Film — as if anyone could doubt it — is increasingly important in telling the Jewish story, whether in harrowing documentaries or cleverly fictionalised versions of true-life issues.
Nowhere demonstrates the breadth of film’s reach more than this year’s UK Jewish Film Festival (UKJFF). It hit the headlines this week after its full programme was announced and revealed that the festival — which begins on November 7 — will be the first to give a UK public screening to An Officer and a Spy, based on Robert Harris’s best-selling novel about the Dreyfus Affair.
Showing in a special pre-festival screening on 3 November with a Q&A featuring Harris, the 2019 film has never been shown in Britain or America because of concerns about the director, Roman Polanski, now 91. Polanski, a Holocaust survivor, was accused of sex crimes dating back to 1977 which caused him to flee the US.
He and Robert Harris co-wrote the screen play for An Officer and a Spy, which stars Oscar winner Jean Dujardin and scooped up awards at European film festivals, including the grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, where Polanski won the best director award.
An Officer and a Spy
Now the UKJFF chief executive, Michael Etherton, says it was important “to give audiences the choice of whether they want to watch a film by Roman Polanski”. He told The Times that the subject matter of the film, which centres on the French military officer Alfred Dreyfus who was wrongfully convicted of being a German spy largely due to antisemitism, was “highly relevant”.
“We were very keen to show that the Dreyfus affair was a key historical social event in France at the time and it pointed the way really to what was to happen many years later in the Holocaust,” he said.
“And as a festival increasingly faced with silence, which often amounts to censorship of British Jewish culture, we don’t ourselves want to be censoring art”.
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain
This year’s UKJFF, the 28th, will screen films in London and around the UK. And there are three gala nights — the opening night’s A Real Pain, The Performance, to be shown on the closing night, and a centrepiece gala, Once Upon a Time in Algeria.
A Real Pain is said to be anything but — much more of a real gift, a touching, funny, sad drama and family saga combined, starring Jesse Eisenberg on a semi-autobiographical road trip with his meshuggene cousin, played by Kieran Culkin (yes, one of those Culkin brother actors), to see the home in Poland where their grandmother grew up. The film is sponsored by the Jerusalem Foundation, in tribute to its late president Shai Doron, who died suddenly in London this July, aged 64.
Once Upon A Time in Algeria
The centrepiece gala film is showing in Southend on November 11 and in London on November 14. Once Upon a Time in Algeria is described as a love letter to the Algerian youth of director Alexander Arcady, a drama in which the simmering tensions of a Jewish family play out against the rumbling of Algerian nationalist uprising against the French authorities.
Picked to close the festival on November 17 is The Performance, based on a short story by the acclaimed American playwright Arthur Miller. It’s an improbable but beguiling tale of a troop of US tap-dancers touring 1937 Europe, who somehow end up in Nazi Berlin, to perform to an audience which includes Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately for the dancers, Hitler loves their act and wants them to stay in Germany; even more unfortunately, the lead dancer is Jewish. Jeremy Piven stars. I can’t wait.
A Good Jewish Boy
Screening on November 16 is the promising-sounding A Good Jewish Boy, a comedy set in working-class Paris with a generational clash as Jews gradually move out of the neighbourhood due to encroaching antisemitism. This film is part of the European segment of the festival, along with All About the Levkoviches, receiving its UK premiere on November 10, and Auction, showing on November 9. The Levkoviches is a Hungarian-Israeli film which explores a series of family relationships and ties and unties between Budapest and Israel.
Auction, based on a true-life story, is set in the world of high art and equally high finance. There is detective work involved as to whether a painting is a fake or in fact a looted piece of art taken by the Nazis.
Robert Carlyle and Jeremy Piven in The Performance
If the European segment is appetising, then the Israeli film programme is even more mouthwatering, with 12 different films to tempt the viewer, from documentaries such as Beyond October 7 or the fascinating Golda’s War Diaries, to the thriller Highway 65, in which a stroppy woman detective from Tel Aviv attempts to solve a missing person mystery in a provincial northern Israeli town.
There are short films, feature films, dramas and comedies — truly, something for everyone. I want to see everything, and if that means sitting in the dark for the first two weeks of November — I am there.
The UK Jewish Film Festival runs throughout November is cinemas across the UK. There is also a small selection of feature and short films available online. ukjewishfilm.org
