JEWISH FILM FEST

The Maine Jewish Film Festival runs from March 29 through April 5 at the Movies on Exchange Street, the Center for Cultural Exchange, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Center for Maine History. Visit www.mjff.org or call 879-5776 for schedule and ticket information.

With a budget of $750, a few TV screens, and the support of the 325-family synagogue, the response was better than the organizers hoped. They repeated their success a year later.

The next year members of the film committee at Bet Ha’am asked congregation member David Connerty-Marin to lead their efforts. The committee applied for and received two grants from Jewish family foundations in New York and suddenly had $8000 to organize the event and pull in more films. They named it the Maine Jewish Film Festival, held six screenings, and sold out – 900 people attended.

Skip to 1999: the film committee split from the synagogue and became its own entity – the budget for the MJFF was becoming too large compared with the other community programs at Bet Ha’am – and the attendance continued to grow. Last year about 1700 people attended four days of Jewish film in Portland, and this year over 2000 are expected as the MJFF expands to four theaters and a week’s worth of screenings.

“We are the smallest city that I know of that has a full-fledged film festival,” noted Connerty-Marin.

True, it’s not exactly Sundance, where over 20,000 fans and would-be filmmakers descend on Park City, Utah every year, or Cannes, which will turn 53 this May and attract over 4,000 journalists and film professionals from 80 different countries. It’s not even on par with lesser-known film festivals in Toronto, Singapore, or even Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso — in Africa, if your geography fails you — which has been going strong for over 30 years. Still, Connerty-Marin has a point.

It’s unlikely that the Maine Jewish Film Festival will ever match the audiences of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The oldest Jewish film festival in the country, SFJFF takes place in three separate cities (Berkeley, San Francisco, and Palo Alto) over 18 days and has drawn well over 30,000 people in each of the last several years. But with a full week of screenings and 25 films, the Maine Jewish Film Festival, in only its fourth year, is gaining on the Boston Film Festival and Boston Jewish Film Festival which, in their 17th and 13th years, respectively, both take place over 10 days and show around 50 films.

This year the budget for the MJFF has grown to $50,000: a combination of grants, ticket sales, local business sponsorships, and individual contributions. The planning and film selection takes place year round, and, as Executive Director, Connerty-Marin is being paid for his efforts for the first time. Along with Nanette and Larry Chern, who have been there since the beginning, Connerty-Marin and a host of volunteers plan the festival and select the movies by reading Jewish media and tracking the selections of other Jewish and non-Jewish film festivals.

“It can be hard to get the movies we want,” explained Connerty-Marin, “often they don’t have a distributor yet, but sometimes we’re able to get them [while the better-known festivals are not] because we’re in a small city.”

Of this years’ group of films, Connerty-Marin said, “It’s not quite as cutting-edge as it was last year. But it is more challenging.”

The hope of Connerty-Marin and the other organizers of the MJFF is to show films that are both entertaining and important documents of Jewish culture, but the emphasis is on the latter.

“Jewish film is no different than any other,” he stated, “Three quarters of it is just plain bad . . . Some of the films we show are not great films, but they are still valuable.”

The 2001 films cover a wide range: from those that examine different aspects of the Holocaust, its aftermath, and how it is remembered to lighter pieces that get down to the level of the piece of coleslaw hanging off a Mah-Jongg tile.

Opening the festival on Thursday night at the Center for Cultural Exchange is the silent film Benya Krik, about Jewish gangsters in Odessa, which has been recovered after 70 years of residing in obscurity and will be accompanied by a Balkan-influenced, soul-infused klezmer band called Paradox Trio. Among the short-film medleys is Chicken Soup, a returning favorite in which a Jewish grandmother gives her recipe for kosher chicken soup, beginning with the ritual killing and plucking of the bird.

Also in the short film category is the humorous Mah-Jongg: The Tiles that Bind. Picture this: a smoky living room, the sound of clicking plastic tiles and gossip rising from tables of four, all kinds of foodstuffs throughout the room, young children trying to see over their mothers’ shoulders. Here’s the thing: you could be in Beijing, in Chinatown in San Francisco, or in the home of a Jewish couple in the suburbs of Toledo.

Mah-Jongg is a Chinese game from the time of Confucius that became popular among Jewish Americans after being brought over by a businessman in the 1920s. Through interviews with elderly Jewish ladies, young Chinese-American grandchildren, and all sorts of folks in between, this film provides insight into what makes the game so popular. Scene titles like “Her silver tea service, her crystal chandelier, and her mah-jongg set” and “Cheaper than a therapist” give you an idea about the tone.

Not all of the shorts are of the comical variety, though. Zyklon Portrait is a 14-minute film that contrasts factoids about Zyklon B, the hydrogen-cyanide gas used to kill millions in German camps during WWII, with memories of the filmmaker’s grandparents who were killed at Auschwitz. With scenes filmed underwater, it is a quiet film, one that finds its emotion in simple images and photographs.

One of the several feature-length films that deals with the Holocaust is Left Luggage, which won awards at the Berlin Film Festival and stars Isabella Rossellini in the story of a daughter’s struggle to understand her parents’ experience as survivors living in Antwerp. In another, Paragraph 175, the title refers to an obscure pre-War law in Berlin forbidding homosexuality that was used by the Nazis to persecute a whole generation of German homosexuals.

But the real gem, and featured film of this year’s event, is After the Truth, which recently made the rounds of festivals including Toronto, Chicago, Berlin, and Singapore. Director Roland Suso Richter will attend the screenings on Saturday night and Sunday morning, and two hate crimes specialists will be on hand Saturday for a discussion following the film.

In the movie, Richter explores what would happen if one of Germany’s most notorious Nazi war criminals, Dr. Josef Mengele, returned from hiding after 40 years to tell his side of the story. With a montage of voices, and a black screen on just long enough to make you wonder if something is wrong with the projector, After the Truth opens unconventionally and slowly, but then draws you in to its moral and ethical swamp.

Peter Rohm is a lawyer who has been researching a book on the hated Mengele for years, to the point where his wife is fed up with his obsession. Soon after an authentic Nazi uniform mysteriously shows up at his apartment, Rohm is kidnapped and taken to the Argentinean home of an old man who claims to be Mengele. Astute as he his, Rohm is incredulous that the man is Mengele – the “Angel of Death” has been presumed dead for years.

Upon returning to Germany and being convinced by government investigators that the man is Mengele, Rohm agrees to be his lawyer. Mengele claims to want Germans to know the truth about his role in the torturing and killing of prisoners at Auschwitz. In his decision to take the case, Rohm’s ambition to be involved in such a landmark event, along with a desire to understand the incomprehensible, overpower his own feelings of repulsion and the vehement protests of his wife and mother, who both leave him to deal with it on his own. Rohm is labeled a Nazi sympathizer by mainstream German society and a hero by the legions of young skinheads who protest outside the courtroom.

The most affecting moments of After the Truth occur in Rohm’s intimate discussions with Mengele and in watching Mengele watch Rohm in the courtroom. The lawyer is forced to see what no amount of research could show him – Mengele is himself a human being, albeit one who did monstrous things to people. With his task of trying to give his client a fair defense, Rohm is the only person in the film who tries to understand Mengele, rather than simply label him a monster.

And slowly, to his horror, Rohm does begin to understand, while Mengele watches the proceedings from inside a glass corridor erected to protect him from those that would harm him — as well as protecting everyone in the courtroom from seeing him as anything but a devil in human form. The glass case is reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter’s cell in Silence of the Lambs, only it’s been put in front of television cameras and an audience in the seats.

Rohm finds himself cross-examining a parade of witnesses with unfathomable stories of how Mengele used the concentration camp as a laboratory. A set of twin brothers sewn together, back to back. Bone marrow extracted from a leg bone without anesthesia. Organs removed from living, conscious “patients.”

But for every example of an atrocity, Mengele has an intricate reasoning that led him to his decisions. He admits the actions outright and claims “I didn’t invent Auschwitz . . . I wanted to help.”

Interestingly, within Mengele’s reasons for killing lies a popular topic of modern society: euthanasia. He claims that since prisoners of the concentration camps suffered incredibly before their death by gassing, since their fates were certain, that he killed them out of mercy. That he also hoped to gain important scientific information from those that died at his hands was merely an added reason to do it.

As horrible as the reasoning sounds, Richter shows Rohm begin to understand it, to see how it is only a few short steps from what many doctors do on a regular basis. He begins to understand Mengele’s claim that the differences between a neighbor and a monster “lie entirely in the situation.” Would others act the same way if presented with the same situation? Would you?

It is a scary moral precipice that Richter walks us to and forces us to look down. As Rohm’s mother’s own past comes to light and as we hear Mengele ask “Do you at least see a bit of yourself in me,” we are forced to see what little difference there can be between being human and not.

There is one technical flaw in After the Truth for which moviegoers should be prepared. The subtitles that translate the German to English are of poor quality, blurring into the white backgrounds on several occasions. It is disappointing that this engaging film has such a flaw. It is still possible to appreciate the weight of it, but you will lose some lines.

So, the movie is somewhat apropos of the festival. David Connerty-Marin and the others working behind the scenes at the Maine Jewish Film Festival know that their group of films are far from perfect, but they see them as important nevertheless, and hope Portland audiences will continue to agree.

Cannes, Berlin, Sundance…Portland?

After the Truth, Zyklon Portrait, and Mah-Jongg: The Tiles that Bind are among the offerings at this year’s Maine Jewish Film Festival