Mobile Jewish Film Festival celebrates 25 years, Baton Rouge lineup announced
In Mobile and Baton Rouge, Jewish Film Festival season gets underway in mid-January, and for Mobile, this is the festival’s 25th anniversary.
Barry Silverman, co-chair of the Mobile Jewish Film Festival, said “This is perhaps the most diverse group of films we’ve ever presented.”
The festival begins on Jan. 12 at Springhill Avenue Temple with the 2 p.m. screening of “Stay With Us,” the part-autobiographical, part-fictional story of Gad Elmaleh, one of France’s most loved comedians, who decides to convert to Catholicism. Returning to France from the U.S., he hides the conversion from his family, but his parents find out and try to bring him back into the fold, while he says his new faith doesn’t negate his identity or love for them. The film about spiritual striving has been screened at numerous Jewish film festivals.
Following the screening, author Roy Hoffman will lead a discussion.
On Jan. 16 at 2 p.m., the Mobile Museum of Art will screen “Vishniac,” a documentary about photographer Roman Vishniac. He is best known for a series of images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the mid-1930s, the last visual records of an entire world, as a decade later they would all be gone.
He escaped Europe in 1940, returning after the war to photograph Berlin in ruins, and children in displaced persons camps. He then shifted entirely to science, and his Living Biology series was a staple of U.S. classrooms in the 1960s and 1970s.
The screening is free, reservations are necessary.
The festival moves to Jewish humor for the annual Reita Franco Memorial Film on Jan. 19 at 7 p.m. at Ahavas Chesed. “The Catskills” is a tribute to the Borscht Belt, where stand-up comedians honed their craft at family-run resorts that were a magnet for Jewish families looking to get out of the city. The film features interviews, personal anecdotes, home videos, promotional images, postcards and menus for a cinematic time capsule. A free dinner featuring Borscht Belt old-world dishes precedes the film at 6 p.m., tickets are limited.
“The Survivor” is a Holocaust-related film with a local tie. Directed by Academy Award winner Barry Levinson, the film is based on the true story of Harry Haft who was sent to Auschwitz but survived, performing in bare-knuckle boxing matches for the amusement of the Nazis. But his main motivation for survival is to be reunited with the woman he loves, and he continues to box after liberation as a means to that quest.
As his boxing career developed in the U.S., he entered the orbit of numerous boxing legends, including a match against future undefeated heavyweight champion of the world Rocky Marciano.
His son, Alan Haft, is author of “Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano” and recently moved to Fairhope. He will speak after the film’s two screenings, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Fairhope campus of the University of South Alabama, and Jan. 26 at 2 p.m. at Ahavas Chesed. A reception will follow.
The final three movies will be at the University of South Alabama’s Laidlaw Performing Arts Center. On Jan. 28 at 7 p.m., “Ain’t No Back to A Merry-Go-Round” tells the story of the efforts to integrate a whites-only amusement park in suburban Washington in 1960. Howard University students join with nearby, mostly Jewish, neighbors in the protest as they face sweltering heat and violent counter protestors from the American Nazi Party.
Donald Shaffer, director of African-American studies at Mississippi State University, will lead a discussion after the screening.
On Jan. 29 at 7 p.m., one of the most acclaimed films of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival will be screened. “The Goldman Case” is a French courtroom drama that delves into the 1976 retrial of radical Pierre Goldman, who is accused of two murders. The “trial of the century” divided the country and highlighted political, ideological and racial tensions in the country.
Arieh Worthalter won a Cesar Award, the French equivalent of the Oscars, for his portrayal of Goldman. David Meola will introduce the film.
On Jan. 30 at 7 p.m., the final film of the festival, “Running on Sand,” was nominated for best film at the Israeli Academy Awards. It tells the story of a young Eritrean refugee about to be deported from Israel, when he is mistaken for a soccer star from Nigeria that was headed to the Maccabi Netanya club. Despite his lack of talent, he is able to help heal the divisions of his struggling team, and his survival depends on their success.
A closing-night reception will follow the screening.
In addition to the regular festival, the Julien Marx Student Holocaust Film Series will take place in area schools, teaching the lessons of the Holocaust.
Individual film tickets are $9 each, or $60 for the entire Festival. Most films can also be viewed virtually.
Baton Rouge Festival
The Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival returns to the Manship Theatre on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. with “Yaniv!” The comedy is about a Bronx high school teacher who needs to raise $10,000 for his school’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors.” He teams with a colleague, Jonah, who us a former gambling addict, to play the Israeli card game Yaniv, “the blackjack of the Jewish people,” at an underground Hasidic club, based on a suggestion from his grandfather.
“The Blonde Boy from the Casbah” will be on Jan. 16 at 7 p.m. Filmmaker Antoine Lisner returns to his birthplace, Algiers, with his young son to present his new film, an account of his childhood in Algeria during the country’s civil war in the mid-1900s. While there, he visits his childhood haunts, remembers how he discovered his passion for the cinema, and how his family was forced to leave everything behind with the civil war and antisemitism.
“Kidnapped” on Jan. 18 at 7:30 p.m. is the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy in 1858 Bologna who is secretly baptized by his nanny and then forcibly taken from his family by the papal authorities to be raised as a Catholic. His parents’ struggle to reclaim him becomes a significant political conflict involving the papacy and the forces of democracy in Italy.
With world condemnation raining down, Pope Pius IX personally guides the boy’s Catholic education and has him baptized a second time, and guided him to the priesthood.
The film explores themes of religious identity, family loyalty and political turmoil during a turbulent period in Italian history.
The festival concludes on Jan. 19 at 3 p.m. with the classic 1947 film “Gentleman’s Agreement,” where Gregory Peck stars as a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to investigate antisemitism in New York. The groundbreaking film won three Academy Awards.
Tickets are $14.50. There is a free VIP Movie Club that offers discounts on tickets, snacks and drinks.
