Deciding how to spend your time at a film festival is one of life’s great challenges. When narrowing down a list of movies, even those of us with unlimited free time (if that’s you, shoot me an email — I’d love to chat about what that’s like and live vicariously through you) will certainly have to kill some of our darlings.
Lucky for you, you have me! Over the past few days, I’ve been reading through plot descriptions, watching trailers, and spending countless hours reading the Wikipedia page about Franz Kafka. All of that has led me here (and, honestly, to a little self-reflection about how I spend my time). Out of the 49 feature films playing at this year’s festival, which runs from Feb. 18 to March 3, I’ve come up with a list of five that I’m looking forward to the most. Here they are.
“The Sea” (Shai Carmeli-Pollak)
“The Sea” follows a young Palestinian boy (Mohammed Ghazaoui) living in the occupied West Bank who, after being turned away at an Israeli checkpoint on a class trip, sneaks over the border anyway, intent on seeing the Mediterranean Sea. Directed by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, the film is a rare Israeli-Palestinian collaborative effort. I think that films that take place from the points of view of children often have a very singular ability to locate the simple truth hiding beneath the rationalizations that adults tend to engage in. I’m excited to see how this movie falls into that lineage.
“Franz” (Agnieszka Holland)
I haven’t read much of Franz Kafka (man turns into a huge cockroach? That’s about all I got). But the trailer for this movie from Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland grabbed my attention about as well as any giant insect could. I might not know a lot about Kafka, but I know enough to know that his particular bent of surrealism has inspired a large swatch of filmmakers that I adore, and I’m excited to see how Holland maps that bizarre, surrealist nature over Kafka’s own life.
“All I Had Was Nothingness” (Guillaume Ribot)
It took Claude Lanzmann 11 years to make “Shoah,” his documentary epic about the Holocaust. “All I Had Was Nothingness,” directed by French filmmaker Guillaume Ribot takes audiences behind the scenes. It’s hard to imagine that there could be footage from the making of “Shoah” that never saw the light of day (the film is over nine hours long), but Ribot has scrounged up never-before-seen interviews, 16 mm footage, and more. If you have even a passing interest in cinema history, this won’t be one to miss.
“Coexistence, My Ass!” (Amber Fares)
Noam Shuster Eliassi is a former United Nations diplomat turned stand-up comedian — the type of person ripe for the documentary treatment, you might say. The Israeli comedian was raised in a place known as “Oasis of Peach” just north of Jerusalem where Palestinians and Jews live together by choice. “Coexistence, My Ass!”– directed by filmmaker Amber Fares – follows Eliassi’s career and her unflinching support of equal rights and freedom for Palestinians.
“The Soundman” (Frank Van Passel)
I won’t name names (don’t want to get anyone in trouble for bias), but some of the higher-ups at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival have said that Frank Van Passel’s “The Soundman” is one of their favorite movies playing this year’s festival. A love story that unfolds on the eve of the German invasion in 1940, “The Soundman” is described as “sumptuous,” “lyrical,” and “breathtaking” in equal measure on its festival information page. Having watched the trailer, I can confirm that Van Passel’s visual style is something to behold. I’m excited to see how it carries through an entire feature.
Tickets for the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival can be purchased online.