The 19th annual Jewish Community Center’s Ames Amzalak
Rochester Jewish Film Festival (RJFF) kicks off this Sunday, celebrating all
aspects of Jewish culture with an array of contemporary films from around the
world. The eight-day festival will run from Sunday, July 7 through Monday, July
14 showcasing a collection of 26 films that includes entries from 18 countries,
including 13 feature-length narratives, 12 feature-length documentaries, and
one special event screening of the first two episodes of popular new Israeli
television series “The Conductor.”
The RJFF
will be screening films at The Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum (900
East Avenue) and the JCC Hart Theatre (1200 Edgewood Avenue in Brighton).
Passes and tickets can be purchased in person at the JCC, by phone at 461-2000,
or online at rjff.org.
As the
festival gets started, CITY takes a look at a few highlights from this year’s
lineup.
This year’s Opening Night film is the inspiring documentary “93Queen,” which chronicles the efforts of Rachel “Ruchie”
Freier to create Ezras Nashim, the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps
in New York City. Laws of the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community strictly
prohibit contact between unmarried men and women, and even though exceptions
exist for life-threatening emergencies, some women remained reluctant to call
the mostly male local ambulance service. As Freier fights to gain support while
sticking to her own deeply-held religious beliefs, Paula Eiselt’s fascinating
film shows how women of the Hasidic community find ways to make progress
entirely on their own terms. (Sunday,
July 7, 7 p.m. at the Dryden Theatre)
“Fig Tree” is a coming-of-age story centered on Mina (the
wonderful Betalehem Asmamawe), a 16-year-old girl living with her brother and
grandmother in 1989 Addis Ababa. The family is Jewish, and is desperately
making plans to escape the Ethiopian Civil War by fleeing to Israel, where
Mina’s mother is already waiting for them. But Mina refuses to leave behind
Eli, her Christian boyfriend who’s taken to living in the woods as a means to
evade being drafted into the army. A loosely autobiographical story from
Ethiopian-Israeli writer-director Aรคlรคm-Wรคrqe Davidian, “Fig Tree” is a
heartbreaking drama about the struggle to hold onto innocence in the face of
upheaval and brutal conflict. (Monday,
July 8, 9 p.m. at the Dryden Theatre)
The lively
documentary “The Mamboniks” takes its title from
the name for dance enthusiasts who are just crazy about the mambo. Directed by
Lex Gillespie, the film traces the origins of the dance as it traveled from
Havana, Cuba to America in the early 50’s. As it made its way to the clubs of
New York City, it captured the hearts of Jewish immigrants who took to the
hip-shaking Latin rhythms mixed with the snazzy moves of American swing. Now
retired, many of them are still mamboing to their heart’s content on the dance
floors of Florida. Filled with the toe-tapping Afro-Cuban sounds of Tito Puente
and Celia Cruz, “The Mamboniks” is an exuberant ode to living life at full
volume. (Thursday, July 11, 11 a.m. at the JCC Hart Theater)
If you’re
already going through Jazz Fest withdrawal, the RJFF has got you covered with “It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story,” a documentary
about legendary jazz label Blue Note Records and its German founders Alfred
Lion and Francis Wolff. Chronicling the creation of the label, the film shows
how fleeing Hitler and the Nazis in late 1930s made the pair uniquely
sympathetic to the discrimination faced by black artists in America. Treating
these musicians with a respect and dignity they rarely found elsewhere had
artists flocking to work with them, eventually helping the label to produce
records from an incredible roster of greats, including Miles Davis, Herbie
Hancock, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Quincy Jones among many, many
others. (Thursday, July 11, 6 p.m. at the Dryden Theatre)
Finding
comedy in any aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tricky
proposition, but writer-director Sameh Zoabi’s irreverent farce “Tel Aviv on Fire” manages shockingly well. The film
follows Salaam, a Palestinian living in Jerusalem who — thanks to his
showrunner uncle — lands a gig writing for the eponymous popular soap opera,
set in 1967 a few months before the start of the Six-Day War. Making his daily
trip through Israeli checkpoints to get work in Ramallah, Salaam crosses paths
with an Israeli commander whose wife happens to be a big fan of the show.
Soon Salaam’s
getting suggestions for plotlines and dialogue changes from the commander to
keep his wife happy. But when those changes go over surprisingly well, Salaam’s
career takes on heat and he finds himself torn between serving two very
different objectives. Prodding at the absurdity of the situation in Israel,
Zoabi allows his characters to discover their shared humanity, even if the
common ground comes from something as simple as shared love of cheesy
television. (Thursday, July 11, 8:45 p.m. at the Dryden
Theatre)
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2019.
