Festivals
Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally is the story of the last painting Egon Scheile painted of his lover and muse, Wally Neuzil, and what became of that painting after it was stolen by Nazi Freidrich Welz from gallery owner Lea Bondi Jaray’s apartment. Jaray was Jewish and her gallery had already been confiscated (or ‘Aryanized’ as they referred to it) by Welz who then proceed to raid her personal art collection. The film documents the 13-year battle for justice fought between Jaray’s heirs and eccentric Austrian art collector, Rudolf Leopold. The battle begins in New York when MoMA holds an exhibition...
Sometime around the start of the Second World War, the British government rounded up the country’s driest wits and funnymen, trucked them to an undisclosed location, and told them it was their national duty to relentlessly mock Adolf Hitler. Forget airplanes and munitions, Britain deployed its greatest weapon: taking the piss out of the big scary Nazis. Afterall, idiots and buffoons aren’t really a threat are they? And thus we have the delightfully titled 2007 documentary, Hitler: The Comedy Years, screening at the 20th annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival. The documentary examines the ongoing British and American fascination with Adolf...
My Australia, directed by Ami Drozd, is the story of ten-year-old Tadek (Jakub Wróblewski) and his older brother Andrzej (Lukasz Sikora). Living in Poland, the two boys are part of a neo-Nazi gang and wind up being arrested after starting a fight at a Jewish school. Their mother gets them released from the police station and reveals to Andrzej a secret she has kept from them, that they’re actually Jewish. Realizing that she needs to get her sons away from this gang, she tells them that they’re going to move to Australia. It’s only after they board a boat that...
After finding his grandmother’s memoir, director Daniel Edelstyn decided to explore his background in the Ukraine. His grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich, lived a rich and interesting life, but when Daniel Edelstyn reaches the Ukraine, he discovers that their family owned a vodka distillery, which drastically changes the direction of his documentary, How To Re-Establish A Vodka Empire. Screening at the 2012 Toronto Jewish Film Festival, the documentary follows Daniel and his partner Hilary Powell as they attempt to restore his family’s vodka distillery, become vodka importers and start a family of their own. What starts out as a simple journey for...
In the United States, 49 million people live with “food insecurity”, which is a fancy, non-threatening term for the very real-life circumstance of not knowing where their next meal will come from. To break that staggering number down even further, that’s one in four of all children currently living the US. Now, statistics are easy – easy to remember, easy to use and even easier to shrug off. The documentary Finding North seeks to make it impossible to shrug off statistics about food insecurity by putting a human face on the issue. The film puts its focus on two stories....
Currently screening at the 2012 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, My Name Is Faith is the heartbreaking and inspiring story of Faith, a 12-year-old girl suffering from Attachment Disorder. This disorder occurs when an infant does not bond properly with their mother. This can result in some frightening behaviour from the children. Their ability to trust another person is severely affected, and they tend to lash out with violence in order to force people away from them. Just before the world premiere screening at Hot Docs, I had the opportunity to speak with Faith’s mother (and the film’s director)...
The 20th annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival begins on a high note with the film A Bottle In The Gaza Sea, the story of two teenagers on different sides of a war they don’t fully understand. Directed by Thierry Binisti, the film opens just after a terrorist attack on a cafe in Jerusalem. Living very close to the cafe is Tal (Agathe Bonitzer), a young girl trying to understand how this could happen. She decides to place a message in a bottle and asks her brother to throw it into the sea by Gaza while he is on patrol. The message is...
The Imposter is one of those films that stretches the bounds of plausibility so much that it can only work as a documentary. If the story was fictionalized, nobody would buy the premise, because it really seems like there’s no possible way any of that stuff could really have happened. I mean, really. In 1994, a 13-year-old boy named Nicholas Barclay disappears in San Antonio, Texas. After an evening out playing basketball with friends, he simply never returns home. Nicholas has run away before, but this time, it’s different. After enduring the hell of not knowing what happened to their son...
In his very personal film, Legend of a Warrior, director Corey Lee uses the process of making a documentary about his father as a means to achieving a closer relationship with him. It mostly works. Lee is estranged from his dad, Frank Lee, a martial artist who runs a training gym in Edmonton. Sifu Frank, as he is known by his students (sifu is the Cantonese word for master / teacher / father) spent much of Corey’s childhood in Asia, training his most talented fighters, giving them the attention that Corey wished he had received. Frank wasn’t just some martial arts guy...
In Herman’s House, director Angad Singh Bhalla explores the strange relationship between imprisoned Black Panther Herman Wallace and artist Jackie Sumell. Sumell was profoundly moved by an interaction with Robert King, who along with Wallace and a third prisoner, Albert Woodfox, made up the Angola 3 — men who were all sent to solitary confinement in 1972 for killing a prison guard. King was released in 2001 after a lengthy appeals process, but the other two men are still there. After hearing about Wallace’s case (he’s now spent nearly the past 40 years in a six-by-nine foot prison cell), Sumell decides...
This year marks the first time that the Bootleg Film Festival, founded in Scotland, will be held in North America. Running from May 10 to 12, this festival will feature an amazing lineup of officially selected national and international short and feature length films from the underground. It will conclude with a special evening of programming that includes comedy, music and an awards ceremony. With a “pay what you can” entrance fee, filmgoers will have the opportunity to view as many films as they like throughout the three days....
