The Hartford Jewish Film Festival brings films from Israel and around the world

_{A scene from the recently restored Hungry Hearts.}

The Hartford Jewish Film Festival

Presented by the Mandell Jewish Community Center, runs from March 13–23. Schedule available at hjff.org

The 14th annual Hartford Jewish Film Festival opens on March 13 with the French comedy Hello Goodbye, starring Fanny Ardant and Gérard Depardieu as a Parisian couple reconnecting with their roots on a trip to Israel. It will kick off 10 days of films from around the world, including entries from Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, most of which will be either Connecticut or Hartford premieres.

The selection committee chose 30 short films and features from 90 entries. “We come from different vantage points,” says festival co-chair Ruthan Wein. “Some are Israelis, some have never been to Israel, some people are Orthodox, some are Reform — but we all want to create an experience for the Hartford Jewish community that is enriching, that holds pride for them, that teaches, that is fun, that makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you rejoice — it just captures every emotion that you can think of.”

Among the Israeli films is For My Father, an enjoyable throwback to old-fashioned plays like Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End, in which a would-be suicide bomber (Shredi Jabarin) gets to know his potential victims while stuck in a small Tel Aviv neighborhood over Shabbat. In an interesting attempt at balance, young Orthodox men are portrayed as almost as unyielding and bullying as the Palestinian terrorists.

In Eran Riklis’ striking parable Lemon Tree, a Palestinian widow (Hiam Abbass, of Riklis’ The Syrian Bride) goes to court to defend her lemon grove, which is deemed a security risk when the Israeli Defense Minister (Doron Tavory) moves next door. But the most unusual Israeli entry is Voices From El Sayed, a documentary about a Bedouin village in the Negev with the highest percentage of deaf people in the world and its own sign language. When Israeli doctors offer free cochlear implants to the children, one father takes them up on their offer, causing controversy in a community in which deafness is not seen as a handicap.

The Holocaust is represented by several films including the short-film program “Lessons from the Holocaust” and “Saviors in the Night,” a German-French dramatization of a memoir of one family’s survival during WWII sheltered by German farmers. The documentary No. 4 Street of Our Lady, about a Polish-Catholic woman who hid 16 Jews in her home, will be followed by a panel discussion featuring her granddaughters, who live in Wethersfield, as well as the granddaughter of one of the Jews she saved.

The festival is also a place to see movies already in Hollywood’s remake hopper. The Debt, about a retired Mossad agent (Gila Almagor) who is drawn back into the spy game to take out a Nazi doctor (a dynamite Edgar Selge) now living in a nursing home, offers both a bathroom-floor struggle as silly as the climactic tussle in The Boys From Brazil and gynecology examinations more squirm-inducing than the dental tortures in Marathon Man. The English-language remake, which stars Helen Mirren and which was slated for a spring release until the implosion of Miramax, will certainly lose something in translation. Queued for remake by the Weinstein Company’s Dimension Films is A Matter of Size, Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor’s warm comedy about a 340-pound dishwasher (Itzik Cohen) in a Japanese restaurant who discovers sumo wrestling, and soon encourages his weight-watching buddies to drop their diets and form a team. In this size-positive Full Monty, the most emotionally honest moments come from the group’s one woman (Irit Kaplan), whose role has Mo’Nique written all over it.

But my can’t-miss pick is the revelatory silent film Hungry Hearts, produced by Samuel Goldwyn in 1922 and recently restored by the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University. Filmed on location and based on short stories by Anzia Yezierska, an immigrant from Poland, chronicler of women’s lives on New York’s Lower East Side and lover of John Dewey, it brings a proto-feminist twist to the immigration saga, as a Russian matriarch (Rosa Rosanova) takes the reigns of her struggling family when her husband (E. Alyn Warren) proves to be a terrible businessman. The screening will be accompanied by an original score composed and performed live by students from the University of Hartford’s Hartt School.

Wein, the director of volunteer resources at Hebrew Health Care, will be bringing the festival to her workplace with the first Senior Screen, in which the music documentaries Close Harmony and From Shtetl to Swing will be shown free for residents and community seniors. Another new program, Family Flicks, will pair the animated short “Something From Nothing,” with a live performance of a children’s opera, composed by Jody Rockmaker, based on the same Yiddish folk tale.

Add to these a documentary about Jews in the early days of the NBA (First Basket) and a drama about a ballroom-dancing boy billed as the Israeli Billy Elliot and the festival has something for just about everyone. “It’s not just for Jewish people,” says Wein. “It touches the soul on so many levels.”

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