You saw the Oscars? Well, the bit when Jimmy Kimmel led tourists through the theater to gawk at the celebrities like they were rare objects, showed what a separate world that is.
One of the best things about a film festival is that separation between audience, subject and filmmaker shrinks – in Q&As and receptions, in watching films together, in talking and noshing.
This year’s Carmel Jewish Film Festival gives each film its own day, stretching out eight full-length features across four venues from March 4 to 19.
It starts with On the Map (7:30pm March 4, Congregation Beth Israel) by Dani Menkin, who will come for a Q&A. It’s a documentary that looks back on the improbable Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team challenging the four-time defending champions in the 1977 European Basketball World Cup. Politics colors the backdrop of this underdog sports story, like the 1976 Tel Aviv plane hijacking.
The 2015 doc Rock in the Red Zone (3pm March 5, Golden Bough Playhouse) by Laura Bialis is about Jewish musicians – mainly of Moroccan, Kurdish and Persian descent – who make fusion music in the Israeli town of Sderot to cope with rocket fire from Gaza.
The New York Times notes, “Long before the director inserts scenes from her own wedding video into Rock in the Red Zone, it’s apparent that she’s grown quite close to her subject.”
Rosenwald (7pm March 18, Middlebury Institute of International Studies) by Aviva Kempner retells the story of Julius Rosenwald, co-owner of Sears, Roebuck & Company. He was also a civil rights champion inspired by the Hebrew notion of tzedakah, or justice and charity.
“Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington combined with this plan for building black schools,” civil rights attorney Julian Bond says on camera. “It’s a wonder they were able to achieve it.”
They founded 5,000 black schools in America; Congressman John Lewis and poet Maya Angelou attended one.
Dumisani Washington, a Christian Zionist with the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, will speak. Festival organizer Susan Greenbaum admits there is some dissent there.
“Because of the BDS [boycott, divest, sanctions] movement and Palestinians, there have been black organizations… [who’ve] not been really supportive of Israel,” she says.
That debate of ideas is different from a spectacle like the Oscars. It’s rare.
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