Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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From the title onward, it is evident that director Paul Mazursky's "Enemies, A Love Story" is anything but your typical run of the mill love story. Ron Silver is magnificent as the tragic Herman Broder, a man who just so happens to wind up being married to three women at once. As one would expect, he isn't a very happy person. But how did we get to this, exactly? When we are first introduced to him, we see he is a man living two lives. In one life, he lives in Brooklyn and is married to the youn...
With the holiday season behind us, cool weather upon us, and our wax-covered Chanukiahs needing a polish before being put away until next year, there are few better films to snuggle up to than the Steven Spielberg produced, Don Bluth directed, “An American Tail.” Originally conceived as a television special, Spielberg felt that the work had the potential to expand into a feature. After having finished “The Secret of Nimh,” Spielberg approached Bluth and asked him to “make me something pretty, like you did in Nimh … make it beautiful....
Over seven years ago, Martin Scorsese unveiled his series “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” at the Lincoln Center, highlighting works mostly made between the 1950s and the 1970s. During this time, Poland produced such masterpieces as Andrzej Wajda’s “Ashes and Diamonds,” Wojciech Has’ “The Hourglass Sanatorium” (previously covered in this series), Janusz Morgenstern’s “To Kill this Love,” among so many others. Many of these films reflected on life in post-World War II as well as the struggle to cope with the horrors that took place. Director...
There have been several films surrounding the historical moment when Israel was established, most taking a nationalist stance, such as “Exodus” starring Paul Newman. As joyful of a moment as this was for many, even for the characters in the film we are about to look at, there was an underlying melancholy that crept its way into their subconscious. As bombs started to fall and wars were triggered, many realized that this was not the romantic dream that so many Jews had. For Israeli born actress Natalie Portman’s directorial debut, she decid...
'Sanatorium pod klepsydra' ('The Hourglass Sanatorium'), directed by Wojciech Has and starring Jan Nowicki and Tadeusz Kondra, is one of the most imaginative films to come out of the 1970s. It is both an adaptation and an "anti" adaptation of the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz' short story collections, 'The Street of Crocodiles (1934)' and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937)'. Although most of the dialogue is ripped directly from the page, it is arranged in a way that is both...
The year 2020 was filled with a lot of heartbreak in the film community and it ended delivering one final blow. On Dec. 31, one of the most important independent filmmakers of the last 50 years lost her battle with dementia. Joan Micklin Silver passed away at the age of 85, leaving behind quite the legacy. With 18 films under her belt, her most notable film, "Hester Street," released in 1975 and starring Carol Kane and Steven Keats, has stood the test of time and is still considered one of the...
In an interview with David Poland for "DP/30: The Oral History of Hollywood," director Ari Folman expressed that the reactions he received in Israel toward his 2008 adult animated film, "Waltz with Bashir," were the most shocking out of every country he visited. He expected to be accused of being anti-Zionist and his film being written off as just a pile of liberal propaganda. Little did he expect the overwhelming praise from audiences and critics alike. And no one could blame him for his...
It was just 36 years before the Munich Olympics in 1972 when Hitler used the event as a means to push Nazi propaganda onto the world. It was now Germany's moment to show the world how much they changed, they even called it "The Olympics of Peace & Joy." They needed to show as little military as possible in order to showcase how peaceful they had become, and this meant a significant lack of security. It had not been 27 years since the horrific events of the Holocaust, which made the Israeli...
Jewish History in Film is a new series exploring how our culture and history is represented in films from all over the globe. Israeli cinema is such an overlooked contribution to the film world, birthing such great movie makers as Ephraim Kishon, Ari Folman, Amos Gitai, Dror Shaul, and many more. This series will focus on Israeli cinema and introduce our readers to films they may not have heard of in the past. "Sallah Shabati," released in 1964 and directed by Ephraim Kishon, was not only the fi...
