AICE Israeli Film Festival 2010

Dates: Melbourne: 17 - 22 August 2010, Sydney: 31 August to 5 September 2010
Venues: Palace Cinemas, Melbourne - Como, Brighton Bay. Sydney - Verona

Hot on the heels of MIFF comes the AICE Israeli Film Festival for those in Melbourne and Sydney. While a more limited program than MIFF, the standard of films this year is commendably high with an accent on the dramatic. Your reviewer checked out a sampling, indicative of the quality of the features being offered.

Spring 1941
A dramatic, disturbing yet moving account of a Jewish family escaping the Nazis during the occupation of Warsaw, Spring 1941 is directed passionately by Uri Barbash. The film commences with comfortably off doctor Artur Planck (Joseph Fiennes), his wife Clara (Neve McIntosh) a talented cellist and two young daughters leaving their comfortable home - domesticity shattered to escape the Germans already storming into the city. The palpable terror and dismay of their situation is strongly conveyed via a desperate flight through streets at night to leave town and find refuge in the country.

They are hidden in the attic of her farm by Emilia (Maria Pakulnis), their local grocer who lives alone, her husband probably killed in the war. While the brutal horror of the Nazi occupation surrounds them, Emilia seeks comfort with Artur in an uneasy ménage à trois, Clara is confined with their daughters in the attic, while her husband helps with farm labour and surreptitiously services Emilia; a fragile situation fraught with danger and thwarted desires. The story is told largely in flashback from 30 years later when Clara (now played by Clare Higgins), having achieved fame, returns to Poland and reflects back to her appalling experience.

An short review can’t do justice to this film with its classical structure, powerful ensemble performances, and innovative direction. Lyrical images mix with most disturbing, such as prisoners being dragged behind a truck. Music and sounds play an important role in creating the atmosphere of brooding doom. The Nazis behave even more brutally than usual. Encapsulated by concert scenes at either end, the story smoothly segues from past to present with a skill doing credit to Ingmar Bergman. The leads are British so this is an English language film, and one which deserves a commercial release.

A Matter of Size
Can you be fat and happy? Certainly, according to this quirky comedy on the unlikely theme of obesity. As those Jamaicans took to bob sled racing in Cool Runnings, here we have overweight guys who decide to become Sumo wrestlers in Israel. With whimsical humour it follows Herzl (Itzik Cohen), who is unable to lose weight in a strict diet club and finds himself tossed out, only to then work in a Japanese restaurant where he meets Kitano (Togo Igawa), a Sumo trainer.

Despite their initial reservations about ‘fatsos in diapers and girly haircuts’ Herzl with a couple of his buddies get the bug to be Sumo wrestlers where big is beautiful. They finally convince the autocratic Kitano to train them.

Herzl tries to keep his training a secret from new chubby girlfriend Zahara (Irit Kaplan) and his interfering mother; while one of his mates is gay, and another has a cheating wife. Great scenes include the guys forced to walk through the city in nothing but their mawashi, and their rigorous training in the forest. The film features tight direction by Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor with touching performances by Itzik Cohen, the delightful Irit Kaplan and the excellent Togo Igawa (The Hedgehog), helped along by the upbeat music track. You’ll love these characters and even learn something of the unusual sport.

Walls
Welcome to Grotsville. In the footsteps of Camorra comes this hard-hitting story of two women challenging terrible odds as they try and escape the revenge of the (possibly Russian) Mafia. From the opening shot of a woman’s scared eyes filling the screen and zooming out to a scene of such violence it takes a moment to recover, the film grips you with a fist of iron. It’s not all violent action though, there’s still much drama in play. The women are so brutally treated by the men in the story.

Illegal immigrant Galia (Olga Kurylenko), a sex worker in Tel Aviv enslaved by the mob, manages escape. She’s chased and viciously beaten into forced assassinations on the promise of a release, money and passport to return home to her young daughter in the Ukraine.

Cheated by the gangsters, she’s stuck in a crappy apartment next door to young married Jewish woman Elinor (Ninette Tayeb) suffering from a violent abusive husband. Friendship develops between the battered women and the desire to escape their miserable situation. This leads to a devastating climax as the Mafia seek retribution.

Olga Kurylenko, the lovely Russian best known for her role as the “Bond girl” in Quantum of Solace gets down and dirty in this gritty role even doing a brief nude scene, proving as she did in Centurion she’s one tough lady and no pushover in a brawl.

Kurylenko makes much of her dramatic role, equally supported by another beautiful woman in Ninette Tayeb, with Liron Levo providing a particularly unpleasant Mafia heavy. Director Danny Lerner lends a strong hand to the violent action scenes, with surprising sensitivity in the women’s relationship. Using striking images and astute editing Walls, like Camorra, is an impressive if unsettlingly graphic example of contemporary crime drama. Much of the dialogue is in English.

Ajami
This film depicts violent gang /family warfare as seen in a seething Israel. It’s told in five inter-related chapters set in Ajami, a poverty-stricken Christian and Muslim Arab neighbourhood of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa region. Nasri (Fouad Habash), a young Arab boy, relates the story. It commences with a drive-by shooting of Nasri’s innocent neighbour in retaliation for his uncle’s killing in self-defense a Bedouin extortionist from a powerful southern family. Nasri’s elder brother Omar (Shahir Kabaha), through a mediator, goes to a meeting where a local judge rules he should pay a large sum to save his whole family being wiped out by the revengeful Bedouins.

Another concern is that Omar, a Muslim, has been courting Christian girl Hadir (Ranin Karim) whose father strongly disapproves of the relationship. Malek (Ibrahim Frege), an illegal worker, has a terminally ill mother needing an urgent operation. Omar and he decide to sell a parcel of stolen drugs to raise money they both urgently require, leading them into a very dangerous situation. There’s considerably more to the plot, with a complex structure directed by Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli, using non-professional actors whose performances are totally convincing.

Giving insight into a way of life of which we may know little, the Ajami region appears a melting pot of multi-ethnic cultures and religions with a currency of violence. Filmed in TV documentary style, Ajami was nominated for this year’s Academy Awards (Best Foreign language Film).

Other highlights include the controversial Eyes Wide Open, a forbidden love story of homosexuality in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community; the documentary A Film Unfinished on Nazi propaganda falsely depicting conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto; and The Loners, a taut prison hostage saga based on a true occurrence.

John Bale