Today at Ebertfest

Posted on April 24, 2010 at 12:22 pm

I will be on stage following I Capture the Castle today. Unfortunately, the travel delays in Europe kept Bill Nighy from attending the festival as planned, but we will have a good audience discussion. Then, we will see Vincent: a Life in Color, a documentary about a Chicago man who wears suits the color of jellybeans and entertains the crowds on the Chicago River boats by twirling. He is here at the festival and came up to me last night to make a joke about my last name (better than most!).

All that and more coming up. Stay tuned.

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Festivals

Today at Ebertfest

Posted on April 23, 2010 at 1:59 pm

I will be on stage following I Capture the Castle today. Unfortunately, the travel delays in Europe kept Bill Nighy from attending the festival as planned, but we will have a good audience discussion. Then, we will see Vincent: a Life in Color, a documentary about a Chicago man who wears suits the color of jellybeans and entertains the crowds on the Chicago River boats by twirling. He is here at the festival and came up to me last night to make a joke about my last name (better than most!).

All that and more coming up. Stay tuned.

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Festivals

I’m Going to Ebertfest!

Posted on April 20, 2010 at 6:00 pm

I’m very excited about my return to Roger Ebert’s Film Festival on Thursday. I love this festival, organized by the leading film critic in the world because it is unique. Instead of the usual quirky indies and other unreleased festival fare trying to get distribution, these are gems that have already been released but did not get what Roger thinks is the audience they deserved. Roger brings in the people who made the films to talk about them. But my favorite part is that while most festivals have far-flung simultaneous screenings that make you feel like you are running an obstacle course and always missing what everyone says was the best film of the festival, at Ebertfest there is just one film at a time, all shown at the magnificent Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois. I am especially looking forward to one of the annual highlights — each year, he shows a silent film with live accompaniment from the Alloy Orchestra.Ebertfest-HERO09.jpg
I’ll be reporting in from the festival, so stay tuned. And if any of you happen to be there, come over and say hello! For those who can’t make it, I recommend joining Ebert’s online club. His newsletters, available to club members only, are delightful and well worth the micro-price, less than $5 a year.

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From Swastika to Jim Crow

Posted on December 8, 2009 at 3:19 pm

Because this is the 20th anniversary of the Washington DC Jewish Film Festival, all of the previous festival directors were given the chance to pick their favorites from past years to put on this year’s schedule. That is how I got to see “From Swastika to Jim Crow” today.
Hitler came to power in January of 1933. In April of that year, Jewish professors started being dismissed from universities and within a month, most of them were gone. About 1200 came to the United States. And of that group, about 50 ended up at one of the traditionally black colleges. Finding themselves in areas segregated by law and culture, these “refugee scholars” were in “double exile.” They had lost their home, their country, their friends, their families, their jobs, and their language. And they were in a place where they were seen as triply suspicious outsiders — Jews, immigrants, intellectuals.
Interviews with the professors, their families, and their students and archival footage bring us into the world of these immigrants, who found they had more in common with their black students and colleagues than with the white members of the community. It is especially poignant when one explains that the black students were better able than whites to comprehend the information that came out about the Holocaust atrocities because “the notion of man’s inhumanity was not foreign” to them. The white community did not accept the refugee scholars but that does not mean they did not tell them how to live. One was threatened for entertaining students in his home. A newspaper headline notes: “White Professor Fined $25 for Eating with a Negro.”
One-time students, now distinguished scholars themselves, talk movingly about these professors, whose struggle, survival, and commitment to excellence and knowledge was itself an education.
An exhibit inspired by the movie is now at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage and will go on tour.

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Documentary Festivals

Michael Verhoeven at the Jewish Film Festival

Posted on December 7, 2009 at 1:57 pm

At noon today, Visionary Award recipient Michael Verhoeven was interviewed by Sharon Rivo, Co-Founder and Executive Director, National Center for Jewish Film. We saw a few moments from his new film, “Human Failure,” which has its North American premiere tonight at the festival. It is a documentary about the discovery of an extraordinary archive from the Nazi era. For more than 60 years, tax records showing the appropriation — the authorized theft — of money and property from members of the Jewish community had been protected by privacy laws. But a professor found a stash of 20,000 files in Cologne, made copies of some of them, and created a museum exhibit. When Verhoeven read in the newspapers about the exhibition, he became involved and made the movie.
Theses special taxes were based on property, not income, so Jews were required to submit detailed inventories of every possession they had, down to the children’s dolls, according to Verhoeven. These are not just documents of what was lost. They provide a snapshot of the lives of these families. Many of the files include facts about the people as well as the property and the short clip we saw included an American who discovered for the first time what had happened to his great-uncle through a newspaper story on the files.
Verhoeven, whose previous films include feature films based on history “The Nasty Girl” (a young woman who exposed her community’s involvement with the Holocaust), “My Mother’s Courage” (a woman who escaped being sent to a concentration camp) and “The White Rose” (about young protesters who were killed by the Nazis), said that when he graduated from high school in 1957, the history of the Third Reich was not being taught. “It was the Cold War. It was not interesting any more who was a Nazi. What was interesting was who was a communist.” Even now, he says, there were those who tried to prevent this archive from being exhibited. But the movie’s release (it was shown in connection with the exhibit for three months) is evidence that “people face the past, people cope with the past. It’s a good thing.”

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