Israel’s biggest box-office hit of 2016, “The Women’s Balcony,” is a warm-hearted film about a close-knit Orthodox community living in blissful harmony until their synagogue literally collapses in the middle of a bar mitzvah. The rabbi’s wife is critically injured and the rabbi becomes depressed and foggy-minded. The men of the congregation are grateful when a charismatic rabbinical student known as Rabbi David (Avraham Aviv Alush), offers to help, bringing along his friends to conduct services and raise money to rebuild the temple. But he proves to be a very divisive figure when he urges the congregation to become more strictly observant, suggesting the men give their wives headscarves to cover their hair. The showdown comes when he tells the women that rebuilding the balcony, where the women sit separate from the men during services, will have to come after the creation of a new torah scroll. The women do not agree.
The details of the setting are fascinating, and while unfamiliar to many in American audiences, the elements of an Orthodox Jewish life are presented in a comfortable, respectful, natural manner. The film is immensely charming in its depiction of the quiet, gentle humanity of the community and the way their commitment to Judaism is reflected in every aspect of their lives. Evelin Hagoel is a stand-out as Etie, a grandmother who leads the rebellion and Yafit Asulin is radiant as a shy young woman who finds love. This is an endearing comedy with some thoughtful insights about the way we find and keep finding the sustaining force of grace in our lives.
Rama Burshtein (“Fill the Void”) is an observant Orthodox Jew who lives in Israel, but she reminds me in our interview that for more than half of her life, she was a secular Jew living in America. “I’m 50 years old. I became religious when I was 27 years old and still have lived more years secular than religious, still am. All my memories, all of who I am, this was not in a religious world.” That is an important part of what makes it possible for her to work with actors and crew who have different levels of religious observance and to relate to the audience for her films as well. While her new film, “The Wedding Plan,” like her first one concerns a young woman’s decision about who she will marry. But “Fill the Void” was set in a deeply religious ultra-Orthodox community, while “The Wedding Plan” characters, like Burshtein herself, are those who have chosen a more observant life as adults. So we see more variation in their practice, some uncertainty and inconsistency but more of a sense of intentionality.
The central character is Michel, played by Noa Koler in an award-winning performance of stunning intelligence and sensitivity in her first lead role. “This character is very, very complicated because she is supposed to make you laugh and cry at the same time, and it’s very complicated for any actress and… So it’s like you can’t discover anyone at that age so good but it’s not true, because Noa, she’s an actress in Israel, she played in the theatre. Everyone knows that she is talented. Nobody gave her a leading role. Ever. At the age of 35. And she’s like a genius. She is extremely talented, It’s like, I’m telling you there is no way to compare anything that she does in an audition than to other very professional actresses–good actresses. She has something that few people have in the world.” Burshtein said one of her most important roles as a director was to show Koler that she had confidence in her. “When I believed a hundred in her then she believed a hundred. But if I believed eighty, she would believe zero. Everyone around me didn’t think I’m doing right. Everyone was trying to convince me not to take her. Everyone knows that she is talented. People didn’t think that she could handle a role where all those nice guys want her. She is like the neighbour’s daughter, she’s not not Julia Roberts in ‘Notting Hill.’ You have to believe that Oz Zehavi, the guy that plays Yos, who is like a big star in Israel, that he would go for her. But I know that at the end when someone is so sincere and like the model of truth, this is what you fall in love with at the end. Even a rock star, that what you fall in love with, you don’t fall in love with a pretty face. We don’t fall in love with a pretty face, that was part of me saying that because today nobody is even asking that question. Nobody thinks that it’s unreal that he wants her.” Making that believable is very important because it helps Michal truly understand that she is lovable. “It’s like ‘La La Land,’ says Burshtein. “She brings this thing out and it suddenly all the actions are opened. She believes that the sky is the limit. It’s an energy shows in her and that brings a lot in.”
In Israel and Europe, the film was called “Through the Wall.” Burshtein says, “It’s not ‘Behind the Wall,’ it’s not ‘Breaking the Wall,’ it’s not ‘Climbing the Wall,’ it’s ‘Through the Wall,’ which is something that you cannot actually do you know. A wall is a wall. You can’t go through it unless you have a door. But that’s what she is doing. She’s going through a wall.
Burshtein wants to deliver a message with this endearing romantic comedy premise of a young woman who hires a hall for the date of her wedding even though she does not have a groom. “There is a thing that I call ‘the imaginary option,’ It’s like you always think that there is someone a little bit better than what you will have sitting in front of you. You do not see what is in front of you because you have a picture of something else. From my research, the women that can fall in love with everyone are married.” She points out that when asked why she wants to be married, Michel gives almost every possible answer except for the most important one: to love. “I would sit with a girl and ask ‘What are you looking for?’ and she’s going to give me that list. And the whole list, which is very interesting, would be what he could give her. I never had girls writing down ‘I feel like I want I want to give. I want someone that I want to do for.'”
Israeli filmmaker Sharon Mayman says that the idea for “The Farewell Party” came from the time that his boyfriend’s grandmother, age 92, was dying, and paramedics prolonged her suffering by “fighting for her life like she was 16 years old.” Her son, in frustration, said to the paramedics, “If you bring her back, you’re taking her with you.” In Israel, as everywhere else, new conversations, long overdue, are beginning about the end of life. This bittersweet story of love, friendship, and loss takes place in an assisted living facility where those who are still healthy spend a lot of time visiting those who are not. We first see Yeheskel (Ze’ev Revach) literally playing God. He is on the phone with a frail friend, pretending to be God, telling her to stay strong. And then he and his wife Levana (Levana Finkelstein) go to visit their closest friend, who is suffering terribly and dying slowly. His wife, frantic and furious, tells Yeshekel he must use his skill as an inventor to help them. And so Yeshekel does, working with a new arrival who has some experience in gentle and peaceful death — a veterinarian — and his friend, a cop.
The machine works, and they think they are done. But word has gotten out and the loved ones of people who are in great pain keep coming to Yeheskel to ask for his help, sometimes so desperate they will threaten blackmail. Levana gets increasingly uncomfortable with what they are doing until her own health issue makes her see things differently. As she struggles with dementia, her friends respond with grace and one of the most simultaneously funny and heartwarming moments in any movie this year. Growing old is not for sissies. But this movie shows us that we do not be afraid to be honest about it, and to smile through our tears.
Parents should know that this movie deals with end of life issues and assisted suicide and includes some nudity and sexual situations.
Family discussion: What can we do to make end of life issues easier for people who are dying and their families? Do you agree with the characters in this film?
Interview: Nancy Spielberg and Roberta Grossman of “Above and Beyond”
Posted on January 28, 2015 at 1:26 pm
Copyright Paramount Productions 2015
In 1948, a group of World War II pilots volunteered to fight for Israel in the War of Independence. As members of “Machal” (volunteers from abroad), they not only turned the tide of the war, they also laid the groundwork for the Israeli Air Force. “Above and Beyond” is the first major feature-length documentary about the foreign airmen in the War of Independence, featuring new interviews with pilots from the ’48 War, scholars and statesmen, including Shimon Peres, to tell their story. I spoke to producer Nancy Spielberg and director Roberta Grossman about making the film and why this story mattered so much to them.
Why tell this story now?
NS: First of all the, “Why now,” is any of the stories that are coming from this generation of World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors, that whole generation, whatever they did, are things that if we don’t grab them now, we’ve lost them and they are slipping through our fingers. And I think we’ve all seen that that the way that people learn, mostly way the the younger people learn is visual. They don’t read books, they don’t like history books, they don’t want black and white on a page. The best way to teach it, to capture it, is through a visual format. And I think that the urgency of getting stories like these, is that the stories are just incredible. To me it’s a study in character, in human nature. What makes these heroes? What makes these veterans, these World War II veterans that served their country, survived; one of them was shot down and wandered for a couple of months, another one almost crashed his plane. What made these people come out of war, get back to their normal lives or be supposed to be getting back and then drop everything to go help somebody else? And it is just sort of amazing because I think they are very matter of fact about it but it is a wonderful lesson for all of us. To what degree, what extent would you undertake such personal risk to help somebody else? And I just think that is a lesson that we all have to hold onto.
What was it like doing the research and finding the archival footage for the film?
Pilots Lou Lenart, Gideon Lichtman, and Modi Alon in Israel in 1948. Copyright Paramount Productions 2015
RG: Well, first of all I should say that there is a lot of archival footage in the film that was drawn from a lot of different archives around the world, primarily of course Israel and the United States. But there is a lot of footage in the film that is unabashedly made to look like archival footage and blend with our footage that is actually re-creations that we did in conjunction with Industrial Light and Magic. So the conceit was to make re-creation look like archival footage when the fact of the matter is there were gun cameras. There were cameras on pretty much every American plane in World War II but in the the ragtag Israeli Air Force in the 1948 war, there were no cameras since the planes could barely fly. So we pretended that there were those cameras there and created sequences that would match or illustrate the stories they were telling. I strongly believe that documentary filmmakers get to use all the tools of cinema and using those tools as historically accurately as possible or else you lose the trust of the audience.
NS: Roberta, you have these connections more than I do with the archivists and people were so engaged with the story that they really dug around it. There is one shot we have which is authentic archival footage of this Egyptian spitfire that kept flying and bombing over Tel Aviv and all they could do on the ground was run in their houses and get the camera and film it because there was no fighting back. They had no planes, they had no way to defend themselves, it was duck and cover. And the idea that this plane could just keep flying over at will, bombing whenever it wanted must have been a feeling of being so exposed and vulnerable for these people. But like Roberta said, this wasn’t World War II with a rich camera crew going off. This was people running for their lives that have nothing. So I think that finding that footage was huge and it really was the efforts here in America and over in Israel, and we had footage archives in Czechoslovakia, really all over.
RG: We really like to try to dig as deeply as possible as time and resources would allow because a lot of footage or archival footage gets recycled all the time because it is the stuff that bubbles to the top, we see the stuff over and over and over again. So if you want to find interesting material you have to keep digging. Our editor, Chris Callister is really great with archival sequences, to really make scenes out of that footage, that’s the idea.
You touched on one of the key differences in aerial combat between the experience that these men had in World War II and the resources available and the documentation of the effort in Israel. Were there differences in strategy as well? What were some of the differences that these men had to adapt to?
RG: The differences were tremendous. In World War II, the American pilots that flew in that war were part of a giant machine. And in Israel there were so few that they each became their own machine and probably made much bigger strides in the overall war efforts.
Because in fact in May 29, that one battle where they were just right outside of Tel Aviv, there were supposed to be five planes to fly against them and these planes had been brought in in pieces and assembled and one plane wouldn’t work so instead of five they had four and they had five pilots. I mean working with bare-bones. So only four planes could go out and try and stop an army.
And in that battle, one of the men died. So in the very first aerial battle, 25 percent of the Air Force was lost. So it was sort of incredible because it’s such a smaller fishpond and so these guys were bigger fish and I think that strategy wise, I think their training supposedly helped a lot but they had to wing it a lot because it’s not like this is a wealthy country with lots of supplies. They had to be pretty versatile. There was a 26-year-old put in charge of the Air Force and there really were only two Israeli pilots that were experienced enough to be able to take command but there wasn’t a lot of order back then. There weren’t manuals and operational guides. It was really sort of “fly by the seat of your pants.”
So they had a young guy who tried to keep it together. But what he was trying to keep together was also a group of foreigners that spoke different languages. Most of them spoke English and English was the official language of the Israeli Air Force. It’s the language almost everybody knew. The Israeli Air Force was really molded from the British Royal Air Force and American Air Force and South African. So they had access to those manuals and later on they used those as guidelines.
When you interviewed the men, was this a story that they had told before or was it something that was a surprise to their families?
RG: It certainly wasn’t a surprise to their families, their kids knew about it. But I think in some cases when their kids saw the finished film, they saw a fuller and heard a more wonderful story than they had heard before because they heard not only their father’s story but they heard about it in an historical context and they heard of the entire efforts. And so I think that a lot of the kids, the children of the pilots were really, really so excited and so happy about the film not only because the film honors their fathers in such a wonderful way but because it gave them a fuller picture of what their fathers had done during the period.
NS: The grandchildren actually love it. They think that their grandfather is the coolest dude around. They really related to him in a different way.
RG: But some of these stories are new because the interesting part of the question is that there wasn’t a lot of talking about this chapter because of the legal ramifications of it. And when the guys first came back and I think many years afterwards, they didn’t go around boasting about it because it was illegal to fight for a foreign country, it was illegal to smuggle a plane. Some people did go to jail for it, one lost his citizenship. It wasn’t something that people talk about a lot. It’s been really interesting everywhere that we have gone and shown the film. People just kind of came out and said, “Oh, my uncle smuggled machine guns,” or, “My grandfather was part of this.” Just on and on and on. It was just like people just are very excited to put all the pieces together.
NS: In fact one person said to us he thought the FBI were going to come always knocking on the door so he really never wanted to share these stories. And another gentleman brought a personal photo album that had never gone out of the house. We used some of those pictures in the film.
Do you think today’s audiences have an understanding of the origins of Israel? And do you think this movie will change their ideas about Israel?
NS: I do not think that people bother too much to think about origins of Israel. And I say that in this sense because I think people are caught up with a CNN version of Israel and don’t go beyond that. When you stop for a second and go, wait a minute, there was a partition plan for a two state solution and the Jews agreed to it. I don’t know, I am not naïve but that could have changed a lot of things and so in some ways the idea that Israel was there, Israel was interested in a two state solution. Israel was attacked, Israel defended itself. I think those things just have to be emphasized again.
What do you want people to learn from this film?
NS: I hope that they will consider a few things. First of all the idea that these guys went to help somebody in trouble, that’s a great universal lesson that we should be there for other people, we should be there to help each other. I also do hope that people will just go, “Hmm, let’s not be so harsh about Israel and Israel’s right to exist.” That is personally important to me but my most important thing is sort of focusing on some feelings of American pride, of Jewish-American pride, of the idea that being a volunteer is a good thing and that you should do it because it is the right thing to do, not for the glory necessarily.
RG: I hope they understand how urgent the situation on the side of Israel was at the time of its creation, how right and necessary it was, how different things might have been if the partition plan had been accepted and how tenuous the state was in its beginning, how it could have easily gone another way and how threatening the issue was in 1948. I think just to take another look. Obviously it is a very fraught issue but I really think that the discussion is so one-sided these days. We’ve got sort of frantic anti-Israel sentiments; believe me I understand why, but it is really nice to have a story that talks about what the intentions were, what the need was, what the spiritual standing of the state was.
Tuesdays in September on Turner Classic Movies: The Jewish Experience on Film
Posted on September 1, 2014 at 9:21 pm
This month, TCM has an excellent series of films about the Jewish experience, every Tuesday.
TCM proudly presents The Projected Image: The Jewish Experience on Film, a weekly showcase of movies focusing on Jewish history and heritage as portrayed onscreen. Co-hosting the films each Tuesday is Dr. Eric Goldman, an expert on Yiddish, Israeli and Jewish cinema, and founder and president of Ergo Media, a video publishing company specializing in Jewish and Israeli video. Goldman is also the author of The American Jewish Story Through Cinema (2013) and Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (2011).
The screenings are divided into themes, which air each Tuesday beginning on September 2 at 8pm with The Evolving Jew, featuring two versions of The Jazz Singer, the story of a young American performer who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. Al Jolson starred in the revolutionary early sound version from 1927, and Danny Thomas took over the role in the lesser-known 1953 remake. That same night, The Immigrant Experience focuses on Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1965) and Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), telling of Jewish families from Europe and Russia who settle in, respectively, the Lower East Side of New York City and a neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland.
Among films dealing with The Holocaust on September 9 are two powerful classics from the 1960s: Stanley Kramer’s all-star Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), about the trial of war criminals in 1945-46; and Sidney LumetÕs The Pawnbroker (1965), starring Rod Steiger as a concentration-camp survivor. Also screening are Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), in which he plays a Nazi fugitive, and Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler (1953), with Kirk Douglas as a Holocaust survivor.
September 16 sees Israeli Classics including two TCM premieres, Thorold Dickinson’s Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), the first feature film produced in Israel; and Ephraim Kishon’s Sallah (1964), a satire that became the most successful film in Israeli history. Also showing are a pair of films focusing on The Jewish Homeland: George Sherman’s A Sword in the Desert (1949, TCM premiere), which deals with the immigration into Mandatory Palestine during the mid-1940s; and Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), which concerns the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
Tackling Prejudice on September 23 are three absorbing films based on novels about anti-Semitism: Laura Z. Hobson’s GentlemanÕs Agreement (1947); Crossfire (1947), based on John Paxton’s 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole; and Arthur Miller’s Focus (2001, TCM premiere). A fourth film, The House of Rothschild (1934), was taken from George Hembert Westley’s play about the celebrated Jewish banking family and its struggles for dignity and equality in the European financial world.
Among Coming-of-Age stories on September 30 are The Young Lions (1958), with Montgomery Clift as a soldier coming to grips with anti-Semitism during World War II; The Way We Were (1973) with Barbra Streisand as a Marxist Jew who shares a bittersweet romance with a handsome Gentile (Robert Redford); and Hearts of the West (1975), with Jeff Bridges and Alan Arkin in a comedy about a young writer who stumbles into a career as a cowboy star.
