Tonight Is Opening Night!

Photo: John Aquino

The cast of "My Mexican Shivah" poses with director Alejandro Springall

Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist, My Mexican Shivah, Chronicle of a Jump, and 5 Days all premiere the evening of Wednesday the 10th.

“My Mexican Shivah” screened last night at the insiders’ opening party for the 16th annual New York Jewish Film Festival. There was resounding applause and free tequila.

Guests included this Grande Dame of New York, Joan Rivers...

Photo: John Aquino

John Sayles (Executive Producer, "My Mexican Shivah") chatted with the audience...

Photo: John Aquino

When the family patriarch dies, his shiksa mistress, orthodox, drug-dealing grandson, distractingly beautiful granddaughter, and more-than-vaguely troubled children get together to sit Shivah, or “chiva,” as the family’s domestic workers call it. There are also a mariachi band and Talmudic scholars to judge the soul of the departed. This is what Jews do. Come watch them do it in Mexico City, with a spirited soundtrack by the Klezmatics.

I spoke with Raquel Pankowsky, Sharon Zundel, and Ricardo Kleinbaum, all actors in “My Mexican Shivah.”

What was your greatest challenge in making “My Mexican Shivah?”

Raquel Pankowsky, Esther
I found the script so challenging, so good, that I became unable to perform, and Alejandro (Springall, the director) had to give me a pep talk. The pressure was so intense that I cried, and then it emerged, Ether’s sadness. Really, maintaining Esther’s level of emotion was the greatest challenge of the film for me.

Sharon Zundel, Galia
For me the entire role was a challenge. My character had so many conflicts, so many ways that she didn’t fit in, she was in such a panic of identity: unable to mourn her grandfather, unable to be a Jew and a Mexican, unable to love freely the only thing she really loved, Galia really admired her grandfather without liking him. This was a very challenging and rewarding role for me.

Mexico’s Jewish community can be closed-off, and it is difficult to be part of Mexican society and Jewish society in Mexico at once. I think that Galia’s predicament addresses this problem, but also goes more deeply to illuminate the human condition.

Ricardo Kleinbaum, Ari
This movie was neither intended as comedy nor drama. If it fits some genre, great, but as I played Ari, and as I saw his role in the film, “My Mexican Shivah” is about people and their reaction to great loss. When death interrupts the flow of life, you see the best and the worst in people. It is with this fact in mind that I approached Ari.


I also spoke with Ilan Stavans, who wrote the story “Morirse Está en Hebreo,” on which “My Mexican Shivah” is based. Here he is on the left, alongside his father, Abraham Stavans, who plays the lawyer in "My Mexican Shivah."

I asked Ilan Stavans about being Jewish in Mexico and about the process of watching one’s story transition from the page to the screen:

My original story was more subtle and more mystical. Alejandro (the director) used the story as a canvas, and thus, necessarily, some things get left out: my tools are words, his are images. But it would be foolish for a writer to be territorial. I really appreciate his interpretation of the story.

I wanted to communicate this sense of suffocation where the characters are bunched together in their own home, ostensibly their own realm, but still they are ill at ease, there is tension. They live, as Jews in Mexico often do, in the prison for the minority individual. Jews in Mexico cannot be protagonists in the history of their country, as Jews can in the U.S. Indeed, my view of on these issues, as with the story of “My Mexican Shivah,” is very much informed by the fact that I live in the U.S. now.

Mexican Jews are at once insiders and permanent outsiders, a bit like the family in the film. The very metabolism of Mexican society differs from the U.S.’s: Mexican society embraces foreigners without really allowing them to become Mexican; they are always other. But then again, the choice is theirs, it goes both ways; they choose to stay in the society.

Alejandro Springall, the director of “My Mexican Shivah,” and I will be speaking later in the week. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates…
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From left to right: Zohar Lavi (Chronicle of a Jump), Sarah Jane Lapp (Chronicle of
a Professional Eulogist), Andrew Ingall (The Jewish Museum), Aviva
Weintraub (The Jewish Museum/NYJFF Director), Kristi Jabobson (Toots),
Lucy Kostelanetz (Sonia), Steve Grenyo (Film Society of Lincoln Center),
Alejandro Springall (My Mexican Shivah)

Photo: John Aquino


Photo: John Aquino

Claudia Bonn, Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Joan Rosenbaum, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director, The Jewish Museum

Saturday at 9PM: Lucy Kostelanetz on Art, Life, and "SONIA"

“SONIA” recounts the life of Sofia (Sonia) Dymshitz-Tolstaya, a brilliant painter and visionary born into a Jewish St. Petersburg family in 19th century Russia. We hear of Sonia’s loneliness as a young, locked-away lovebird, as a mother during World War II, as an artist struggling under Stalin, and later, ever more alone, invigorating a Communist genre with her sense of generous feminism and beauty. Her tableaux are shockingly accomplished, blending the accepted form of Social Realism with a humanistic, life-affirming vision.

I spoke with filmmaker Lucy Kostelanetz (Sonia’s great-niece) in her Manhattan studio. Lucy spent more than fifteen years preparing “SONIA.” Her commitment alights from every frame of this gorgeous, ambitious film.

I asked Lucy Kostelanetz about her great-aunt Sonia’s artistic career:
Sonia painted what she saw. She went out to the countryside and got to know her subjects, the workers, which was part of her style, her sincerity, and her belief in the principals of the Revolution. Her paintings are not celebrations of the happy worker. They’re loving, and they’re grim. You can really see the history of the country in her art.

Sonia worked with Vladimir Tatlin, the Constructivist leader, producing incredible art and theory, and addressing the way museums and art institutions function. She and Tatlin called themselves “Artists of Material Culture” and it was then that she made her works on glass, which art historians consider her most accomplished. A great part of her heroism as an artist to me is that despite the circumstances, and perhaps, in some inexplicable way, because of them, she managed to put herself into her work, with these propaganda paintings on glass; tract made translucent, if you will.

How did Judaism fit into Sonia’s life?
Jewishisness is sort of a submotif in the film, but it’s always there. To me her humanism is what shines and what makes her culturally very Jewish. Now, Sonia did convert to give her daughter the benefits of a Christian birth, and I can’t know how conflicted she was, yet she converted back to Judaism in 1917, which to me was a return to her true selfhood.

I was very interested in how Sonia mediated the differences between the ideology and reality of Communism, how, with her heart and soul invested in the Revolution, she came to terms with its realities. I wonder if her Jewishness wasn’t part of this reckoning.

Lucy Kostelanetz (left) on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg

How long did “SONIA” take you to make?
The idea occurred in 1991, when Sonia’s granddaughter gave me her memoirs. My first shoot was at the Guggenheim Museum in 1992 at a show called “The Great Utopia,” on the Russian Avant-Garde. The USSR broke up and in 1994 I went back to research, and stayed with family. At first, the art historians and curators were very disparaging of her work, and then all of a sudden they were interested in her. Every story opened up to something else, and in 1999, Final Cut Pro (computer software) unburdened me of many time-consuming technical issues.

I still feel there’s more art. At the Russian Museum alone, they’ve been discovering more paintings. In fact I’ve learned there exist at least four more, but they need thorough conservation.

Would you tell us more about the process of bringing still photographs to life?
I would make the storyboards and give them to Jared Dubrino, who did the motion graphics. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s drawing and collage added a level of visual complexity to the film. George Griffin was our animator, and Todd Sines designed three unique fonts for the film. And he named one after me, Kostelanetz Modern Bold!

To learn more, please visit www.soniathemovie.com.

Jared Dubrino on "SONIA"

"The process of making the images for Sonia developed over time. Initially, there were a series of drawings and still photos and simple collages that were created by Lucy. She tried to maintain the feeling and some of the style of Sonia's collage work. As time went on, technology caught up with her vision, and Lucy and I spoke of creating work that Sonia might have created had she had Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro.

Just as Sonia longed to get away from the surface, to add depth and space to her works (which is what led her to glass) so did we also want to move away from flat images with simple pans and zooms.

By using the "Z" axis, the 3rd dimension available to us in After Effects, we were able to create a 3D world where the different 2D images could live and move. Just as Sonia did in her own work, we used existing photographs of the characters, extracting them from their surroundings (using photoshop instead of scissors or blades), then mixing them with found images of objects and environments. This was all then animated and given life with After Effects.

We also had original images specially created for us by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, pen-and-ink drawings as well as collages that were based on Sonia's own work, where situations involving the characters were recreated. George Griffin led the way with his animations using these techniques, and then Matthew and I built upon that style, eventually animating the better part of the film. Todd Sines of Scale+ then created the custom animated fonts, each based on the Cyrillic text of Sonia's environment. These text treatments added the final "icing," bringing even more spirit of Sonia's times and works to our film."

The Last Yiddish Film Made in Poland: "Unzere Kinder (Our Children)"

1948’s “Unzere Kinder (Our Children)” tells the story of Jewish orphans living in the Polish countryside near Lodz after World War II. It was the last Yiddish-language film ever to be made in Poland. But, as J. Hoberman, Senior Film Critic of The Village Voice and author of Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, explained, it was certainly not intended to be. Rather, it was to be part of the reinstitution of the old Yiddish talkies.

Two Jewish men--played by virtuoso comedy duo Shimon Dzigan and Israel Shumacher--return from the USSR after the war and perform Yiddish vaudeville for the orphans. The men talk with the children, and moved by their stories, decide to visit their orphanage. Dzigan and Schumacher, as J. Hoberman explained at the screening, were essentially playing themselves, as were the children. Like so many, they were coming to grips with what happened in the Holocaust, and as we see in the film, finding out how to represent the Holocaust is its largest concern: the children have brutal flashbacks, the mothers weep and tell of dead children, Dzigan and Shumacher ape the Nazis, but no one is satisfied that they’ve told a coherent story.

There would be no more Yiddish talkies in Poland. Indeed, the film was never shown in that country but had to smuggled via the Turkish diplomatic pouch into France. Ultimately, the post-Holocaust life in Poland that “Unzere Kinder” tried to envision was as chimerical as a Dzigan and Shumacher set piece.

"Gorgeous!" - Director Lisa Azuelos on Women, Jews, France, and Paris

Director Lisa Azuelos' comedy "Gorgeous!" (or "Comme t'y es Belle") portrays the lives of women today in the Sephardic community of Paris. Azuelos explained after the sold-out screening that her film plays differently to French and American audiences. In France, she explained, it was almost bizarre to see everyday Jewish women as the subject of a film, and the fact that "Gorgeous!" was a comedy made it even more unique, perhaps singular.

I spoke with Lisa Azuelos at last night's Directors' Party.

What drove you to make “Gorgeous!”? Are you part of a Sephardic community in Paris?
I wanted to make a movie about women. And even though I’m not Jewish because my mother is not Jewish, I was raised by my father in this Jewish community. So I’m enough of an outsider to have witnessed it, and enough of an insider to talk about it. Being part of the community has really grounded me, even though I’m not a real Jew. In fact it would be a pain for me to have to marry a real Jew because then I would have to convert.

But this community gave me love and affection and food, and gave structure to my life with the dinners, high holidays and celebrations, like a perennial student on the semester system. Every year is structured in a special way. In the end, I really identify with the Jewish community I was raised in.

So that’s why this movie is both Jewish and non-Jewish: you see, I am very much Jewish but I’m not. So I’m talking about women in this film, I’m talking about Jewish women, especially, in tribute to my Jewish grandmother who did not speak of god, but who had god in her hands while she worked in the kitchen.

How does Jewish life fit into Parisian life?
Nothing that is not pure French Catholic is fully normal in France. It’s difficult for the French to absorb other communities and it’s the same for these communities to accept French culture. It’s not like here where you put your hand to your heart, say you’re an American, and then you are. In France you have to choose between one culture and the other, and in the end nobody really can choose anything. It’s odd, but I think it will soon change for the better.

Well maybe your film is in some sense a look in that direction, a hopeful look?
Yes, that’s why I made the movie. It is a hopeful look at the relations between men and women, Arabs and Jews. I was trying to bring joy.

Are your characters the type of women one could find in Paris today?
Yes, I know people like this. I’ve been like this, I have friends like this. I think I've stuck to real life in the film.

Then why, as you said at the screening, was “Gorgeous!” a challenge for French audiences?
Dramas about Jews are much easier for French audiences: You are a Jew and nobody understands you, you are a Jew and love an Arab; you know, drama. Or you can have a big, big comedy which is unrelated to real life. My movie, though it is a comedy, takes places in real life, which makes it unique.

You know, Woody Allen talks about Jewish people, but really about people more universally. And American audiences get that. But, when it comes to films in France, people think being Jewish should be the only thing, it should eat the other story.

But the French love Woody Allen! Because he’s exotic…?
No, because he’s great! Well, for us it’s exotic to see Manhattan. I wanted to do some of the same things, not to compare of course!, to make fun of certain aspects of Jewish life in Paris.

Is it common for Sephardic Jews to employ North African Muslims?
Yes. In the end, women are more bound by the fact that they come from Morocco than by religion, in a sense. They can speak Arabic together, they are part of the same community.

What sorts of responses did you get when you were first showing “Gorgeous!” in France?
People were really moved by the women’s stories, they could really relate. And I’d like to recount this one event: I took my film to a little town called Vannes at the end of Brittany. It has only cows and flowers. Nothing else. And they really don’t know what a Jew is. I showed this movie to an audience there, and these 65-year-old ladies were moved by my movie. And I was moved by that.

"Love and Sacrifice"

"Based on a book by Isidore Zolotarefsky, Love and Sacrifice is a prime example of shund—escapist melodrama born on the Yiddish stage. Shot over two days in a New York City loft on a miniscule budget, the film portrays a long-suffering middle-class matron who goes to prison for shooting the man who compromises her. Producer Joseph Seiden described it in his original advertising copy as follows: “You’ll see a tender yet mighty picture drama. Hot with a living breath of a story as old as the ages, new as tomorrow!” Love and Sacrifice was restored by The National Center for Jewish Film."
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From left to right, Aviva Weintraub (The Jewish Museum, NYJFF Director), Sharon Rivo (Executive Director, National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University), and Esta Salzmann
(Yiddish theater and film actress; one of the stars of the film).

Photo: Elliott Rivo

Photo: David Paul

Gabriela Böhm Discusses Her Documentary, "The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America"

"'The Longing' is a moving documentary portrait of South Americans who, after discovering that their Jewish ancestors converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition, undertake profound, personal journeys of faith. Dismissed by local Jewish authorities, these determined men and women choose to study via the Internet with an American Reform rabbi who ultimately arrives in Ecuador to complete the conversion."

I spoke with Gabriela Böhm, whose documentary “The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America,” has its World Premiere at the NYJFF.

Would you tell us more about what brought you to this project?

I was born in Argentina to parents who emigrated after the war from Eastern Europe. Then when my parents divorced, my mother took us to Israel, where I lived for ten years.

Later, as a film student at NYU, I heard an NPR show about crypto-Jews in New Mexico, which fascinated me. At the time I was still a student, and the issue’s richness and complexity put it a little out of my reach. But, years later I returned to that idea of crypto-Jews who believed they were the descendants of forced converts from the Inquisition. I wanted to find out why these people believed they were descendants, and what drove those who wanted to pursue Judaism.

What were some of the fundamental themes you wanted to explore?
The question of identity is really important to me: how people construct identity, what constitutes the pillars of one’s identity. And the people in my film lived in what I call a ‘dual identity process,’ as descendants of Jews who survived the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition and expulsion. Their relatives had to choose how to live, how to keep their traditions alive, while continuing to be Catholics on the outside. More than the real Catholics, they had to be very involved in the Church and the Catholic community to avoid suspicion, and on the inside, as forced converts, they lived out a secret identity.

Any written communication was risky: they could be tortured and killed for it; so Judaism lived on through the oral tradition. And traditions began to mutate as they embellished the existing ones, but some standards remained: not eating pork, lighting candles for Shabbat, not going to church during one’s menstrual period. It was unclear to the children why they observed these traditions but they passed them on just the same.

The few who care and begin to research their backgrounds, remark that they've noticed something in their fiber, if you will, that feels Jewish. This is not a scientific question, this is not an academic question, this is a question of feeling. And that is why it interests me so much: this question of what makes us who we are, what really forms our identity. What makes one a Jew?

Why did they identify these feelings with an essential Jewishness?
People who search for their identity are people who are looking for something concrete. All of us have this desire. The people in my film all spoke of returning home, not as a literal place but as a means of grounding, of a relationship to god they did not feel with Christianity. Part of this experience was identifying with Judaism. In any event, I think it’s a miracle for these people to be feeling a connection to Judaism so many centuries after their families were forced to convert.

“The Longing” maintains an expertly neutral tone throughout, but curiosity left me wondering where you stood…
It was very important for me to stay neutral: I didn't want to be some accusing hand because I feel we all make choices and need to take responsibility. I wanted to be there for their quest for acceptance, and to tell their story. Their hearts were set, and I felt for them.

You know, I don’t believe in answering questions so much as asking them. That makes me a Jew I guess. We really don’t like answering questions unless it’s with a question. This provides an environment with more discussion and investigation.

The prospective converts encounter tremendous resistance from the local Jewish councils…
Of course, I didn’t know that their story would take the path it did, that they would encounter such obstacles. As I filmed, I realized there was a strong reaction on my part, that I really was appalled by what they had to face. Even after completing the film, I am left with a lot of questions as to why things happened as they did. At the time I felt it had to do with the socio-economic difference between the two groups. Certainly they looked different: the prospective converts are mestizos, a mix between Indian and Spanish, so the mainly Ashkenazic council members couldn’t really identify with them as brothers. You know, Jews like to identify with one another as brothers, and here they couldn’t.
And one thing that struck me was how very Catholic the gestures and prayers of potential converts were.
Absolutely, this was interesting to me because they were affected by the Catholic environment at all levels, and they bring it with them even into their new Jewish lives. But, as the rabbi in the film says, if they were already Jews they would be like us, but since they are new to Judaism they bring with them a new relationship with god, a new love for god that we are not familiar with. And there is some iconography that gets blended into their behavior.

So, as much as they feel they are Jews, as much as they want to be, they are not recognized as Jews, even though have been become Jews. But will they ever be able to know how a Jew behaves if they are never allowed in the Jewish sanctuary? Only through participation could they learn? In this sense I sympathize with them. In Israel, they ask the same questions: are the Ethiopian Jews really Jews? I ask, how do we know?

How did you get to know the rabbi who helps the prospective converts?
I have amassed a lot of contacts as I’ve been researching this for a few years. The leading expert on Brazilian Jews put me into contact Rabbi Cukierkorn.

What are the lives of Jews like in Ecuador and Columbia?
For the cryto-Jews it is a very difficult road, even more so for those who converted. They have taken a stand, but they will not be part of the Jewish community. For what I’m told, they plan to form an association of crypto-Jews to worship together. This will be very difficult.

The local Jewish communities are very selective and exclusive. They are like a club. They can do whatever they like since they have their own guidelines. They mingle with those on the same social level, and marry within these ranks. Not so much in Argentina, but elsewhere in South America, it’s a ghetto-like experience.

Are they subject to anti-Semitic violence?
During the dictatorship in Argentina, they were. In fact, my young student cousins were among those murdered. Yet I don’t think there is active anti-Semitism in South America but I do feel the crypto-Jews will really suffer marginalization and that they will never find their place as things currently stand.

One last thing I wanted to say is that I have never seen a film where the actual process of conversion is shown. I’ve seen photographs from before and after the mikvah, but to be there inside the process, the rabbinical trial, I think this is an aspect of my film that might be interesting for many people.

"The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America" screens at Lincoln Center on Monday Jan. 22nd at 4PM and Tuesday Jan. 23rd at 1:30 & 6.

To find out more about Gabriela Böhm and her films, please visit www.bohmproductions.com.

Please see the NYJFF in The News section of this blog for more press about "The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America," including her interview with Robin Cembalest in Nextbook.