Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, the 28th annual New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) will take place January 9 to 22, 2019. Featuring new work as well as restored classics, the festival’s 2019 lineup includes 32 wide-ranging and exciting features and shorts from the iconic to the iconoclastic. Screenings are held at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, NYC.
The NYJFF opens on Wednesday, January 9, with the New York premiere of Eric Barbier’s epic drama Promise at Dawn, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Pierre Niney. This riveting memoir chronicles the colorful life of infamous French author Romain Gary, from his childhood conning Polish high society with his mother to his years as a pilot in the Free French Air Forces.
The Closing Night film is the New York premiere of A Fortunate Man, directed by Academy Award–winner Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror). In it, a gifted but self-destructive young man leaves his suffocating Lutheran upbringing for metropolitan 1880s Copenhagen, where he’s welcomed into a wealthy Jewish family and strives to realize his grand ambitions.
The Centerpiece selection represents the first time an Israeli television series has been presented at the NYJFF with the three-and-a-half-hour miniseries Autonomies, to be presented all at once, binge-style, with a 20-minute intermission. Directed by Yehonatan Indursky, the dystopian drama is set in an alternate reality of present-day Israel, a nation divided by a wall into the secular “State of Israel,” with Tel Aviv as its capital, and the “Haredi Autonomy” in Jerusalem, run by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group. A globally relevant tale of identity, religion, politics, personal freedom, and love, this gripping story follows a custody battle that upends the fragile peace of the country, pushing it to the brink of civil war. Indursky will present a master class in conjunction with the screening of Autonomies.
New to the NYJFF this year is an annual initiative that highlights a film made by a woman filmmaker that deserves broader American recognition. Maria Victoria Menis’s Camera Obscura (2008) tells the story of an immigrant woman whose encounter with an itinerant photographer reveals a sense of self she never knew. The film was shot in the lush forests and lagoons of Buenos Aires province in a mélange of visual styles, including elements of hand-drawn animation, World War I archival footage, and early surrealist black-and-white films.
Filmmaker Amos Gitai returns to the 2019 NYJFF with the U.S. premiere of his thought-provoking new drama, A Tramway in Jerusalem. Gitai uses the tramway that runs through Jerusalem to connect a series of short vignettes, forming a mosaic of Jewish and Arab stories embodying life in the city.
The NYJFF will also present the U.S. premiere of Fig Tree by first-time director Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian. Set in Addis Ababa during the Ethiopian Civil War, the film concerns a young woman who plans to flee to Israel with her brother to reunite with their mother. But she is unwilling to leave her Christian boyfriend behind and hatches a scheme to save him from being drafted.
Look at Me[/caption]
The Toronto International Film Festival will spotlight 48 films from international filmmakers in this year’s 2018 Contemporary World Cinema roster with a strong presence from Latin America and Eastern Europe — telling stories of identity, depicting family dynamics, and making bold political statements.
Several of the the impressive 27 World Premieres in the program are from TIFF veterans, including Belmonte from Uruguay’s Federico Veiroj, The Other Story from Israel’s Avi Nesher, Stupid Young Heart from Finnish Academy Award nominee Selma Vilhunen, Quién te Cantará from Spain’s Carlos Vermut, and Look at Me from Tunisia’s Nejib Belkadhi.
The program also highlights film selections that have already captivated audiences worldwide this year, including “I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians” by Radu Jude, Birds of Passage by directing duo Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, and Border by Ali Abbasi.
Olmo Omerzu, Jiří Konečný, Ada Solomon, Radu Jude (Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary)[/caption]
“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” from Romanian film director Radu Jude won the Crystal Globe for Best Feature Film at the 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. In the film Radu Jude takes up a massacre perpetrated by the Romanian Administration through the Romanian Army on the Eastern Front in 1941, an actual event that a young activist artist decides to stage. “As we are in the Czech Republic and my film was made with the Czech co-production, I would like to thank all the Czech people involved, primarily Jiří Konečný”, said Radu Jude.
Barry Levinson received the Právo Audience Award for his thirty-year old movie Rain Man. Levinson also received the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinematography at the Closing Ceremony. “This is really a wonderful festival and an incredible experience for us. And also an extraordinary honour for a boy from Baltimore to be now granted an award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema here in the Czech Republic. Film is an artistic form that interconnects the whole world. While differing feelings drive us apart, we should bear in mind that we are in fact all quite similar,” the director expressed his gratitude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv4q3sWs8wE
The 54th Karlovy Vary IFF will be held from June 28th to July 6th, 2019.
I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians[/caption]
Ten world and two international premieres will compete at this year’s 53rd Karlovy Vary IFF including the latest by leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude “I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians”, an original exploration of the subject of nationality and a nation coming to terms with the traumatic moments of its own past. Respected Argentinian director Ana Katz presents a mixture of subtle melancholy with light humor in her family drama Sueño Florianópolis, and we find a no less complex look at the question of male-female relationships in The Fireflies Are Gone, the story of a rebellious yet charismatic teenager directed by Canadian filmmaker Sébastien Pilote.
A harrowing performance by actor Caleb Landry Jones dominates Peter Brunner’s dark Austro-American drama To the Night. Two other filmmakers previously recognized at KVIFF present equally original though noticeably more poetic new films: the Russian director of the popular Zoology, Ivan Tverdovsky, presents Jumpman, while Israeli director Joseph Madmony is presenting his third premiere at KVIFF, the subtly moving drama Redemption, co-directed by cinematographer Boaz Y. Yakov.
Domestic cinema will be represented by Olmo Omerzu’s road movie about the force of boyhood friendship Winter Flies and by debut filmmaker Adam Sedlák’s claustrophobic minimalist study of the slow decline of body and mind, Domestique. Other debuts are from the Dominican Republic and Spain (Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada’s nuanced story of an adolescent girl, Miriam Lies), Poland (Paweł Maślona’s dark comedy Panic Attack) and Turkey (Ömür Atay’s moving drama Brothers). The selection, which spans a wide range of styles and genres, is rounded out by talented Slovenian director Sonja Prosenc’s poetic tale of female coming-of-age History of Love.