle

Much of the interest in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and its role in film history, animation and otherwise, is about technique, and that is entirely proper. The fact that a combination of live and animated materials could be done so deftly, in an age before digitization, is almost incredible and the discussion of this breakthrough with all the complications, including the use of characters owned by one film studio in the film by another studio, is the heart of the discussion among filmmakers that you can find on the DVD set.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit set a new standard, but what I want to offer to you as a new idea, or anyway, my idea, is that we can see the connection with the early Fleischer Studio experiments, at the early end of film history, and the related connections of live and animated material in American Splendor, with Harvey Pekar as the indispensable protagonist.

No one has pointed out, to my knowledge, that all this--these three connected points of animation breakthroughs in what might be called postmodern modes, but has precedented and succeeded what has been called postmodernism--are also JEWISH moments, Jewish breakthroughs. I don’t think that I can prove this point, but it is something to ponder as you watch the film.

A scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit

You will be seeing, after brief remarks from me, one of the most important but also intriguing animated feature films ever made. It is important, in a business sense, for reasons that you can easily find on the web or histories of animation in film and television. It is intriguing in ways that do not usually get discussed, involving Jewishness and the complications of Golden Age Hollywood’s Jewish presence, the sudden further corporatization of Hollywood at the eclipse of both the New Deal and the Golden Age boxoffice, in the second half of the 1940s. The loss of large-scale dreams about artistic independence and a more cooperative society. And the legacies left behind right up til now.

Let’s take on the film industry business side first and get it out of the way. Animation peaked in the 1940s, like the whole film business. But crashed more definitely in the 1950s, so much so that the effectively unionized and large Jewish world of animation workers saw wide-scale unemployment, with some economic relief but also artistic disappointment in the television work of the Hanna-Barbera studios. The best animation seemed likely to be made abroad, for a very long time.

It would be intriguing to say that the experiments of Ralph Bakshi during the 1970s made a lasting impact but like assorted television special animation features, the prospects of animation for adults remained uncertain. Then came Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988, winning wide audiences for its innovative presentation, mixing live action and animation across feature-length, for its humor and for the strength of its story line.

It also brought Steve Spielberg into animation (he had done some cameo shots before) full scale as a producer, and with him Jeffrey Katzenberg as head of Disney animation, returning animation into the number one moneymaker of Disney enterprises, with two Jewish Americans atop a corporation once known for its hints of anti-Semitism, under Uncle Walt.

Industry professional Tom Sito, a self-made scholar of the field and a former student of Harvey Kurtzman at the New York School for the Visual Arts, told me that without Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the distinctly postmodern characters of alternative comic artist Matt Groening would never have been invited on to The Tracey Ullman Show and from there, the creation of The Simpsons. We are now more than twenty years since The Simpsons debut and it is still going strong. As social commentary, in my humble view, the Simpsons view of middle American life is unsurpassed. As animation, its success is not likely to be equaled.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

So let’s go back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the subtext, as Sito, inviting me to the hang-out café of the animation workers local IATSE 839, described to me. The largest trauma in Hollywood Jewish history is of course the Blacklist, a leading subject of the 2007 Toronto Jewish Film Festival and a leading subject of my interviewing oldtimers. General readers often think of the Blacklist as being exclusively about Communists and ex-communists, and perhaps about accusations of divided loyalty among Jewish Americans. This view separates Cold War issues from all the other things going on in the film capital simultaneously. The end of the war saw another, sometimes violent, war over unionization, with thugs brought in to break union picket lines and, we learned later, actor Ronald Reagan as an FBI informer against the very largely Jewish Left in the unions and studios.

The sharp decline of revenues after 1947 was a body blow, considerably before television had reached the hinterlands and had its blanket effect on filmgoing. At the same time, hopes for independent production were still very much alive--the dream of writers, directors, grips and some stars that there would be a creative breakaway from the oligopoly of the handful of big studios, and the creation of art films that were popular. Abraham Polonsky, the great noir director and my favorite interviewee, seemed to be reaching toward that goal successfully, at least with John Garfield as his star, until the blacklist closed in on him.

Meanwhile, LA itself was being transformed in many ways, the most dramatic, to working people at least, taking place in the shutdown of what had been a superb mass transit system. It became clear later that this was a conspiracy of sorts to compel automobile sales, one of the great scandals in America’s loss of crucial human transport relative to the rest of the world and runaway sprawl.

So much happened so quickly that LA looked like a different place to many residents looking back from the middle 1950s to the middle 1940s. Jews continued to move there in large numbers, but so many democratic prospects were gone and the new residents seemed unaware how they had slipped away.

Roger Rabbit, then, is subtly about recovered memory. The Toons, animated characters, are the ordinary film workers and community, which was never as Jewish as writers, producers and even stars, but was Jewish enough for a kind of stamp of specialness, a semi-Jewish world that is losing what it had and that needs a kind of redemption. There’s a moment in the film, directly about mass transportation, the Red Cars, that makes this all clear. But you have to watch carefully for the explication.

Our protagonist seems to be on a much more normal noir detective plot--normal if we remember that the invention of the noir was largely by the Jewish Left in Hollywood--reflecting their view that the world of FDR and national unity was now gone, replaced by intrigue, betrayal and greed.

As you will see, the evil plot to take control of Toontown, to destroy it for a freeway and then force people to use that freeway by destroying the trolley fleet, is not entirely a product of fantasy. You have mostly seen the film, and won’t be surprised to learn that a crucial secret identity is involved here, or that the secret identity most common in Hollywood was the secret identity of Jews, disguised by name and perhaps nosejob, as gentiles.

There is so much to appreciate in this film, at any number of levels, that only by looking back toward the era when live-action and animation had not yet been mixed successfully (although attempted from earliest animation, as seen yesterday in Fleischer studios work of the early 1920s), we can only marvel at the smoothness and hilarity of the breakthrough. But it’s also true that animation, after Who Framed Roger Rabbit, rarely came back to the story of Hollywood itself, and the more hidden story of Hollywood Jews who did not become moguls or stars. Enjoy!

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

An Interview with the Co-Directors of the Israeli Comedy, A Matter of Size

2010-05-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

A Matter of Size, the opening night film of the 2010 Toronto Jewish Film Festival

POSTED BY
SUSAN STARKMAN
FilmMatters and Programmer
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

The Toronto Jewish Film Festival opened its 18^th year with A Matter of Size, an uproarious “coming out” comedy of a different kind. Tired of being slaves to the “dictatorship of skinniness”, a group of overweight Israelis discovers the world of Sumo, where wrestlers are revered for their size. As they embark on a rigid training schedule under the strict watch of their Japanese coach (the owner of a Japanese restaurant in Ramle), each of the men embarks on a journey of self-discovery. While the audience is kept in stitches for much of the film, A Matter of Size ultimately delivers a serious message about learning to accept oneself.

Co-directed by Erez Tadmor and Sharon Maymon, A Matter of Size has won multiple international awards and has played at numerous festivals. The Weinstein brothers have recently purchased the film and an American version of the film is in the works. Susan Starkman recently had the chance to interview both of these directors about this film and some of their earlier works. The interviews were translated from Hebrew by Tamar Klarfeld.

Sharon Maymon (left) and Erez Tadmor (right) at TJFF's opening night screening of A Matter of Size.

Interview with Sharon Maymon

Susan Starkman: A Matter of Size is less about Sumo than it is about self-acceptance. What made you decide to use Sumo as a vehicle through which these men would come to accept themselves?

Sharon Maymon: The idea was indeed to write a film about self-acceptance and coming out of the closet. Because I did not want to write about that directly, I decided to look for another story through which I would be able to get the message across in its subtext. And then it struck me that I could use Sumo wrestling as a catalyst for freeing overweight people, and deal with the subject in this way. In addition, the protagonist of the film is called Herzl, named after Theodor Herzl, Hoze Ha'Medinah [visionary of the State] that freed the Jews from being dispersed all over the world. Like Theodor Herzl, Herzl in the film is a leader of sorts who frees and brings independence to overweight people. I wrote the script with Danny Cohen-Solal.

SS: At one point in the film, Aharon comments that there is no Sumo in Israel because there are no fat people in Israel. Do you think that Israeli society is as obsessed with being thin as North American society?

SM: Yes, I believe that similar to North American society, Israeli society is also controlled by the ‘dictatorship of thinness’. In Israel, good-looking equates to being thin. Everybody drinks diet cola and counts calories. It begins when kids are around 11, in elementary schools.

SS: The character of Mona, Herzl’s mother, reflects a conflicting attitude towards food; on the one hand, she criticizes Herzl for being obese and, on the other, she acts like a stereotypical Jewish mother by offering him more to eat. Do you see this contradictory relationship toward food as being a particularly Jewish phenomenon?

SM: Truth be told, Mona’s character’s is very close to my mother’s. I simply wrote the character based on my mother’s behaviour and it is difficult for me to analyse her. I think that at the end of the day her behaviour stems from love. She wants her son to be happy so she smothers him with love to the point that it suffocates him. In addition, I think that there is a connection between over-eating and being Jewish because on holidays we eat so much, much more than you would think is possible. After the holidays you can say that all Jews are on a diet, or at least claim to be.

SS: Both A Matter of Size and your earlier film, Mortgage, deal with serious social issues through comedy. Do you find it difficult to find a balance between keeping your audience entertained while still getting your message across?

SM: Yes, the movies that I write are dramatic and comic at the same time. I believe that it is easier that way to sweeten the pill and deal with difficult subjects in a lighter and communicative manner. Every time that I write a dramatic scene, I must temper it with humour in order to prevent it from becoming schmaltzy. It is easier for the audience to empathize with the situation if they can find a release through laughter.

Eli Finish and Hilla Sorjon-Fischer in Mortgage

SS: Mortgage explores the strain that financial problems can cause on a marriage. Do you think that working with a female co-director (Tal Granit) contributed to making the relationship between the husband and wife onscreen seem so realistic?

SM: I wrote Mortgage with a woman and therefore after the audience views the film they say that they felt that the woman sounded like woman and the man sounded like a man. There’s no doubt that you have to be a woman to write a woman’s role and the opposite.

SS: Where did you meet Erez Tadmor and how did the collaboration with him on A Matter of Size come about?

SM: I met Erez Tadmor on my first day of classes at Camera Obscura [Film School in Israel]. Already as students we worked together on projects so it was natural to direct this film together.

SS: Can you elaborate on the visual style of A Matter of Size, particularly the vibrant colour palette? How were you able to incorporate a Japanese aesthetic into an Israeli film? Are there any specific Japanese directors who influenced you artistically?

SM: No, we were not influenced by any Japanese directors, but the idea was to combine elements of Oriental art and Japanese styles. Erez and I travelled to Japan and researched the Japanese culture in general and the Sumo culture in particular. We combined elements of Japanese drawings, primarily in Kitano’s house and in the forest scenes where the actors were wearing the red “mawashi” (Sumo uniform). Regarding the colours, the idea was to start the film with dark and grey colours and, at the moment that Sumo entered the plot, the colours became warmer (with the introduction of the red mawashi). The idea was to pass the message of how the characters were feeling through the colour scheme.

SS: How much training did your actors go through before they could film a credible wrestling scene?

SM: The actors underwent sumo training for three months. Approximately one rehearsal was necessary on the film set in order to begin filming because the rehearsals had been precise and exhausting.

SS: How did Togo Igawa (Kitano), a Japanese actor based in England, become involved with this film?

SM: Our casting director found Togo Igawa. She auditioned him in England and both Erez and I flew to meet him in Germany. We auditioned him in our hotel room and, from the moment he entered the room, we knew that he was the one.

SS: Mortgage and A Matter of Size are both set in Ramle. Are any of the characters in these films based on people that you knew growing up in that city?

SM: Yes, many of the characters are based on archetypes that we knew in Ramle. Today I live in Tel Aviv, but when I sit in my writing room to write, I go back to the city of my birth and write about the people I met there. These are the people that I’m really interested in writing about. I guess I have Ramle in my blood.

SS: Like so many of the characters in Mortgage, Kitano is missing part of his finger as a result of a work-place accident. Will the characters in your next film have all of their fingers intact?

SM: The missing finger motif began with Mortgage and continued into A Matter of Size. My father lost a finger in a carpentry shop and apparently this influenced me and became etched in my memory. The idea of the missing finger connected naturally to the character of Kitano since, as everyone knows, the Yakuza (the Japanese mafia) chop off fingers as the punishment for betrayal. The lead role in my next film (Good Death) is based on the character of Yehezkiel from Mortgage who was played by Zeev Revach. It can be seen as a sequel to Mortgage and he will be missing a finger in this film as well.

SS: Can you tell us about your other project with Tal Granit called La’harog Devora?

SM: La’Harog Devora is a short film that I directed with Tal Granit. The film was awarded best short film in the Haifa Film Festival. The film is, in essence, an allegory of Israel society. It opens with two men killing a bumblebee, which leads to a mass murder.

Interview with Erez Tadmor

Susan Starkman: A Matter of Size marks a radical stylistic departure from some of your more improvisational films such as Strangers and Offside. How did you approach writing a more conventional screenplay?

Erez Tadmor: Sharon Maymon contacted me after he finished the first draft of the film script that he co-authored with Dani Cohen Solel, and suggested that I join him in directing the film. From that moment, we embarked on a cross-border adventure. We started our research and travelled together to Japan. We stayed there for two weeks, where we were hosted by the Sumo University, and watched from the sidelines as the students trained – eating for three hours, training for three hours, round-the-clock training. We learned a little about admiration, how much the Japanese admire their Sumo stars – almost like the Italians with their soccer. We returned to Israel with the answers that we were looking for, and we started rewriting the script from a more knowledgeable perspective.

SS: Your last film, Strangers, is the first Israeli film to be listed on the Danish website Dogme95 (although, strictly speaking, the film does not adhere to all of the stringent restrictions laid out in the Dogme manifesto). How much influence do directors like Lars von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg have on your approach to filmmaking? What other directors have influenced your work?

ET: I was familiar with the Dogme films of Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier from the early Nineties. They brought a new and refreshing approach to filmmaking with films like The Celebration and The Idiots. So many directors adopted the Dogme Manifesto that they authored that it began to grow arms and legs. Even the creators of the Manifesto began to break the rules. That’s what we did with Strangers. We wanted to take two actors and film them from 8 in the morning until midnight every day and see what developed. We chose a couple that would be well matched and they met for the first time on a train in Berlin (in the opening scene of the film). That’s how it came to be that we had four people on the set, two directors (me and Guy Nattiv), a cameraman and a soundman. We decided where to take the characters and guide the actors’ improvisations – and then something amazing occurred. A romance developed right in front of our eyes and, of course, in front of the camera lens, a kind of romance that continued through to the end of the film. We felt that the Dogme approach to filmmaking was an effective way to capture the love story in the film and liberate it from the conventional mode of love stories.

SS: While the majority of the conversations between Eyal and Rana (the young couple in Strangers) were improvised, some of the scenes were scripted. Were their discussions relating to the Arab Israeli conflict and the war in Lebanon improvised or were they written beforehand? Did the outbreak of the second Lebanon war during the shooting of the film have any impact on the relationship between the lead actors?

ET: During the filming of Strangers we got a telephone call from the leading actor’s (Liron Levo) father, telling him that two soldiers had been kidnapped in the north of Israel. We wanted to film what really happened in that year and so we incorporated it into the film. We were so preoccupied with the love story that we didn’t even notice that a war was breaking out right under our noses. When we comprehended that fact, we stopped and thought about how to continue with the film. We couldn’t ignore what was happening so we decided to take the realism to the limit. Lubna Azbal, who played Rana returned home to Paris and we returned to Israel with Liron. We were there for a week, organizing ourselves, and focussing on soothing the nerves of our producer who was worried that he had only half a film. Then we travelled with Eyal to Paris and integrated what was happening in Israel at the time into the characters’ relationship. We decided not to film in Israel, so that the war would be depicted from the outside, through the perspectives of a non-Israeli and an Israeli living away from the country. The love story even grew bigger, since when Liron arrived in Paris he stayed at Lubna’s apartment. The script evolved with each day that we filmed.

SS: Two of your short films, Strangers and Offside explore issue of Arab-Jewish relations, but Offside presents a much bleaker message about the prospects for peaceful co-existence. Does this reflect an increasing pessimism on your own part? Can you tell us a bit about the third short film that you are planning to do to complete the trilogy?

ET: The first film in the trilogy, Strangers (the short version), deals with the Israel-Arab conflict, but from the perspective where we are all the same and we all have to join forces against the real enemy which is racism. The ending of this first segment is optimistic, but this is the segment based on a real experience that Guy Nattiv and I had, a personal experience that was etched in our memories. After the success of this film and the many awards it received around the world, including the Sundance Award for Best Short Film, we decided to do another segment, this time with a much more tragic approach to the situation. We showed that war was not child’s play and that when you arm soldiers (on both sides of the border) there is also the chance that they will use those arms. We didn’t want a rosy ending for each film in the trilogy. The problem still isn’t solved, it still exists and we wanted to emphasize this. After the premiere of the film at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, we were approached and embraced by Syrian, Lebanese and Iranian film directors. They said that the film should be screened all over the world and that it was important that it be seen how we are trapped in a dangerous cycle, just like the four soldiers in the film. The third segment will be much more optimistic, and it will be filmed soon.

Liron Levo and Lubna Azbal in Strangers

SS: The feature-length version of Strangers was warmly embraced internationally as a story of love triumphing over politics. What was the critical reception to the film in Israel?

ET: The film Strangers (the feature length version) was screened for the first time in Jerusalem and invoked an angry response. People wanted to know why we decided that the couple should remain together. The Israeli public still wasn’t ready for this. They connected with the love story but didn’t want them to be together at the end and that was sad. What does that say about us? Are we ready for peace? Only after the film was picked up for international distribution after receiving an overwhelmingly positive response at Sundance, did Israeli critics finally begin to treat us favourably. It was a difficult birth.

SS: You frequently work with a co-director (Sharon Maymon in A Matter of Size and Guy Nattiv in Strangers and Offside). What are the advantages to directing with someone else? Do you have plans for any solo projects?

ET: Two directors working together always benefits you as an artist, vis a vis the producers, vis a vis the funds, and vis a vis the actors. It’s not that the work gets easier; it’s even harder sometimes, but there are many advantages to having two brains on the film. I have also done films together with Guy Nattiv (who co-directed both the short version and feature length version of Strangers as well as the short film Offside). There was no ego-tripping over who would direct, stemming from our mutual desire to produce. Without these impediments, there are no problems: anything is possible. Also, the work with Sharon Maymon on A Matter of Size was very interesting and productive. We studied together at film school and so we understood each other. The producer was less satisfied because there were more takes, but the editor was happier.

SS: A Matter of Size explores the issue of the discrimination faced by overweight people in a society preoccupied with being thin. Did you visit any weight loss clinics as part of your research into the film? Are the leaders of these groups as brutal as Geulah or are they more supportive?

ET: Before we started filming, we met with a group of overweight people who belonged to a social group that was proud of being fat and believed that everyone should be more like them. They were a close group of friends who met regularly at restaurants and movies. They met with us after reading the script and helped us to fine tune certain aspects of the story, particularly the areas that related to the “dictatorship of skinniness” and the inner feelings of an overweight person in Israeli society. They told us about all kinds of diets that they had been on and the various diet coaches they had seen. These experiences were an important step towards their final liberation from the societal pressure to be thin.

SS: Itzik Cohen (Herzl) is best known in Israel as a drag queen and as the gay Hitler in the Israeli production of The Producers. How did you get him to become involved with the film?

ET: We contacted Itzik Cohen after seeing him in the Drag Show “B'not Pessia” and many other popular performances at the Israeli Cameri theatre. We believed that he was the only person to play the role of Herzl. We approached his agent, but he claimed that Itzik did not want to play a leading role that portrayed him as a fat person. We told the agent that he must read the script, but Itzik refused. Only after a personal meeting with the actor, where we explained why he must play a fat man, did he understand and agree to read the script. But there were many other crises along the way. He didn’t want to take off his shirt at first, but he finally got used to the idea. The Sumo training tired him out (there really was some rigorous training) and he nearly left the film during the rehearsals. Each day we could never be sure if he was in or out of the film. Every day there was a new surprise. It was only once that filming began that he was committed to seeing the project through.

Right: Itzik Cohen in the Israeli production of The Producers

SS: Was it difficult to find an overweight female lead willing to do a film that deals so explicitly with the issue of obesity? Did the actors bring any of their own experiences of being discriminated against to the film?

ET: We were lucky, early on, to have discovered Irit Kaplan, who played Zehava. There were no particular obstacles to overcome with her. She was a professional actress who understood her role from the beginning and cooperated with every scene. Each of the actors took their own journey through this film. The most difficult scene for Irit was the moment where she was “lynched” by the inmates of the women’s prison for being fat. It reminded her of how she had been treated in the past and that made her very sad. The same was true for Itzik and the rest of the actors in the film.

SS: Can you tell us about your upcoming projects?

ET: I wrote a film called The Son of God that I will be directing it with Guy Nattiv. The filming is scheduled to begin around October 2010. It is a story of a father and son who go out in search of a magician that disappeared in chilly Poland. The father, a Holocaust survivor who was once a magician, and the son, an ultra-orthodox Jewish Breslov rap singer, have not spoken in years. They find themselves on a journey in search of the man that saved the father. This is to be the last chance to thank the man for teaching the father the art of magic that ultimately saved his life during the war. The journey will serve to bring the father and son together to rediscover their relationship. It is an Israeli-Polish co-production and some of the actors will be Polish.

Itzik Cohen and Irit Kaplan in A Matter of Size

An Interview with Israeli star Hanna Azoulay-Hasfari

2009-11-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

Hanna Azoulay-Hasfari (centre) with Ronit Elkabetz (left) and Yael Abecassis (right) in Shiva.

POSTED BY
STUART HANDS
Assistant Programming Coordinator
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

Greeted with much enthusiasm at last year’s Festival was the Israeli feature film, Shiva, directed by actor Ronit Elkabetz (The Band’s Visit). Set during the first Gulf War, when Israel was under daily missile attacks, the film chronicles the Ohayon family as it is hit by its own tragedy when one of nine siblings dies suddenly. Shiva won the Wolgin Award for best Israeli feature film at the 2008 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

Winner of several awards for her performance as one of the sisters in Shiva, Hanna Azoulay- Hasfari is an Israeli playwright, documentary filmmaker, and well-respected actor who has appeared in some of the country’s most notable films (such as Savi Gabizon’s Lovesick on Nana Street, Roni Ninio’s The Quarry, and Avi Nesher’s Rage and Glory). She also wrote and starred in the influential and groundbreaking Israeli film, Sh’chur (1994). Based loosely on her relationship with her Moroccan family, the film embodies Azoulay-Hasfari’s personal straddling between East and West cultures.

I had the chance to speak with Hanna Azoulay-Hasfari as she reflected on some of her films, growing up as a Moroccan Jew in Israel during the 1970s, as well as her theatrical training through the IDF theatre troupe, the Tel Aviv University theatre programme, and her years with the fringe group, The Simple Theatre, initiated by her husband, playwright and filmmaker Shmuel Hasfari.

Left: Savi Gabizon's Lovesick on Nana Street (Azoulay-Hasfari second from right).

Do you think that the women in Shiva have any real power in their marriages?

No. They rely on the ancient way of being strong: by being manipulative. But they don’t have any other choice. I wish they were not so manipulative. The men, on the other hand, don’t have to be manipulative because they have the right not to be, as they are the ones that rule the house. In Shiva, when it comes to the decisions of selling of the house and helping the big brother, the women are not consulted at all. Perhaps the women in Shiva are more liberated than they are in Sh’chur; but if they are more liberated, they pay a high price for it. Maybe they are ultimately getting what they want, but it’s from being very difficult.

Azoulay-Hasfari as Rachel/Cheli in Sh'chur, which she also wrote. Her husband, Shmuel Hasfari directed the film.

The mother in Sh’chur uses magical powers. Do you think that’s a way for her to obtain a sense of power and control within the family?

Of course. Let’s talk about the characters of the mother [played by Gila Almagor] and Pnina [the sister played by Ronit Elkabetz] in Sh’chur. The mother and Pnina are ruling the house, and every problem in this family is treated by their magical powers. They don’t think twice, they just use these powers because this is the only way they know. When Pnina is sent to the institute, all the power of this culture is taken from her and she is just seen as crazy. Before that, she is not crazy—you don’t know what she is: perhaps she is a very great power, perhaps a kind of medium. The mother is simply a Moroccan woman who controls this house by this magic power. But the influence of this power changes as Western culture increasingly influences her children. So the youngest child, Cheli (which is the character that represents me) is not influenced at all by her mother’s powers; Cheli sees it as very primitive and disgusting. And she is afraid of it—thank god she’s afraid of it—as these fears prompt her to come back twenty years later and reflect on it, and maybe accept it.

How close is your film, Sh'chur, to your own family background?

Pretty close. When I wrote it, my family was always on my mind. Like Cheli in the film, I grew up in the 70s. I was born and raised in a very similar kind of neighborhood and culture. With the exception of the mother and father in the film, most of the characters are represented quite accurately. Although some of the characters are not based on my family. The character of Pnina, the sister that Ronit Elkabetz plays, is based on someone from my neighborhood; I decided to include her in my script to deal with all my ambivalent feelings about this character, and what I feel, as a grown woman, about this culture. The little girl in this film, Cheli, is me when I was a child. And Cheli as an adult represents me at the time I wrote Sh’chur.

In Sh’chur, there is an environment of superstition? Was it similar when you were growing up?

Yes, but I wouldn’t call it superstition. With this film, I was trying to change the way we see those primitive acts or primitive behavior or ceremonies. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s not superstition—it’s a culture. I don’t think there is such a thing as high culture or low culture, or good culture or bad culture. Any culture has both bad things and good things about it. Of course, as an adult, one has to decide which aspects of the culture are good for you and which are not, and then behave according to your choices.

Growing up, were you eager to assimilate into Israeli mainstream society like Cheli is in Sh’chur?

Of course. Since Israel was dominated by the Ashkenazi Western culture, belonging to a minority, I wanted to assimilate into the dominating culture. I can understand why I felt like that: All the culture around me—all the television, all the newspapers—was saying that my culture was bad… I wanted to turn my back to this culture and this past. Thank god I couldn’t. Thank god I had my husband to tell me that it wasn’t a smart thing to do. He told me that I had to confront and rebuild my past and rebuild my attitude to this culture, otherwise I’ll have nothing. And since then, I don’t feel cut to pieces; I feel more whole.

Did you watch much Israeli film when you were growing up?

No. I didn’t. First of all, in the neighborhood where I grew up, we were so poor that we couldn’t see very good films. (We saw only Indian and Arabic films.) And when the Boureka films were released to the theatres, I was studying at a boarding school for gifted children. And in this school, we weren’t allowed see these Boureka films because we were expected to see only “good” films, like Hitchcock films for example. After I finished school, I saw those Boureka films later and I didn’t see myself—or the group I came from—represented properly in them. When I made Sh’chur, it was considered a great breakthrough in terms of the Israeli cinema’s representation of the Mizrahim.

Right: Azoulay-Hasfari (2nd from left) in her second film, Banot (1985)

I read that your earliest acting experiences were with the IDF entertainment troupe. Would you talk about your experiences there?

When I went to the audition for the troupe, I knew nothing about theatre. But I was lucky because the director of it was Nola Chilton, an American director who had a very nice theatre group here in Israel; she was really a revolutionary. She started a theatre of social protest here. When she heard about me and where I came from, she immediately included me in her group. And so here I was in a play by Thornton Wilder and I played a small part. For a year, we brought theatre to the soldiers in all kinds of military posts. We went to the Sinai before they gave it back to Egypt, and there were a lot of military posts. So one week we were in Sinai, and one week we were in the north, and two weeks we were in the middle of the country. We know about theatre. We just brought theatre to those poor, poor soldiers. It was a really interesting experience. And then I went to the university afterwards.

Would you talk about your experience studying theatre at Tel Aviv University?

When I came to the university, I was too young; I was twenty. And I fell in love with a very nice guy studying there [Shmuel Hasfari], who later became my husband, and that was the only thing I was interested in. So one year later, after we were engaged, we left the university: we felt it didn’t give us much because we wanted to be onstage. [Shmuel] was a really charismatic person, and he was really into a different kind of theatre process. He was reading a lot of books about Grotovsky and his methods. So we decided to leave the university and start [our own] theatre group; and since I was in love with him, I agreed. I learned some things at the university, but the important things I learned through my husband and through this Grotovsky method. Our group was called The Simple Theatre. We were really enthusiastic for this kind of theatre. And then, like what happens to most of these fringe groups, everyone [went in their own directions].

A Conversation with Hadar Galron, star and co-writer of Bruriah

2009-09-18T08:48:00.001-07:00

Hadar Galron as Bruriah

POSTED BY
STUART HANDS
Assistant Programming Coordinator
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

The Toronto Jewish Film Festival kicks off its eighteenth year with the Canadian Premiere of the provocative Israeli film, Bruriah.

When, in the second century, the Rabbis declared that "women are light-minded," a learned and intelligent woman named Bruriah mocked their statement. Her husband, Rabbi Meir, tried to prove the rabbis correct by sending one of his students to seduce her. She was seduced, but when she discovered that her husband had planned it, she committed suicide.

Drawing upon this little-known story from the talmud, the film tells of a modern-day Bruriah, who sets out on a personal crusade in which she confronts her desires and the nature of her relationship with her husband, Yakov.

Hadar Galron, co-writer and star of Bruriah is a playwright, actress and comedian. She was born in London and immigrated to Israel with her Jewish orthodox family at the age of 13. After studying in a religious high school, Galron, against her parent’s wishes, joined the army and then pursued a degree in Theatre at Tel Aviv University, where she began writing and performing professionally.

Hadar Galron created Pulsa, a one-woman comedy show that took aim at the status of women in Jewish law. In 2005 Hadar wrote Mikve, a full-length drama for the stage that peeked at orthodox women’s lives through the ritual of the Mikve. In 2007, she co-wrote the screenplay to Avi Nesher’s The Secrets (TJFF 2008).

I recently had the opportunity to interview her by email.

STUART HANDS: Why do you think the biblical story of Bruriah is very little-known today?

HADAR GALRON: In the film, Bruriah asks her husband Yakov, "Why was the story hidden? If they really managed to prove that 'women are light-headed' the story should have been publicized…" In the fine-cut of the film, the question is left almost unanswered; a hint to our answer is provided by an earlier question asked by Bruriah to Yakov: Why didn't he (Rabbi Meir) try to prove her [wrong] via 'mind'–with his brains—rather than sending his pupil to seduce her?

My bold answer would be: Maybe it is because, even though his pupil managed to seduce Bruriah, he did not prove women to be light-headed, but rather, on the contrary, he proved both women and men equal! How? Throughout Jewish history, it is women that used seduction; it was their strong "weapon" against men. If, in order to prove Bruriah wrong, his brains were not enough (she is said to have been a brilliant scholar herself ) and Meir had to use the “women's weapon,” has he not proven their equality?

SH: Why did you choose to make a film about this story?

HG: It was not I, but the director-producer, Avraham Kushnir, who chose the story. He says that for years he thought about it, and [feels that it] is the most provocative story of love in all Jewish history. He often quotes Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything but temptation… "

SH: When were you first exposed to the story of Bruriah?

HG: A few years before we started the film. I knew of Bruriah beforehand—heard many stories—but not this one. This story was 'unspoken' where I came from (my religious background). Even today I have heard many apologetic explanations about this story being a moral rather than a real story, as all the others about Bruriah…

Galron and Baruch Brener in Bruriah

SH: Would you talk about how sexual intimacy and the passing of knowledge are linked in Bruriah? Do you feel that this also occurs in The Secrets?

HG: I believe that sexuality and a certain sense of knowledge are linked already in the bible: "…and Adam knew his wife Eve" (Genesis). This obviously doesn't mean he googled her to find out where she studied… The meaning is sexual intimacy—he and she were joined as one, as a couple. What are the things we know…really know? [I’m not referring to] the sense of information we store in our minds, but rather to the sense of 'knowing by experience'? Sexual intimacy in Judaism is considered the height of spiritual experiences—that also beholds (if wrongly used) the danger of leading one to the lowest pit of impurity and sin. As Yakov says in the film "the tree of life and the tree of knowledge are the same tree".

Right: The Secrets (2007)

SH: In The Secrets, one of the teachers at the Midrasha says to the young student, Naomi, that religious women within the Orthodox community are in the midst of a "silent revolution" in terms of liberation. Do you see such change taking place?

HG: I think that—with a slight delay (about 10-20 years!)—feminism has finally reached the orthodox community. They are no longer 'housewives' and are slowly but surely becoming aware of themselves and their own needs and passions… However, there is a price to pay; in The Secrets, Naomi loses her whole world; in the original story of Bruriah and Rabbi Meir, Bruriah loses her life. In the film, the modern-day Bruriah doesn't commit suicide—because society is ready for a new breed if women—although she cannot yet confront either her husband or father: She has to be manipulative to get what she wants. Her daughter, Michal [who is studying to become a rabbi] is 'the woman of the future'. In reality, there's still a long way to go…

SH: Four people are credited as writers for Bruriah. Would you mind talking about the evolution of the project, the story and the screenplay?

HG: As I already mentioned Bruriah is Avraham Kushnirs' baby. He told me years ago (after seeing my satirical stand-up show on women's status in Jewish law!) that I was Bruriah. He also picked out Baruch Brener as Yakov. There were no auditions for the 2 leading roles…

The first draft was written by Kushnir and Yuval Cohen (also DOP and editor of the film). The basic story was good but the screenplay was, well… almost 300 pages–mostly irrelevant. There was already a first shooting day set. I didn't know what to do… In the end, I met Kushnir and lightly suggested he should work further on the screenplay because the characters and relationships didn’t really exist yet. He said he's not moving the shooting date- I took a deep breath, silently parted from my first cinematic role, and told him that it would be a waste of time and, on his part, a huge waste of money, but wished him luck. He then postponed the shooting for six months and invited Baruch and myself to join the 'workshop'. We began the whole screenplay anew. Writing in a foursome is a very trying experience… especially as all the other three were men and we were writing the role of a woman.

SH: Would you talk a bit about the career of your Bruriah co-star, Baruch Brener, who plays your husband, Yakov? [He played the religious lawyer in Brothers, TJFF 2009]

HG: Baruch Brener (Yakov) is an actor, teacher and… a rabbi ! (an orthodox rabbi, not conservative or reform…) He teaches Midrash and Talmud as well as acting in Nissan Nativ (one of Israel's leading drama-colleges), and performs on stage in a few musical shows.
Left: Baruch Brener in Brothers

An Interview with Yariv Mozer, the Winner of TJFF's 2009 Tzimmie* Award

2009-05-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

POSTED BY
STUART HANDS
Assistant Programming Coordinator
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

(left to right:) Yariv Mozer and TJFF Assistant Programme Coordinator, Stuart Hands

When filmmaker Yariv Mozer was called up by his unit in the Israeli army during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, one of the first things he hid was bring a video camera. In My First War, Mozer gives us a personal view of the war, with all of its confusion, chaos and disorganization. This first-hand look at the conflict focuses on the soldiers — their fears, their problems and their reactions to the contradictory orders and facts surrounding the war. At one point the government ordered a large land operation into Lebanon at the same time it accepted a ceasefire. The result was the unnecessary death of many young men and the open revolt of some soldiers who refused to obey their orders.

During the festival, I had the opportunity to interview Mozer where we discussed his film, his family as well as why, after what he has seen and documented in My First War, he still agrees to serve in the reserves.

STUART HANDS: When you decided to bring your camera, what did you initially expect to find?

YARIV MOZER: It’s not that I expected to find something. It was more about what I was feeling when I received this phone call to go to the front. First of all, understanding that I’m going to war—which raises a lot of fears— there’s immediately the thought that you are going to be in a life and death situation. The second thing—which is unique to me—is that I went to a unit that I didn’t know about, with people I never met. I was going to replace an officer who ran away from the battlefield with an anxiety attack. I think this made me more fearful because if I knew that I was going to war with people that I knew already, it would have felt different. So I can understand why I had this urge to take my camera (really at the last second) as I left the house. In my house, I had one battery and five cassettes, which in the digital age, is not the amount that you take for a documentary; I never had the feeling that it was going to become a film. I think that I used the camera to cope with my fears, to have something to—as I say in the film—mediate between me and the reality I was in, and to look at the reality as if it were a film and not reality. And I remember at the beginning of war, I was looking only for the surrealistic things. So I only filmed things that looked unusual to me or raised questions. And latter on I started dealing more with the meaning of this war.

Three stills from My First War

SH: Is it common for soldiers to bring their video cameras into the army with them?

YM: Yes, because the army in Israel is a regular phenomenon so everyone comes, bringing their things from their homes.

SH: In your film, you demonstrate this natural instinct to use the camera as a mediator between you and reality. Did you develop this instinct when you were young?

YM: It comes from a very early age. I always had a camera, starting from twelve years old, from the minute there was an available video camera. I had the first VHS-C camera (do you remember this one?), which I used. And then when I was in my obligatory service, I was always filming my officer’s school and trainings and things that I had during my army service. I was always walking with a camera so it was very clear to me that was going to be a filmmaker. This is why I had a camera and used it [when I was called to the front for the Second Lebanon War].

SH: My First War offers a very poignant depiction of male sensitivity. Was this open display of vulnerability readily apparent among the soldiers or did you have to seek it out?

YM: I know that I had this intuitive interest in this world of men. For example, you can see a very clear shot of a women reading a book, but I was not interested in those women soldiers. I was interested in men. I was interested in the joint experience of men together in a situation like war, like the army. [I think that you see the male] vulnerability in the film because I was talking to the people eye to eye, not as a director or a journalist asking questions from a distance. I was talking to people as a friend, as a fellow officer or fellow a soldier. I really talked to their emotional situation, so it was something that interested me and it brought out the vulnerability of the men, which I think you can see in this film in a very clear way.

SH: In general, do you think Israel is a macho society in terms of how it nurtures male identity?

YM: For sure, as every born male child is raised knowing that he needs to go into the army at the age of eighteen, and then needs to serve in an elite unit, and be brave and follow after all the heroes of Israel. So it becomes a very macho society.

Being gay myself helps me look at this from a different point of view, from a different angle, with sensitivity, with a desire to understand men and to be with men—that’s the undersurface of the film. It’s not on the film’s surface; I didn’t want it to be. I think gay people notice it, as do people with a good sense of filmmaking that can read cinematic language. People who know me also can see it in a clear way. When I’m saying in the film that I’m attracted to Ilan’s blue eyes, it’s a way for me to say that I’m in love with him. When I see such an officer, who is—in a way—also macho, but has a heart, I fall in love with him.

SH: You mentioned the other day that My First War is playing at a Gay and Lesbian film festival in Israel.

YM: Yes, just before I came to Toronto, the head of the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Tel Aviv asked me if they could present the film in a special program of documentaries that have a gay subtext. Of course I agreed. It’s not something that I am hiding.

Standing army Lt. Col. Ilan Levi in Mozer's My First War

SH: Are you in the reserves of the Israeli army?

YM: Yes.

SH: After what you have seen and documented with your film, how come you still agree to serve?

YM: It’s a thing that I need to deal with on a daily basis. But, the most important thing for me to say is that I don’t want to leave or give up. I don’t want to leave the army in the hands of people with a different point of view than mine. I still think that left wing people who are part of Israel, who care about Israel, should also be part of the army. Because if you want to change something, if you want to be in the inside and not look from the outside… this is why I still need to be there. At this point in my life, I don’t want to give up and say that I’m not part of the Israeli society. I want to be inside and criticize and I want to still serve. And if I will find myself in a situation where it contradicts my beliefs, I will not do it. Until now, I have not found myself in such a situation.

Like the majority of Israel, most of the officers and soldiers in the reserves are right wing and they talk very nastily about Palestinians Their way of thinking about Arabic people is very racist. And when I’m serving in the army, the people there know that I’m a journalist, that I’m a director and that I have a left wing point of view, and so they try to avoid talking like this. They try to hide their personal point of views. And I like this, I like being there, not like a policemen, but as a guard of human rights.

SH: Would talk about your parents? Were they born in Israel?

YM: The roots of my family—both grandfathers and one grandmother—are from Poland. My grandmother on my father’s side was born in Tel Aviv. My grandfather on my father’s side came to Israel before the Second World War when he was three years old. My Grandparents on my mother’s side were survivors.

SH: What did your parents do for a living?

YM: They served the security forces of Israel. They are now retired. My father still deals with recruiting and hiring young Israeli guys for guarding Jewish communities all around the world. My grandfather was also from the security agency of Israel.

SH: What do they think of your film?

YM: They support everything I do as a filmmaker; they also support the point of view of the film. I must say that it is not a controversial film in Israel. It’s really a film that shows, in a very sincere and honest way, what happened in this war and what happened to the soldiers. And if someone doesn’t want to deal with the reality of Israel, then he has a problem; most of the people know the reality and can cope with this.

I always thought it was important to not have my film be too left wing, so it could shown to the majority of Israel. The very left wing people in Israel hate my film and they criticize it. They think it’s a propaganda film and the Palestinians also think it’s a propaganda film. They don’t see the criticism in the film.

SH: In what ways do they see it as a propaganda film?

YM: Because it raises an emotional attachment to soldiers in the Israeli army…We knew that if we wanted to address the majority of the Israeli audience, we needed this film to be sincere and honest, and not against the soldiers. I would never be against the soldiers, I’m part of them, and I respect them. I respect the people that were with me. I respect every human being as he is; I do not say ‘oh he is a soldier in Israel, so he is a monster’. This film comes from a lot of respect towards the people who served with me, and towards my country… I care about this country and I want to address the people in it. In Israel, nobody sees the majority of the very left wing documentary films that are being supported by the European audience. When my film was released and when it played on the documentary channel, a lot of people saw it. Now the Israeli channel 1—which is the main public channel—is re-running this film on prime time for the three-year anniversary of the war. So then it will be shown to more people in Israel, who would not watch a film that is too left-wing.

SH: Would you talk about the film you are directing now?

YM: My next film as a director is called Noa and Mira. It’s the story of internationally acclaimed Israeli singer Noa, who is asked to represent Israel at the upcoming Eurovision song contest in Moscow. She said that she would perform there only on the condition that she goes with Arab-Palestinian singer Mira Awad, and that they do a duet with a song that combines Hebrew, English and Arabic. So this is the first time that Israel is sending an Arabic singer to represent Israel at the Eurovision contest. This is a big thing in Israel and it brings out criticism from both the left and the right.

A shot from Mozer's music video of Noa (left) and Mira Awad (right) performing the duet, "There Must be Another Way"

You can visit the website of Yariv's production company, Mozer Films, by clicking here.

*The Tzimmie Award (also called the David A. Stein Memorial Award) is presented in memory of David A. Stein, a gifted Toronto filmmaker who passed away in 2004 at age 34. Named after his production company, Tzimmes Entertainment, it is an annual $5,000 award to the director of the best documentary making its Canadian premiere at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, and supports documentary filmmakers in creating works that would have interested David and that carry on his passion for storytelling. Yariv Mozer's film was selected as this year's winner by a jury consisting of filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, casting director Marsha Chesley, and author/journalist Evan Solomon.

Yael Perlov's introduction to TJFF's screening of her father's landmark film, In Jerusalem

2009-04-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

Right: David Perlov (photo © Mira Perlov); Below: Daughter Yael in Perlov's Diary (1973-1983),

As part of a special programme exploring the city of Jerusalem before and after its reunification during the Six Day War, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival offered David Perlov’s 1963 landmark documentary, In Jerusalem. On behalf of the Perlov family, daughter Yael offered the following introduction to her father’s film:

David Perlov, my father, had never made serious efforts to be shown abroad: he was not a man of festivals.

When he died five years ago, the Israeli cinema critics were unanimous to speak of him as "The most important Israeli Filmmaker". Nevertheless it was only two years later that his work began to be shown abroad when the Centre Pompidou organized a retrospective of his films. Since then Diary and In Jerusalem have been invited and shown all over at international film festivals and cinematheques in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Brazil Argentina, and more.

I would like, of course, to thank the public here, for coming and showing curiosity for a film director yet unknown in Canada.

Allow me to give briefly some milestones of Perlov's biography:

He was born in Brazil and began his artistic career as a painter. At the age of twenty he leaves for Paris, where after a short time of studies, he fell in love with cinema, worked as assistant of Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise and then collaborated with the documentarist Joris Ivens in the editing of a film on Marc Chagall.

In 1957, while still in Paris, he makes his first short film: Old Aunt China, which was supported by the British Film Institute.

He arrived in Israel in 1958. He began directing documentary films for the local authorities, yet throughout the 1960s he constantly clashed with the ideological demands of the Israeli establishment. As he himself said in an interview years later, "I wanted to make films about people, they wanted films on ideas".

In 1963 Perlov made In Jerusalem, which has become a turning point and a milestone in Israeli cinema. The film set a new, free style for documentary work in Israel.

A still from David Perlov's In Jerusalem

The structure of the film, in its 10 different episodes connected by a repeated image of a stonemason, presents the city in a poetic and fragmented way, which avoids the strong symbolic conception so often attached to Jerusalem.

As he himself said: "I filmed at street level. I have a tendency to shoot the below". He wanted to show the people living in Jerusalem as they are: on the one hand, the extreme severity of the orthodox who avoid the camera, and on the other, the warmth of those who want to participate willingly and openly in the scenes that are shot.

In the year 1963, in the official cultural atmosphere of the country, (it was the year that the Beatles were not allowed to perform in Israel because it was feared they might have a negative influence on the local youth), the film In Jerusalem created a shock: It was different, it had a strict formal conception and a lyrical rather then ideological approach.

The authorities that financed the project were determined, for example, to censor one of the sequences that bothered them most of all. It was the sequence showing beggars in the holy city, which was based on a legend stating that, before the coming of the herald Messiah, another Messiah would announce the great event and he himself would appear as a beggar. David then shows several of the beggars in the city. The Prime ministry, the Jewish agency and the national Film Service found this scene scandalous. “After all ", as David says in the interview, " the country was socialist and the producers protested: There are no beggars in Jerusalem. There are no barefoot [people] in the country.

To the establishment’s mind, people were brought to Israel and given clothes and shoes. So how could I go a around the city shooting the exceptions? “In short, they wanted me to forget the film and proposed that I make another one. "

Eventually the whole matter reached Levi Eshkol, then the Prime minister of Israel, for his judgment. He was a man [with a] sense of humor and he approved the film.

To read Uri Klein's interview with David Perlov about In Jerusalem, click here.
To visit the David Perlov website, click here.

An Interview with Cathy Randall, writer/director of Hey Hey It's Esther Blueberger

2009-04-22T06:09:00.000-07:00

POSTED BY
SUSAN STARKMAN
FilmMatters and Programmer
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueberger is a fun and cheeky Australian comedy about a 13-year old girl, Esther (Danielle Catanzariti), who feels like an alien. The girls at her posh private school think that she is a nerd and even her mother pressures her to act “normal”. Esther chooses to break free at her bat mitzvah where she escapes her own party and befriends Sunni (played by Whale Rider’s Keisha Castle-Hughes), the effortlessly cool girl from the local public school. Pretending to be a Swedish exchange student, Esther starts going to Sunni’s school and spending time with Sunni’s hip and spontaneous mother, Mary (Toni Collette).

Randall directing Castle-Hughes and Catanzariti

The following is a director's statement from Esther Blueberger writer/director, Cathy Randall:

From Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield, from Ferris Bueller to Napoleon Dynamite, a long line of adolescent outcasts in literature and movies have traversed the grey zone between childhood and adulthood with a perceptiveness and verve that illuminates something true about life at any age. Yet, almost none of them have been girls. With this in mind I wrote Hey Hey It's Esther Blueberger, drawing from my own experience as an Australian Jew to create an outsider character that struggles to fit the social norm but through the course of her journey - a series of daring acts and foolish mistakes - learns its okay to be different.

I recently had the opportunity to interview director Randall by email .

SUSAN STARKMAN: What made you decide to become a filmmaker?

CATHY RANDALL: I’ve always wanted to be a writer so I decided to try screenwriting, thinking that it might be a way to make money. Once I started screenwriting, I became fascinated in directing because I viewed it as an extension of the storytelling process, and another way to challenge and express myself creatively.

SS: Based on your screenplay for Hey, Hey It’s Esther Blueburger, you were awarded a scholarship to the Los Angeles Film School’s Feature Development Program. Who did you work with there and how did the screenplay evolve over that time?

CR: The course was fantastic because, although it didn’t teach filmmaking in a practical sense, I was given the opportunity to develop the screenplay and learnt a great deal about so many different aspects of filmmaking—from financing to marketing, directing and editing. The faculty was excellent and, because the school was located in Hollywood, quite often we would have guests – all kinds of industry professionals – come and give us a class. Among the most memorable were producers, Saul Zaentz and Barbara Boyle.

The fulltime faculty included Linda Cowgill (scriptwriting), Harry Clein (marketing), Gabrielle Kelly (producing), Daniele Suissa (directing), Amadeo D’adamo (directing), Donn Cambern (editing)

The screenplay evolved by becoming lighter and funnier and also the story and structure got tighter.

SS: Does the story in any way reflect your own adolescent experiences?

CR:The story is loosely drawn from my own adolescence, but warped and twisted and filtered through my imagination so, in fact, it doesn’t feel like Esther resembles me at all. But I did go to two different schools (private and public), and have a bat-mitzvah. And I do have a twin brother but I have a sister as well.

SS: How much do you think the experience of adolescence has changed from when you were in high school to when you went back to that environment as an adult director?

CR: I don’t think it’s changed very much at all. I think 13, the age I was writing about, is a fascinating age because I believe you experience things more intensely than you ever have before or ever will again. It’s that wonderful grey zone between childhood and adulthood where you start to experience puberty and break away from your parents and form surrogate families with your friends. It can be a time of intense introspection and self-exploration as you start to reform your identity as an adult and gain some autonomy separate to your parents.

SS: The film has a unique aesthetic style that you have referred to as “Esther vision.” Did you have a clear idea of how you were going to approach the visual style of the film when you were writing the screenplay?

CR: The whole time I was writing the screenplay, I was collecting images from books and magazines that I found inspiring or thought would feed into the look of the film in some way, so, quite often, my writing was influenced by the images [and vice versa]. For instance the idea of Sunni having a xylophone doorbell came from an image I cut out of a magazine.

SS: Who do you consider to be your main artistic influences?

CR: I don’t have any specific artistic influences but I’ve always known I wanted the film to have vivid colours and to have a strong sense of choreography. I think I was very much influenced by my love of musicals and dance, both modern and classical. Films like The Red Shoes and Cabaret probably had a powerful effect on me.

SS: The soundtrack is an integral part of the film. How many of the songs were written specifically for the film?

CR: The only song that was written specifically for the film was the title track which runs over the opening credits, “The Only One” by Paul Mac. There was an original score written as well.

SS: As a first-time director, how difficult was it for you to enlist such well-known actors as Toni Collette, Keisha Castle-Hughes and Essie Davis?

CR: It was actually very easy and straightforward. They all loved the script and wanted to be a part of it when they read it.

SS: The relationship between Esther and Sunni feels authentic. How much time did Danielle and Keisha have to get to know each other before filming? Was there much rehearsal time?

CR: We had four weeks of rehearsal, which was a wonderful luxury, and they were pretty intense so Danielle and Keisha got to do a lot of bonding before shooting started.

SS: Was there any room for improvisation once production on the film started or did everyone adhere to the screenplay? I am thinking particularly of the poem that Esther makes up about her name. Was any of that Danielle’s creation or was it scripted exactly like that?

CR: There was practically no improvisation at all once the shoot started—in fact, none that I can think of. Everyone adhered to the screenplay. The poem was entirely scripted although Danielle fed into the performance – for instance the hand movements she does, where she moves the imaginary letters around, were Danielle’s creation.

SS: I understand that Keisha was pregnant while filming. Was the rest of the cast aware of this at the time? How did the other teenage actors react to her pregnancy at such a young age?

CR: The rest of the cast were fully aware of Keisha’s pregnancy and were completely supportive.

SS: Hey, Hey It’s Esther Blueburger takes a refreshingly frank look at teenage sexuality. I understand that the initial cut of the film included a scene in which Esther engages in oral sex. Why was this taken out of the final cut?

CR: It was only taken out of the American cut of the film because of some feedback we got from American distributors that the film would not sell with it. The Australian cut still has the original oral sex scene, which was there to demonstrate just how far Esther will go in order to fit in.

SS: How much of Esther’s sense of alienation is due to her being Jewish in a WASPy environment? Do you see it as being the main cause or just a contributing factor?

CR: I see it as a contributing factor. Esther is an individual in so many ways – she’s got a kooky imagination and way of seeing the world, and when we first meet her, she’s trapped in an environment where individuality isn’t encouraged, where it’s all about being the same in order to fit in. I think Esther would really love to fit in but simply doesn’t know how to.

SS: Recently, two of Sydney’s most elite private boys’ schools were involved in creating an anti-Semitic page on Facebook that received a great deal of media attention. Do you think that Jewish students in Australia experience more racist discrimination than other minority groups in the country?

CR: I can only speak from my own experience and that of my friends and I would have to say no, not at all. I have never experienced anti-Semitism and nor have my friends (that I know of). The Facebook incident was shocking and very surprising.

SS: While there are other Australian films set in state schools or private schools, Hey, Hey It’s Esther Blueburger effectively highlights both systems and the vast socio-economic gulf that separates them. Was this the source of much media discussion surrounding the film? How did the educational community receive the film?

CR: As far as I can remember it wasn’t the source of much media discussion at all, although it did generate a lot of supportive feedback from the general public. And I still get into the private versus public school debate conversations with people who see the film. The educational community received the film well and there were many teachers keen to teach it at schools.

SS: Australia has produced a number of coming age films, such as the Year My Voice Broke, Australian Rules and Looking For Alibrandi. Why do you think that so many filmmakers in Australia are drawn to the adolescent experience? Is it possible that Australian filmmakers themselves are coming of age in terms of creating a uniquely Australian brand of cinema that does not borrow from American and English traditions?

CR: I think there are a lot of coming of age films produced in every country as filmmakers and storytellers generally are drawn to the adolescent experience because it is such a fascinating time of self-discovery that produces inherently interesting stories. Perhaps as you say, Australians filmmakers are coming of age, but we also have a strong culture of writer-directors who draw on their own experiences when writing scripts.

SS: What is next in the pipeline for you?

CR: I’m developing a couple of different ideas – primarily concentrating on writing a script (too early to talk about it in detail yet) about a young female protagonist and lots of song and dance!

An Interview with Cindy Kleine, director of Phyllis and Harold

2009-04-09T06:17:00.000-07:00

POSTED BY
STUART HANDS
Assistant Programming Coordinator
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

Film and video artist Cindy Kleine brings her most recent documentary, Phyllis and Harold, to the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. In this film, Kleine whimsically blends animation, family photographs, home movies and cinema verité to tell the story of her parents’ troubled 59-year marriage. Set in the vividly-recreated upper-middle class suburbs of Long Island, this tour-de-force documentary captures the values, ambitions and stifled longings of her parents’ generation of North American Jews.

You can visit Cindy Kleine’s website, by clicking here.

Filmmaker Cindy Kleine

Stuart Hands: Would you mind talking about the evolution of your film, Phyllis and Harold? How was it initially conceived?

Cindy Kleine: It started with the interviews that you see in the first quarter of the film, the ones where [my parents] are wearing their sunglasses. I interviewed them separately and asked them the same questions, and they answered with completely different perspectives. I was shooting those interviews with the intention of using them as dialogue for a fiction film. So I started editing them to make transcripts for the actors to read. And as I was in the process of cutting, I became completely enamored of how incredible these interviews were when cut together. I then ended up not doing the fiction film, because I thought you could never get actors to do this convincingly, and the material was so strong. So then I just used what I cut together for the transcript, which became a short film called Till Death Do us Part. That film was shown in 1998 and 1999. It was not shown widely because I didn’t want it to be distributed, as my parents were still alive at that point and I knew I wanted to keep working on the film. I knew I couldn’t tell the whole story while my dad was alive so I kept working on it in sections. I had this idea of making a feature-length film out of three or four short films. I then made the second section, which showed them reading the letters—that was at one time a kind of separate film—but it didn’t really stand on its own. It kind of went from there, and little by little, over twelve years, it kept growing and evolving into what it is now.

The two interviews from Till Death Do Us Part, which reappear in Phyllis and Harold

Married for 55 years, Phyllis and Harold read their love letters from their courtship

SH How much of Phyllis and Harold did your mother see before she passed away?

CK: Sadly, she didn’t see the whole finished film. She died before it was finished. What she did see was Till Death Do Us Part, the twenty-minute short of those interviews, which she loved. My father saw Till Death Do Us Part before it was completely finished, when it was a ten-minute film, but it didn’t have my mother blatantly talk about the affair she had: She sort of eluded to it in a way that, if you didn’t want to get it, you didn’t get it, and he didn’t get it. He looked at the ten-minute cut of the interviews and thought it was hysterically funny, which amazed me. He was just sitting there laughing and he grabbed my mother’s hand. I realized later that he thought it was so funny because she was saying things like, “oh those so-called love letters he sent me”, where she was being really negative. But, on the other hand, she married him and here they were sitting there fifty-five years later, still together, and somehow it struck him as hilarious. I was nervous because I didn’t know if he would be hurt by it. I had no idea how he would react, but he loved it.

SH: Have any friends or family of your parents seen the film?

CK: A lot of their friends aren’t around anymore, but there have been several of their friends who have seen it. It’s very difficult for their friends. A couple of my mother’s friends have seen it. They knew the story, knew her basic story, so it didn’t really come as a complete surprise, but I think it was very difficult for them. I realized when I showed it to them that each of us is a different person to whoever knows us in our life— your mother sees you in a totally different way than your friend sees you, and your sibling sees you differently than someone else does—so I realized that, for them, it was difficult for them to see me portraying my mother as a kind of narcissist. Nobody had any objection to my portrayal of my dad. In fact my dad’s brother just saw it recently. He watched it without me—in fact I didn’t even know he watched it—but he loved it. I was really worried about him seeing it, but he absolutely loved it and wanted to see it again. But, one friend of my mother’s—her best friend—was quite upset by it: She felt that I portrayed my mother wrongly; it wasn’t the way that she saw her. I think what happens is that people project their own issues on to it and so she saw it in her own way and we had to have some discussions about it. She is fine now, but she wasn’t thrilled about it.

SH: Over the course of your filmmaking career, did it take time for your parents to become comfortable in front of your camera?

CK: No, not at all. One of the big lucky things that allowed me to make this film is that they were completely comfortable with the camera from the first second I turned it on. I didn’t have to coax them. A lot of people asked me, how did you get them to do this? That was a non-issue. I would just turn the camera on and they would talk really freely, my mother more freely as you can see. My father is not a big talker, but they were both very happy to answer questions. The only times that they were slightly [ill at ease were when] I was filming them in their house and they are walking around in their underwear and doing their own thing: They would suddenly get self-conscious and look at me and say, “Why are you filming this? Don’t you want us to do something? Why is this interesting?” They felt funny just being filmed doing nothing. Other than that, they were fine. My mother would just light up in front of the camera—she absolutely loved it.

SH: What has been the response so far to your film, Phyllis and Harold, among American Jews of your parents’ generation?

CK: Not surprisingly most American Jews of my parents’ generation find at least a little something they can relate to. It’s only been shown at one Jewish film festival [The Boston Jewish Film Festival] and that was my best screening, because it was a huge audience which just seemed to relate to it on an even deeper level and more broadly than most others. It seemed that a lot of people were laughing at most things that I think are funny, which most people don’t get, because it’s got that dark Jewish sense of humor. Every time I’ve shown it, people come up to me and say, we lived in Long Island right near there and my marriage was exactly like that. People really relate to it, not only Jews, but many people of that generation.

SH: Were there Jewish women in the audience that could relate to the sense of being stifled like your mom was?

CK: Absolutely, I think that’s one of the things that most women could relate to. I think that whole generation of women was really stifled. They were trapped in their lives and their marriages by the cultural expectations and what it meant at that time to be a wife. It’s not just the Jews of that generation, except that I think, at least for my parents, there was a [Jewish emphasis] on family that it made it very difficult to get out of marriages— people didn’t get divorced if they were unhappy. There was a sense of having to stick with it, not wanting to destroy the family. You married someone that you didn’t necessarily love, but they were your high school sweet heart and you didn’t want to disappoint your family if you didn’t [marry them]. There was a lot of that stuff going around for my parents and their friends.

An early home movie seen in Kleine's Phyllis and Harold

SH: Despite the bitterness you must have developed toward your parents while growing up, you display sensitivity and understanding toward them in your film. How were you able to achieve such perspective?

CK: Achieving a certain perspective, I would say, is just who I am, who I grew to be. Maybe it’s from coming out of that family. From a very young age, I remember my parents screaming at each other, and I would go into my room, close the door and draw. It was as if making art was my own way of making my own world, blocking them out, deciding how I can make my own reality. Making art can be a very redemptive activity, almost like an alchemical process, where you take reality and transform it into something else, something more like you want it to be. I think there is [a kid] in every family who is just always on the outside, just observing, and that is who I was. The act of making my family members into characters in my films also allowed me to [see] them at a distance, to objectify them, to see them with more perspective and, I think, therefore, with more compassion too. I wasn’t embroiled in my own emotions toward them as much. Maybe that’s also partly why I became a filmmaker. You remove yourself and put yourself behind the camera. Maybe, in a sense, I learned that from my father, because he was always doing that—he was kind of always there but behind the camera.

SH: Was he more comfortable like that?

CK: I think he was. He even said in the film at one point, “you know me, I’m not a communicator.” He wasn’t a big talker, he didn’t talk about feelings or emotion. As kids, he adored us, but I think he felt more comfortable taking our picture than grabbing us and putting us on his lap and telling us a story. He was sort of shy and uncomfortable with children, which I think was a generational thing. I think a lot of men [of that era] were uncomfortable with children because they were off working all day while the women took care of the kids.

SH: What gifts do you think your parents gave you? What positive lessons did they teach you?

CK: [Concerning my mother], in one way, I feel her character was a study of narcissism, but on the other hand, she was trapped in her life and her marriage—but she talked about it so freely. In a way, she became my teacher, the person I learned from [in terms of] how I didn’t want to live, the kind of marriage I didn’t want to have. So her talking about all that was a gift to me. And, in a way, my father was also my teacher: He taught me how to use a camera; he was always making these gorgeous photographs, even when his subject was this family that was completely dysfunctional. He made photos that were gorgeous as well as really honest: As you see in the film, he didn’t only make my family look fabulous. He also took those bizarre pictures of my sister looking like she wanted to flush me down the toilet. He saw with an honest eye, I think.

SH: You said in a previous interview that your father as a photographer had a great sense of composition.

CK: Oh yeah, I think he was really talented. He took thousands of pictures. I had to choose from approximately 2500 slides that he shot; the amount used in the film is nothing. Actually I still have this idea of one day publishing a book of his photographs because they are really classic forties and fifties family shots. He had an amazing sense of composition. He was a really great, talented, creative guy. I once said to him, “you’re so good at [photography], you’re really talented.” And he said, “Ah, you’re ridiculous, it’s just a hobby” Anything that you didn’t make money out of didn’t seem to him as being valid. To him, work equaled money, otherwise it was just a hobby, so he sort of poo-pooed it. But he was very talented.

SH: Your short film Nana focuses on your mother’s mother. What do you feel are the differences between the marriage of your grandmother and that of your mother?

Shots from Kleine's Nana (1987)

CK: It’s an interesting question. I would say that I come from a long line of matriarchal Jewish women. They all were very powerful. My grandmother was the ruler of the roost—[her home] was her domain and she hardly ever left it. She moved around her house like my mother did around hers, but with total control. In some ways, they both married similar kinds of men: They both married men who would allow them to be the boss and let them walk all over them, be mean to them and yell at them. My nana would scream at her husband all the time. They were married for 68 years and they fought the whole time. [My mother and grandmother] had similar marriages, but the difference was generational, as my nana was a first generation Jew.

My great grandmother Rose—my Nana’s mother—came over in steerage on a boat from Europe at age 18: She was pregnant and had a miscarriage on the boat. She came over by herself because, while on the train before they got to the boat, her husband was hauled off the train by the police because he didn’t have his papers when he went to go use the washroom. So Great Grandmother Rose was pregnant, sitting on this train and her husband never came back from the bathroom. She got to the place where the boat docked and waited for him for three days, but he never showed up. So she got on the boat by herself and ended up on Ellis Island by herself, after having a miscarriage on the boat. She then found some relative on the Lower East Side, moved in with them and opened a saloon. She became a saloon-keeper—she was this tough, fierce, big lady. She single-handedly ran this saloon and would throw out drunks by herself, apparently. She had ten children and her husband, I was told, was a Talmud Scholar, so he was always upstairs studying, because he was too religious to work (that was the phrase I always heard). So my nana, from age 12, grew up working in this saloon and pouring beer for the big, drunk guys. She was very tough, had a very hard life and she never complained. I’m sure my grandmother had her issues and fought all the time with her husband, but she would never have whined and complained about it: [She felt that one had their] lot in life and you did what you had to do, and you worked very hard.

My mother, on the other hand, had a very easy life. My grandmother had enough money for my mother to go to Brooklyn College for day classes, which was a big step up in the world. My mother then married someone who had money. So she had a relatively easy life and didn’t have to work nearly as hard—if at all—like my grandmother did, but she was always complaining about her marriage. So I think there was this big difference in generation.

SH: Do you think there was a certain strength that was passed from your grandmother to your mother, but your mother had no place to use it?

CK: I think there is something to that. I think my grandmother passed a lot of things to my mother and I don’t really know a lot about them. Nana never really talked about anything personal. I never saw my grandmother cry. She was a very tightly-wound person. I can’t really imagine what kind of mother she was. The only thing I know about her was that, as a mother, she—and I think this is very generational thing—brought my mother up to be this beautiful darling that would attract the right man. It was very important that she always looked perfect—you can see that in the old home movies. She had these gorgeous outfits that Nana made her—coats with beautiful fur collars—and she always had beautiful makeup. I think she primped her like a doll. When you had a daughter at that time, you had to make them very attractive, charming and lady-like so they would get a good man who could support them. There wasn’t a sense that she would make a living or become a professional woman, because it was too early for that.

SH: I wonder if your mom hadn’t had everything done for her, had she been given a greater sense of independence, would she have been as preoccupied with this affair and the life she could have had with this other man?

CK: I don’t know if the life she had with the other man was just a fantasy that she would have needed within any marriage. I get the feeling that if she had married this lover, she still would have been unfulfilled, but I obviously could never know that.

SH: While growing up, did you feel much connection to your Jewishness?

CK: Growing up, my Jewishness was something I just took for granted because I didn’t really know anyone who wasn’t Jewish. In Long Island, my whole neighborhood was Jewish. Like other kids, I was dragged to the temple for high holidays and forced to wear new outfits. It never really meant anything to me and, in fact, it really bored me. [At synagogue] my friends and I would go into the bathroom and smoke cigarettes and stuff. I knew we were Jewish and I knew what we were suppose to do, but nobody really ever taught me what it meant to be Jewish. Then when I went to prep school, where I was one of five Jews in the whole school, I started to have a consciousness that there is something different or weird about being Jewish. But, it wasn’t until I was 40 that I started to become interested and embraced [my Jewish roots]. Two things happened simultaneously. First of all, I met the man who is now my husband Andre [theatre director, actor, playwright and painter Andre Gregory] who is the first Jewish man I ever had as a boyfriend. All my boyfriends [that lasted beyond a couple of weeks] were not Jewish. Also, when I turned forty, I started to take Kabbalah classes from this amazing Rabbi here in New York named Joseph Gelberman. He is about to have his 97th birthday and he is still teaching. He changed my life. He really became an important teacher for me, as he really taught me what Jewishness was and what it meant to me, mostly through the mysticism side of it. He officiated at both my parents’ funerals as well as married my husband and I here in New York. He’s become a very important person to me. It’s only been in the past 10 years that I’ve been into that.

SH: Did your parents attend your wedding?

CK: We had two weddings: the first was in Hawaii in the garden among the ruins of an old Sugar Mill. My parents did not come to the wedding because it was too far away, which we kind of knew and that is why we did it there. The minute I told my parents that I was getting married—they both were on the phone—it was one of the most hilarious conversations I ever had with them. The two of them were on the phone in different parts of the house and I’m in New York telling them. The reaction I expected was, “oh congratulations that is so great”. They—especially my father—[responded with], oh my god we’ve got to tell everyone, we’ve got to invite so and so…people I had never even heard of. I realized that in five minutes, they were going to insist on having this wedding with 300 people I didn’t know, and I started to panic. So we ended up going to Hawaii, where there were only 12 guests at the wedding. And a couple weeks later, we had a New York wedding for our family, where the Rabbi married us again. My parents were at that wedding, in fact they walked me down the aisle.

An Interview with Argentinean filmmaker, María Victoria Menis, director of Camera Obscura

2009-03-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

Director María Victoria Menis

POSTED BY
SUSAN STARKMAN
FilmMatters and Programmer
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

Camera Obscura, this year’s opening night film, is a cinematically beautiful, understated romance. Gertrudis is a Jewish immigrant born on the docks when her parents’ ship arrives in the harbour of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century. Labelled ugly by her jealous younger brother, she tends to blend into the background, especially when photos are being taken. Married off to a wealthy Jewish rancher, Gertrudis appears to have a happy life and loving family. However, when her husband hires an itinerant photographer to photograph the ranch, Gertrudis finds herself strangely drawn to him and discovers that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Camera Obscura is the fourth feature film by director Maria Victoria Menis whose previous films include the award-winning El Cielito and Arregui, News of the Day. In preparation for this interview, Maria Victoria submitted the following director’s statement about Camera Obscura:

“The territory of ugliness, is a place known only to those who live in it. With my camera, I would like to open the frontier of that world, immerse myself in it, and discover its overwhelming beauty.”

SUSAN STARKMAN: The film marks a departure from your earlier films that deal with contemporary society. What was the inspiration for this film and why did you decide to make it a period piece?

MARIA VICTORIA MENIS: Twelve years ago, I read the short story “La Camara Oscura”, written by Angelica Gorodischer. Immediately, I felt it would be interesting to translate it to the cinematic universe. The story is a profound reflection about the subjectivity of the way we see things. It is told through the intense relationship between a woman considered “ugly”, obliged since she was a little girl to look down, and a photographer who sees everything. The story takes place in another period of time and with my camera I went there. I must confess that I was concerned because, at the end of the day, it had to be credible. Argentina is not a country known for period pieces! But I had so much enthusiasm for the project that I overcame all of my fears. Years had passed since I had first read the story, but sometimes there are things that keep coming to your mind and don’t leave you, and that’s when you know that you have to do something with that material. Between first reading the story and making the film version, I shot two other movies but I felt that I owed a debt to Gertrudis, the main character, and her story in some way drove me to make this film.

Young Gertrudis' family in Camera Obscura

SS: I read that your last film, El Cielito, was based on a true story. Is that so?

MVM: Yes, it was inspired by a true story. I read a short article in the crime section of the newspaper that I read every day. The police had shot a young man. On the floor, seriously wounded, he asked them to take care of his son whom he had left at an emergency shelter. After a time, the police discovered that the 10-month old baby was not, in fact, his son. The young man had taken it from a home because he believed that the boy was being abused. That love between a very marginal young man with nothing in his life and a 10-month old baby represented an intense protective bond that captivated me. That story still affects me today and sometimes when I watch the film – my own film – there are moments when I cry because I know that it is a true story.

SS: Although religion does not play a central role in the film, we are frequently reminded that Gertrudis and her family are Jewish. Why did you decide to centre the story on a Jewish family?

MVM: The original story had that element and I think that Angelica made a very good decision. Gertrudis’ mother was a woman who escaped from the discriminatory and bloody Russian pogroms to start a new life in Argentina but, in spite of that, she discriminates against her daughter. Isn’t that a paradox? A discriminated person can discriminate too. It’s tremendous. On the other hand, my grandparents came from Russia and that was a topic that was hardly discussed in my family. I’m sure that was because it was too painful to bring up. Evidently, almost without knowing it, I wanted to get into my own “silenced” story. It must have been really hard for all of them and what a powerful instinct of survival they had.

Lastly, I was attracted to the idea of showing the integration of the Jews and the gauchos, the natives of the interior of Argentina. Argentina is a country that is built mostly thanks to the efforts of millions of immigrants. I also have a project that I want to do about the life of the indigenous people before the arrival of the immigrants. This is also a culture that suffered all kinds of discrimination during and after the conquest and their story deserves to be told. The problem is the budget: making a movie about South America Pre-Spain is very expensive and money is tyrannical in the world of cinema.

SS: Your characters rely mostly on nonverbal gestures to convey what they are feeling. Gertrudis, like Felix in El Cielito, say very little yet their expressions and gestures reveal more about them than any words. How do you cast your films? Do you have particular actors in mind when you are writing?

MVM: In the case of both films, I did not have any actors in mind. Many times, I write thinking of actors as in the case of Carmen Maura in my film Arregui, the News of the Day. In this case, I imagined Felix and Gertrudis in their most minimal gestures. Only in the casting, after seeing many actors, I found them. Neither Leonardo Ramirez (Felix in El Cielito) nor Mirta Bogdasarian (Gertrudis in Camera Obscura) had any film experience. They came from a theatrical background. That can be a big risk! But they were very committed to their characters and they turned out to be excellent cinema actors.

SS: From the moment she enters the world, Gertrudis is made to feel alienated. She is even denied Argentinean citizenship because she was born on the boat. How much does her statelessness contribute to her overall sense of alienation?

MVM: Gertrudis is born on the footbridge of the boat that brought her family fleeing from Russia. She is born just as they arrive in Buenos Aires. I think that’s a very interesting situation. It’s not Russia, its not Argentina, it’s not what her mother expected (a boy), and she’s not the pretty little girl that her mother desired. The look of Gertrudis’ mother sentences her. Later on, her family decides her destiny and, in that life they impose, they make her feel invisible and foreign at the same time. When you are little and made to feel different or “ugly” as in the case of Gertrudis, you don’t want to look for attention. You don’t want anyone to look at you and you don’t want people to hurt you anymore. The external world can be so hostile. After having assumed that role for years, you feel like you have dropped out of society. You can stay all of your life in this position, or one day decide to change. I’m very attracted to these crossroads. The characters of my last three films also experience those feelings – do they stay? Do they change? Do they escape?

SS: The characters in your films either have no family or they feel disconnected from them. Is this reflective of a general kind of breakdown of family life in Argentina?

MVM: It’s true, some don’t have family or they are foreigners in their own families. This is a reflection of the large political and economic crisis that occurred here in Argentina. Many families disintegrated because poverty forced them to emigrate to another country or town in search of work. The story of Felix in El Cielito is a glimpse of that. The mother and the father both leave and the boy is left to be raised by his grandmother on the farm. In other cases, there are families that live under the same roof but they are unhappy because they are unemployed and living under a lot of pressure.

In the case of Camera Obscura, we are situated at the beginnings of the last century, when women’s destinies were decided by their families. Gertrudis’ family came from Russia with very little money and they need her to get married. For an immigrant during that era, it was better to have sons who would have contributed financially by working. In other words, then, like now, social conditions generate situations that directly affect families.

SS: Gertrudis finds solace in the beauty of nature. We often see her arranging household objects to look like still life paintings. Are their particular artists or specific paintings that you had in mind for these shots?

MVM: In preparation for the film, I immersed myself in Marc Chagall’s world, his small villages and his magic. All of that fascinates me. I wanted to have almost still frames, simulating photography. I looked at many photographs dating back to the birth of photography. I looked at black and white photos of the photographic pioneers. These photos have a lot of brightness and were very artistic. Surrealist photographers like Man Ray were also an inspiration, as were the French Surrealist directors of the Thirties. Obviously, contemporary cinema was also in my head. In the last few years, I have been very attracted to Asian cinema, in particular Zhang Yimou films such as Raise the Red Lantern, Ki-duk Kim’s Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring, and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. These films are made up mostly of images rather than words; the frames and the shots, almost still, create a cinematic synthesis. I must say that the Argentinean director Leonardo Favio also inspires me. His first films from the Sixties have been an enormous inspiration throughout my life. He’s a “pure image” director.

On the set of Camera Obscura

SS: Jean Baptiste identifies with the artists of the Surrealist movement and his personal photographs bear the influence of artists such as Man Ray. Did you model his character after any particular artist?

MVM: I read, with my co-writer Alejandro Fernandez Murray, that during the early Twentieth Century, there were many artists and photographers who came to the Americas - Canada, the U.S., Central and South America. They were inspired to photograph nature, the natives, the wild America that was so different from Europe. They were explorers and adventurers. This idea was very interesting to both of us: the life of a French photographer, radicalised in Brazil, whose photographs focussed on trees, plants, stems and petals. Jean Baptiste survived the First World War taking photos of the battle camps. He’s a hurt man, body and soul, and he needs to go and look at nature. He possesses the Surrealist spirit that broke with the traditional canons of “beautiful” art that had dominated for centuries. He introduces the art that dives into the unconscious world and he takes photos of America in a Surrealist way. Unfortunately, I think that fixed attitudes towards beauty continue to exist in our own society. We in the West (and now even the East is affected) are slaves to a definition of “beauty” that is imposed by a world full of marketing. Globalisation turns it into a fixed and singular type of beauty that again and again is imposed on all of the screens across the planet. What is beautiful? What is ugly? This is taught to us through brands and consumerism that dictate the way that we see. These are very blinding glasses, by the way.

SS: The black and white photos of Gallipoli provide a stark contrast to the otherwise idyllic images captured in the film. Why did you focus on this particular battle?

MVM: I needed to tell Jean Baptiste’s suffering in the First World War and I did this through his own, very painful, photographs. As he talks about the war, I needed Gertrudis to listen, feel and connect with him so that she could “see” those same photographs in her head, and that we could see along with her. I needed Jean Baptiste to say that war is the most horrible, ugliest thing in the world. Jean Baptiste looks at the world in a different way and Gertrudis immediately feels it. It’s a shock to her, and when she discovers this new way of seeing, a feeling of attraction is generated between them. It is though she has been hypnotised. While I was writing the film, I remembered the film Gallipoli directed by Peter Weir. I suffered a lot in that film and, well…cinema has always been my biggest inspiration. Gallipoli was a huge massacre (every war is unfair and cruel). Almost a quarter of a million soldiers died, young soldiers, from both sides, in one battle.

SS: Camera Obscura can be described as a collage of visual techniques. How did you decide to approach the story from a multi-media perspective?

MVM: It’s a film about the human look and that concept was very liberating. It gave me a freedom that I never had. I thought, I’m a filmmaker, why do I have to stick to only one technique? Besides, this is a film about the infinite ways of seeing. Why not a Surrealist movie? Over the last few years, cinematography has opened up to mixed techniques that incorporate photography and video. Museums now have expositions that mix painting, cinema, photography and video. Why does cinema have to be only animation or live actors in black and white or colour? Let’s play and make those collages that I was so fond of when I was very little! I knew it was a risk, but I must say that the essence of the story responds to this format. People were moved by the little animated sequence that appears surprisingly and describes the feelings of the main character when she was five years old. People have embraced this multi-media approach with a great deal of enthusiasm (luckily!!!)

Menis' El Cielito (Little Sky)

SS: Both Camera Obscura and El Cielito begin with a black screen and the sounds of the outside world. Why did you choose to have your audience focus on the aural, rather than the visual initially?

MVM: My grandfather was my initiator into the world of literature and cinema. He was the principal narrator of the stories I heard as a child. He narrated the story of Lawrence of Arabia and with his words I “saw” the movie. In fact, when I saw the film, I felt like I had already seen it! (I love that movie!!) I think that sounds, voices and noises are united to form a “Once upon a time…” It’s possible that the black screen and listening to the sounds is a way of immersing yourself into the film with little steps, or like slowly opening the cover of a book. It’s the “once upon a time” of my grandfather’s voice.

SS: Although set almost a century apart, both Camera Obscura and El Cielito depict marriage and motherhood as something which women have to escape if they are to have any kind of autonomy. Do you think that women in contemporary Argentine society have a harder time than their North American counterparts balancing their personal and professional lives?

MVM: I don’t think that all women have to escape from marriage or motherhood to have autonomy. In fact, I’ve been married to the same man, I have four children and, up to now, I haven’t escaped anywhere! (laughs out loudly) I was very interested in telling the story of women who, because of social conditioning, economic crisis, mistreatment, violence or silent humiliation, need to rethink a change. By no means does this mean that they don’t love their children. I’m just saying that there are women who, in some defining moment, can’t handle their children because they are depressed and their psyche is fragile. This occurs in El Cielito. For many years, it was common to think that the most important thing for a mother is her son. But people who thought this way did not see that a mother is also a human being with her own troubles, frustrations, and sadness. These women had their own personal longings and vocations that they wanted to develop. Sometimes these women became victims who really didn’t know how or couldn’t take care of their children. Did somebody ever think that maybe a woman didn’t plan to be an animal procreator of children for a husband that only chose her for that reason (as in the case of Camera Obscura)? I am writing about those women.

In my film Arregui, News of the Day, it is the man who needs to find the time and distance to reflect on what he is going through and make people understand him. I don’t differentiate between male and female characters; they are equally marginal beings that can’t take being on the sidelines anymore.

SS: Jean Baptiste frees Gertrudis from her self-imposed prison. Is this because he is the first person to consider her to be beautiful or because he is the only one who recognises (and shares) her artistic sensibilities?

MVM: Gertrudis did have the loving look and the affection of her father. However, he submitted to his wife’s authority and he couldn’t understand how Gertrudis felt when he sends her into a marriage that was supposed to be “ideal” for her. Maybe it was her father’s look that allowed her to survive childhood and create an internal world that was so intense. We all need in some way a loving look in our childhood. It can be from our parents, grandparents or anyone who gives us their love. We can even get sick or die if we don’t get that look. The look of Gertrudis’ mother sentences her to a life of feeling ugly. Jean Baptiste’s look is one that values her and builds a bridge so that she can look at herself in a new way. Gertrudis looks at herself in the mirror for the first time and she is pleased with what she sees.

SS: Jean Baptiste convinces Gertrudis not only to pose for a photograph, but he also empowers her to stand behind the camera. What (if any) options were open to women of that era to express their artistic talents beyond their domestic settings?
MVM: It depends on the places where those women lived. Obviously, a woman living on a farm in Argentina in 1912 (or nowadays a woman living amongst the Taliban) did not have it the same as a woman living in Paris or New York. Women needed a lot of personality, character and courage to develop an artistic, scientific or commercial vocation. How many women couldn’t express their talents even amongst those closest to them? Writers, painters…when did they stop being invisible and appear in society? There are so few considering the time! Creativity was also expressed in the way they raised their children, managed their homes, the seam of a beautiful tablecloth and the clothes they sewed. Their creative talents were evident in the stories they told their sons and the lullabies they sang to make them sleep. In the end, it was not easy to find a “room of one’s own” as Virginia Woolf said. She was a brilliant writer, a “woman of her house” who was driven to madness because of daily life.

SS: The end of Camera Obscura is open to interpretation. Why did you decide to leave it ambiguous?

MVM: We tried to ensure that the film was filled with subtle details. We aimed for a Chekhovian atmosphere where things that don’t appear to be meaningful, are. Much of what happens occurs behind the scenes. That is how we worked the ending of the film. But for me, there is a sum of small details that would indicate with certain clarity the ending of the film.

However, it is true that there are people who see the ending to be open to multiple possibilities. And it’s true that some people have the opposite view and think that the end is absolutely clear and concrete. It’s amazing the surprises you can have with an audience, and I am not saying that just for this film. All of a sudden, people tell me interpretations that I would never come up with. Some of them are really creative and marvelous and reveal to me, almost as if it were psychoanalytic therapy, aspects that wouldn’t have occurred to me in the creation of this film but that perhaps I had included unconsciously.

SS: What projects do you currently have in the pipeline?

My mind was worn out after I finished this film. It demanded a lot of time and effort on my part. I needed a vacation to disconnect myself, or perhaps connect myself back to earth! My beautiful planet Earth, my family, my friends, my teaching, long naps, gym classes, coffee and reading the newspaper. To summarise, I’m shuffling some film possibilities, though I also want to do short projects such as writing a play, lecturing at University, writing a few texts and probably doing a documentary for television. Wim Wenders said that the director of cinema is a Samurai. This is true; there is creativity but, at the same time, it is a struggle to translate this creativity into something concrete. Well, in spite of being very satisfied with Camera Obscura, I would like the Japanese sword to be much lighter in my next film!

A Maria Victoria Menis Filmography

2008: La Cámara Oscura (Camera Obscura)
2004: Cielito, El (Little Sky)
2001: Arregui, la noticia del día (Arregui, News of the Day)
1989: Los Espíritus patrióticos

An Interview with Galilee Eskimos director, Jonathan Paz

2009-01-13T16:43:00.000-08:00

POSTED BY
STUART HANDS
Assistant Programming Coordinator
Toronto Jewish Film Festival

The cast of The Galilee Eskimos

In The Galilee Eskimos, the Israeli film shown at January's Chai Tai screening and being repeated during our festival in April, twelve senior citizens wake one morning to find their kibbutz deserted. The bank has foreclosed on the property and the residents have left with all their belongings. As the seniors band together to keep their kibbutz and oppose the construction of a luxury spa and casino which will destroy their community, they rediscover the same pioneering spirit that they had when the kibbutz was first founded.

The film’s director, Jonathan Paz, grew up on kibbutz Mizra, where he was a member until 1971. Galilee Eskimos speaks of Paz’s love for this generation of kibbutzniks and the egalitarian values which they nurtured into practice.

In preparation for our telephone interview, Jonathan Paz generously composed a four-page document where he described what motivated him to make this film:

The idea for the film came to me some seven years ago, in the final year of my dear mother's life. On one of my visits to the kibbutz (which, incidentally, treated her and her contemporaries in a wonderful way, as do, to the best of my knowledge, all of the other kibbutzim), we spoke of Globalization, insensitive Capitalism and the poor state of the kibbutzim. Many of the kibbutzim had begun the process of Privatization (no more Communal Living or "Each contributes according to his abilities and receives according to his needs"… no more equality and cooperation, only "Differential Wages" etc). I spoke to my mother about loneliness and the fact that life passes so quickly (even though my mother lived to the ripe old-age of 97, alert and lucid to the end). I asked her, "Mother, which period of your life do you miss the most?" She answered without any hesitation, "I would like to go back to the time when we founded the kibbutz". I knew right then that I had a story! There was a film to be made!

Galilee Eskimos is offering these old folks the opportunity to go back for a short period to their proud past, to return and build the kibbutz once again: A return to the Commune, to mutual help and friendship, to the old work clothes and the communal shower, the work roster and the general meeting (democracy), to a life of culture and romances of old, even to the re-arming of the kibbutz in order to guard it from external enemies.

STUART HANDS: How do you feel about the recent films, Children of the Sun and Sweet Mud, where the children’s generation provide more bitter portraits of kibbutz life?

JONATHAN PAZ: First of all, I cannot compare my film to Children of the Sun, as [the latter] is a documentary based on [archival] footage and interviews with people, etc. But I can easily, and without much hesitation, compare my film to Sweet Mud, which is a great film. Dror Shaul is a very talented director. He had some bitterness and wanted to face whatever was troubling him from his childhood: He wanted to settle the account with the kibbutz for what happened to him and his mother. My approach was different: I made my film with a great deal of love, nostalgia, longing and homage to those people who founded the kibbutz. I really admire and love those people. I loved my childhood. For me and my friends, the kibbutz was a great time. We had a really happy childhood. The children’s home was great. I fondly recall the communal sleeping arrangement as an exciting and special experience, which I look back on with great affection.

SH: Since Galilee Eskimos pays tribute to the founders of the kibbutz movement, why did you choose to open the film with the flashback of the father leaving his son at night in the children's house?

JP: This initial abandonment later connects to the film’s present situation, where the tables are turned and the parents are being deserted by their now-grown children. This is probably the central issue presented in the film. Now, some 50 years later, the same (now aged) father appears at the window of the kibbutz old-peoples’ home watching the now-grown children leaving the debt-ridden kibbutz. The Deserter has been deserted!

Those who know a little bit about the kibbutz are aware that it is suffering a great crisis: Much of the younger generation have left, while the elders are left behind. A lot of the younger generation—say my generation—were killed in the army. And many of us also left the kibbutz and even left Israel. There are many Israelis in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, etc, who were Kibbutz children.

Jonathan Paz on the set of The Galilee Eskimos

SH: Shortly into the film, one of the women comments, “We left our parents and our children left us”.

JP: Exactly, it’s funny what the lady in the dining room says.

SH: Do you think she understands how they could be left by their children?

JP: This is a different story than the children’s house. The tradition in Western culture is that when the child gets out of high school, he leaves home, period. They go as far as they can. Starting when they are eighteen or nineteen years old and for the rest of their lives, they see their parents once or twice a year— at Rosh Hashanah, or if they are Christian, at Thanksgiving or Christmas time. In Israel it’s completely different. First of all, we are a very small country: For example my son and my daughter live twenty-five/thirty minutes away from me. They come over every Friday night. We see them at least once or twice a week. Everybody is still living together. When I talk about this subject of children leaving their parents with people in Western countries like Canada or the United States, they don’t understand what the big deal is. That’s why the lady in the film says, we left our parents when we get older and our children have left us— that’s the way of life. I wanted to emphasize with this that Israeli tradition is different: children don’t leave their parents for long. That’s why the founder of the kibbutz is in shock [when the children have left].

SH: I wonder if the older generation of the kibbutz has been abandoned partly because that mentality of social collectivity has been replaced by individualism.

JP: Exactly, you are absolutely right. Privatization killed the kibbutz. 80 or 90% of the kibbutzim already went for privatization. The kibbutz as defined in the old days is gone. The very few Kibbutzim that still exist are not like the old collective kibbutz. That’s one of the tragedies of my parents’ generation.

SH: Is Yulek (Shimon Yisraeli), the filmmaker in Galilee Eskimos, based on anyone in particular? Was it common to have a filmmaker as part of the kibbutz?

JP: At any kibbutz, there was always one guy who managed to have a movie camera and used to document the events in the kibbutz. In my kibbutz we had a person like Yulek, but he was a mechanic. In fact, each of the twelve characters in Galilee Eskimos existed in every kibbutz. Do you remember Nyeshka (Leah Shlanger) from the film, the nice lady who had a love affair with practically everybody? In every kibbutz there was one girl who was quite beautiful and sexy and drew most of the guys’ attention. In my kibbutz, this lady—rather a few ladies—would make this entrance every Friday night where everybody would see her and realize that she had a new shirt or something.

SH: Galilee Eskimos shows a great deal of candor among the characters toward sex. How sexually liberated was this generation of kibbutzniks?

JP: People are always thinking about sex until their last breath of life. What I tried to show is that the old folks in my film are not half human beings; they are not invalids. As long as they are kicking, breathing, fixing the electrical work, gathering water and defending themselves, etc, they are still talking about sex. My philosophy is that as long as you are still talking about sex, you are thinking about sex--which means you are still a human being. The myth that old-age represents a second class humanity needs to be shattered! Sexuality among our old-folk is not to be seen as a taboo. In my film, I wanted to emphasize very strongly the characters’ thinking, talking and remembering about sex to show that they are full human beings.

SH: You gathered a really wonderful cast for the film. Are they all professional actors?

JP: They are the most famous, well-known actors and actresses in Israel. All of them are professionals, but most of them are not working any more. Shimon Yisraeli, who plays Yulek, was the most famous actor in Israel. But he disappeared ten/sixteen years ago. When the audience [for Galilee Eskimos] first saw him on the screen, most of them asked, he is still alive?

SH: You dedicated your first feature film, Valley Train (1989), to the memory of your father, Chanoch Paz (“theatre director, teacher, educator, and a man of culture,” describes the film’s dedication). I wonder if you can talk about your father and the type of work he did. Was he a teacher on the kibbutz?

JP: Yes, he was a kibbutz member as well. He came from Eastern Europe. First of all, he was the founder of the kibbutz high school: He was the head of the school and a teacher. He was also the first theatre director in the whole north of Israel. He was a cultured man, which was quite unique because, in those days, everyone wore working clothes and went to work.

SH: What kind of influence did he have on you and your work?

JP: I didn’t realize it back then, but [he influenced my decision to become a filmmaker]. I still remember today when he bought me a super 8mm camera. He also bought me two three-minute cassettes (which was very expensive in those days) and told me to go ahead and [film] something about the family. And I was crazy enough that, instead of shooting the family gatherings, the family events, I filmed the cows’ house….

SH: So you filmed around the kibbutz.

JP: Yes. (In fact, a very short bit of footage used in Children of the Sun is mine.)

SH: Why did you leave the Kibbutz?

JP: First of all, I wanted so badly to study filmmaking. In the early seventies, there were no film schools in Israel, but now there are so many. I did a lot of research and, in those days, NYU was considered the best film school in the world. It wasn’t easy studying there because, in the beginning, I didn’t know enough English, and, the tuition was so expensive. I worked twenty hours a day in so many jobs just to cover the tuition.

SH: When you began studying film, were you interested in Israeli films of the past?

JP: Not at all. Israeli films were lousy in those days. The big wave—the new period—started around twelve/fifteen years ago, around the time of my first feature, The Valley Train: Suddenly, with the [spreading] of film schools in Israel, the help of government funding, [the films got better]. But in my day, even though they were lousy, the films made a fortune: Israeli commercial TV—the one channel—was lousy, so everybody went to see films. So almost every film was pulling in hundreds and thousands of tickets, and the audience was flooding to the film theatres to see very bad quality films. In those days, [these bad films were nicknamed] Bourekas. Bourekas are a very special food which can be made in two minutes: just warmed and eaten straight. All those films in those days were called Boureka films, which means they were without any quality, good taste, effort, and were easy to swallow. But those days of low quality—lousy scripts, bad sound—are gone. These days all films go under a very thick machine—a selection process—and the scripts produced are very high quality.

SH: After NYU. did you go right back to Israel?

JP: Yes. I found a nice lady, an Israeli who was also studying in New York. We got married in New York, had a baby and went back home to Israel.

SH: What was it like making your first feature film, the semi-autobiographical Valley Train?

JP: It was very difficult because I produced it on my own. I didn’t get any funds. I went to my Kibbutz, which I had already left, and told them that I wanted to shoot my own story in the kibbutz where I grew up.

SH: Was the Kibbutz still operating at this time?

JP: Absolutely, but the whole kibbutz was mobilized for this film. I used non-professional actors that were kibbutz
members. (The only professional actor in the film was Dan Turgeman..) The kibbutz didn’t help me financially but they helped by giving me the locations. I remember I didn’t have money but somehow I managed to do it.

Jonathan Paz Filmography

1977-1975 (USA)
YOU ARE SO YOUNG, Drama, 30 min., (Won the Bronze medal in the Festival of the Americas, 1975)
NEXT TIME, YOU KNOW, 27 min., Drama,
TO ISRAEL WITH LOVE, 35min., documentary.
1977-1995 (ISRAEL)
Wrote, directed and produced dramatic and documentary films:
LET THEM HAVE A THEATRE, 30 min., A dramatic documentary - the Youth and Children’s Theater of Israel.
THE GEVATRON - A KIBBUTZ CHOIR, a dramatic documentary.
ISRAEL IN A STATE OF WAR. 30 min., documentary.
I LOVE ISRAEL, 30 min., documentary.
COME TO CURE IN ISRAEL, 27 min, documentary. The Psoriasis disease and its treatment in the Dead Sea.
ELCO, High Tech, promotion.
THEY WERE ALL WE HAD, 45 min, documentary. The Birth of the Israeli Air Force.in 1948.
THE MACHAL 82 min, English. WW2 pilots fighting for Israel in 1948.
WINGS OVER CALIFORNIA , 53 min., Documentary. The first flying course for the Israeli Air Force in Bakersfield, Ca, 1948.
1989 (ISRAEL)
THE VALLEY TRAIN , 90 min. feature film. (director, co-writer, producer)
1999 (ISRAEL)
ZAYA” 100 min. feature film.. (director, co-writer, co-producer)
2007 (ISRAEL)
THE GALILEE ESKIMOS, 100 min. feature film. (director, producer, co-writer)