By Vivienne Porzsolt
As in previous festivals, the latest Jewish film festival in Sydney covered the usual preoccupations of Jewish film with identity, the Holocaust, Israel and the pains of adolescence. With a couple of exceptions, it lacked the strong political dramas and documentaries of previous years.
I avoided Pour Sacha, billed as "a romantic drama set on the Golan Heights". I should have done the same with Tel Aviv Stories, which centred on three young women in Tel Aviv without any consciousness of the sexual politics of their lives.
Leon the Pig-farmer looked promising, but the execution of a wonderfully comic idea failed to fulfil its promise.
Moi Ivan, Toi Abraham, with most of the dialogue in Yiddish, successfully portrayed the texture of shtetl life confronting the virulent anti-Semitism in the backwaters of pre-war Poland, but in a slow, schmaltzy sort of way characteristic of the films of the former Soviet Union.
Just beyond that forest was an interesting portrayal of the nuances of Jewish-Polish relations during the Holocaust. However, the acting and production were disappointingly wooden.
Fausto, whose director asserts that art should help us bear life, not escape it, is a delightful tale set in Paris' Jewish quarter during the mid-1960s, but ultimately inconsequential.
His Wife's Lover is a jewel of a film, continuing the tradition of the Jewish Film Festival of showing one classic of Yiddish cinema. Delightful romantic nonsense, it is nevertheless firmly anchored in a progressive, anti-capitalist world view which used to be taken for granted by a significant proportion of Jews.
L'Oeil de Vichy is a compilation of newsreels produced by the Vichy regime in wartime France. A fascinating insight into the nature of the regime, it showed how Petain and his henchmen were full partners with the Axis powers. This film disappointed because the accumulation of excerpts was just that. Chosen for its chronological coverage of the period, it became repetitive as successive excerpts failed to expose anything new.
From Mexico came a wonderfully sensitive film about two young Jewish women growing up in the 1960s. Novia Que te Vea portrays the contrasting and conflicting milieus of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Catholic Mexico. The texture of the three worlds is superbly realised.
The highlight for me was undoubtedly Fires in the Mirror. This film about the crisis in community conflict centred on the deaths of a black child and a rabbinical student in Crown Heights, New York, in 1991. It is an adaptation of Anna Devere Smith's one-woman show, taken verbatim from interviews with participants and observers.
It is an acting tour de force as Smith successively portrays more than two dozen different personalities. Her political and ethical balance is exquisite as she negotiates the tensions between the black and Jewish communities. Clearly exposing where appropriate the racism of members of both groups, and with compassion for both, she nevertheless confronts the reality of the deprivation of the black community and the relative prosperity and insularity of the Lubavitcher Jews.