I am very excited about “Jerusalem,” a spectacular new 3D Imax film about the city called “the gateway to God.” Exquisitely beautiful cinematography and immersive 3D effects bring the audience inside the city, from its thousands-year history to its religious heritage and spiritual significance, its splendor and beauty, and its modern-day families, schools, and businesses and restore a perspective warped by too many news stories about violence and bigotry. Three young girls, one Christian, one Muslim, one Jewish, show us their views of the city, their love for the city, and their hopes for the city. The movie is showing now at the Museum of Science in Boston and I will keep you updated on opportunities to see this film on Imax screens across the country.
Rated PG for mild thematic elements and brief smoking
Profanity:
None
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking and drunkenness, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:
Sad offscreen death
Diversity Issues:
Role of women in traditional orthodox community
Date Released to Theaters:
June 14, 2013
A young woman about to choose the man she will marry is torn between her own desires and the wishes of her devout family, ultra-Orthodox Jews. We know where the American version of this story would go — the triumph of individual happiness over the antiquated strictures of the community. But Israel’s official entry for the foreign language Oscar is a sympathetic, layered portrayal, rich with detail, that earns its more complex and resonant conclusion.
Writer-director Rama Burshtein was born in the United States, grew up in Israel in a non-Orthodox home, studied film, and chose to become “baal teshuva” or one who “returns” to the the practice of traditionally observant Judaism. This movie reflects her deep understanding of both liberal and conservative notions of religious practice as a connection to the divine and the many variations in between. She is a gifted filmmaker who understands the way the tiniest details tell the story and evokes utterly natural, intimate performances from her actors. She shows us a world of very strict and demanding tradition, but it is the context for characters who are never caricatured. They are vividly drawn and portrayed with respect and affection.
Like a Jane Austen novel, the primary concern for Shira (a shimmeringly lovely Hadas Yaron) and her family is a propitious match, and the cultural structures for making this decision are clearly defined. In this community, young men and women have no opportunities for interaction until they are identified as potential partners by their parents. Then they have one heart-wrenchingly awkward meeting to decide whether they can spend a lifetime together. As the invariable small plate of cookies goes untouched, there is no shilly-shallying about what they majored in or their favorite music. A few simple questions about their aspirations for family life are all they get.
We first see Shira and her mother sneaking a look at a prospective groom in the aisles of a the grocery store. Shira believes he could be the one. She is excited and happy. But then a terrible tragedy strikes. Her sister, Esther (Renana Raz) dies in childbirth. And then the widower, Yochay (a smolderingly handsome Yiftach Klein) has an offer to marry a woman from Belgium, which would mean moving there and taking the baby with him. The only way to keep Esther’s child close to the family is for Yochay to marry Shira.
Suddenly, Shira has to cope with an entirely different set of pressures and an entirely new sense of power. She has to sort through her feelings without any real opportunity to learn how Yochay is responding. Could he want her? Or is he being forced? What would it be like to be married to someone who has not just been married before, but who was married to her sister?
American films have ranged from clumsy to dreadful in portraying the Orthodox community, with Renee Zellwegger in “A Price Above Rubies” and Melanie Griffith’s “A Stranger Among Us” as notorious failures. Burshtein’s perspective as someone who chose that life is refreshing in its focus on the lives, relationships, and choices of the characters. The details of their religious practice draw us in as illumination, not anthropology. The dynamics of Shira’s parents’ relationship play out in the celebration of Purim, a holiday less observant Jews may think of as a minor celebration for children to wear costumes and shake noisemakers. For these people, it is also a time to encourage those the community who needs help to ask for it and for those who can to give it. It is Shira’s father who receives the requests. But it is her mother who brings the money. And in the oblique discussions they have about Shira’s choice and the factors to be considered, we see the many layers of family, community, and religious observance twined together.
Parents should know that this film includes drinking and drunkenness and brief smoking. There is a sad off-screen death.
Family discussion: What does Shira decide and why? Do you agree? Will she be happy?
If you like this, try: “Ushpizin,” another film about the Orthodox community made by a baal teshuva
Interview: Rama Burshtein and Hadas Yaron of “Fill the Void”
Posted on June 3, 2013 at 2:23 pm
“Fill the Void” is an Israeli film with a rare, intimate, and very sympathetic portrayal of a very observant Orthodox Jewish community. It is the story of a young woman, still in her teens, who is under pressure to marry the husband of her sister, who died in childbirth. If this was an American movie, it would be about the girl’s rebellion. But this is a far more complex, layered, sensitive exploration of the girl and her world, and therefore a much more fascinating story. The lead role is played by Hadas Yaron and the writer-director is an Orthodox woman born in America and raised in Israel, named Rama Burshtein. We met at a hotel in Washington to talk about the movie.
What makes a good marriage?
RB: You’re good. What makes a good marriage? This is not a quite popular view I would say but I think it’s about defining men and women and knowing how they’re different. Okay, this is how it works for me. I need my husband to be a little bit more, for me to hold more, to hold that passion…to feel that sexiness. This is what I need. He needs to be a little more open and it’s me making that. I have to make him want me. Like especially if I’m like dominant and a strong person than I really have to work hard to make him more than me. In a deeper way. He’s got the stamina. I know it is so not popular and some want to crucify me for saying that because it’s very not feminist to say. For me, it’s only about being in love and being passionate so I don’t care about being equal. I really care about really liking him for the rest of my life you know and really being attracted to him and that he’s going to be the center of my life. It doesn’t mean I don’t do other things, I’m sitting here and yet when I ever, ever have to make a choice it will be him. It will always be him.
Okay, and what about you, Hadas? What do you think makes a good marriage?
HY:Well, I’m not married. It’s funny because I’ve been listening to Rama. I have a boyfriend and the words you said really stayed in my head, the words you said to me about how God’s journey is planned in relationships and I really remember that. The whole thing with two weeks of not touching and then two weeks of this and so holding it and bringing it back. I remember I told him; maybe we can do that, like for one week to be a bride again after being separate. I think it’s about being real with him and so that’s hard sometimes…to be really exposed and then feel that the other person really gets you.
One part of the most striking parts of the movie are these very structured “dates” where the couple essentially has just one meeting to decide if they can spend their lives together. There’s this plate of cookies that no one ever touches.
RB: No one ever touches it. You know if she asks her mother for more time, she will have more. It’s about seeing if there’s chemistry and if you can go to the next date. Actually, the first one is just to know if you can go to the next one. And, by us we come and sit for three hours or four hours and some of that’s him being a man for the rest of my life and her being the woman for him for the rest of his life. They’re both tuned in on it and the concentration is on that. So, everything he says is very important and everything she says is critical and the concentration is so strong. I got married like this. When I sat with him for the first time every answer he gave was to tell me if he could be there for me forever or not. It is amazing! It’s so strong that when you decide to get married you actually nourish it from that first meeting for a long time. Because like I said everything is there now it’s just puppy love but you felt everything there and you know what kind of home you can have. How do you see life but in such a way you say that’s all I ever wanted, for him to really want me forever from the first time. This is it! This is what you want.
Did you intend the final scene of the film to be open to interpretation?
RB: The weird thing about this film is that people read it the way they read it. Some people think her mother pressures her to marry her late sister’s husband, but the mother never pressured her. She speaks to the father. She speaks to the matchmaker. The only time she speaks about it is when the mother and the father are in front of her telling her the offer and the father doesn’t want it. We get the feeling that she’s pressured but there was not real pressure on her. People really read into something that is not there.
I think she knew what her mother wanted.
RB: Wanted is not pressure. Wanted is fine. For me it was really intentional that she will not pressure her, that she would keep her feelings to herself. The mother is in sorrow. She is mourning and she is trying to do her best and yet she does not really pressure. The only one that she is a bit manipulative with is her husband, which is always what women do to their husbands. She tells him “You have to ask her, I would die to go.” This is what I believe. I believe that everything at the end comes together and you see it in life. There’s like a big plan because it’s really far out from what we want to feel. It happens with feelings and emotions and then suddenly you are realizing things…it’s like combining with the big plan. The big plan was for her to marry him. Something had to be done…an offer had to be made. The mother had to really push the father for everyone to actually get there. First of all her husband is gorgeous and sexy…he’s there…he’s a man…why not? In terms of the film of course.
And, then she’s beautiful and young and everything and all the complications and intentions are strong to say a true love story is not that complicated…and at that moment at the end where you don’t know what you’re feeling and you’re comfortable because it combines everything. It’s easy for us to say just make it like a love scene. It’s how you feel and wanting and not knowing where you’re going and the whole thing together …this is real. It doesn’t mean it’s not about love. It’s just a little different language, which is a true language because it is the way you experience it in your life. Not Hollywood.
The last shot is a shot that says see the real thing…it’s real. You can go all the way with everything in it. Sometimes you use too many emotions and then the viewer doesn’t see all that. They didn’t see the feel and they see the confusion. They just went with her being excited towards that night.
So, how do you talk to Hadas about portraying all of that, without any lines of dialogue?
RB: I think that when we did the film and we got prepared for it the one thing I knew is that it’s going to be a mixture of feelings of emotions and we were talking a lot about it…about trying to hold two different emotions together. On the one hand you want that aand it’s not just doing that it’s just jumping from one emotion to another. Right? We talked a lot about that. For me, this is being Jewish. A good example for that is when I just got into the religion a friend of mine was about to marry her eldest son in the evening and in the morning her mother passed away very suddenly. So, about 12 o’clock in the afternoon we buried her mom and then 7 o’clock that night her son got married. And, I was looking at her because she was just for the ceremony then she had to go but, that moment he got married she was there, she was happy and like a few hours ago she was really sad because her mom in a very surprising way just passed away. And, looking at that and looking at her, you think this is incredible…you can just jump from those feelings. This is from me being Jewish…really this is Judaism to be able to hold two things together.
And, what do you want people to take away from the film?
HY: I guess it’s just about being real. That’s something I learned. It’s the most difficult place to get to…like the most real, deepest, and the best place to be.
After documentary filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger’s grandmother died at age 97 in Israel, he brought a film crew to her apartment where she and his grandfather lived from the time they immigrated to what was then called Palestine just before World War II. He was fascinated by their home, which seventy years later looked as though it had been transplanted from their birthplace in Germany. The books on the shelves were in German. They always spoke German in their home. Most of their lives were lived in Israel, but they lived as though they were still in Berlin.
Goldfinger thought he would learn something about his grandparents as the family sorted through their belongings. But he could never have imagined what he would find or where it would take him. His grandmother had saved issues of one of the most virulently anti-Semitic newspapers distributed in Nazi Germany. This discovery led to a journey that illuminated one of the strangest friendships imaginable, represented by an artifact that is almost unthinkable — a coin with a Jewish star on one side and a Nazi swastika on the other. The movie also focuses on the strain this inquiry put on Goldfinger’s relationship with his mother, who was almost as passionate about not finding out the answers to his questions as Goldfinger was about seeking them.
I spoke to Goldfinger when he was in Washington, D.C. to show the film, which opens tomorrow.
What did you think you were going to film?
To be honest, I just wanted to be there with the camera and document the world I knew was going to disappear very quickly. I thought it would be an even quicker process. I knew this flat all my life and I had an ambivalent feeling toward it. On the one hand, I had an attraction to this world, to this culture, to those books, to the secrets, the mystery. On the other hand, as an Israeli it was so foreign, so German, so connected to the tragic happenings in the Holocaust. It was only later I had an idea to make a film, but even then the idea was just something very short. People would ask, “What can you learn about someone from what they leave behind?” This shows you can learn a lot.
What does your mother think about the movie?
I was very afraid of course. Our relationship was close before and if it would stay like that, it would be fine. But I was surprised. It brought us closer. She was very supportive of the film. After the first screening, when she first saw it, she said she saw it was important for her, too. When her friends saw the film, they said to her, “We didn’t know, either. We didn’t ask.” She felt that she was not alone.
Why was your mother reluctant to know more?
She was really raised in a German house. I remember as a kid, hearing her argue with her parents in German. But when she went out of the flat, she was in Tel Aviv, the Mediterranean combined with bohemian, a place of vibrance. She lived two lives. But like all of the people of her age, she wanted to leave the past behind her, as you see when you look at her flat, not even any dust from the past. Your house is the place you want to live in. And she wanted to live with with barriers to all the historical items. Before I made the film I thought it was her character. But now I understand it’s a barrier from all the pain and sorrow.
You met with Edda, the daughter of the Nazi couple who were your grandparents’ friends. Tell me something about your impressions.
They were lovely people, very friendly, welcoming, warm. That made it harder. If they were nasty it would have been easier for me. During my research I would think, “Maybe it’s not possible, maybe it’s not right” that this friendship existed between my grandparents and the Nazis. If I called someone out of the blue and said “My grandparents knew your parents, I would not recognize one name.” But the way she recognized it so immediately, the way she knew and was so glad to hear from me in such an open way and with such memories — I don’t remember even one gift my parents’ friends gave me — but for her, she remembered so much.
What about her father, the man who was your grandparents’ friend while having an important role in the Nazi party?
I found much more about him than what is in the film. It was important to say that he did not live the Nazi party. He was involved in anti-Semitic propaganda. But he wanted to stay in contact with Jews. I found all kinds of other things about him, nothing that would change your mind, no smoking gun, but you could ask yourself, “Did he have an alternative?” The way to describe what happened was this. Nobody knew what Hitler wanted, but everybody knew if they did something Hitler did not want, it’s the end. It was a classic regime of terror. There’s a book called Alone in Berlin that described life in the war. It’s horrible. I am a Jew; I don’t so much identify with them, but still I can understand and ask the question, “Could he do something?” If you look at his career, you won’t find him in the concentration camps. He is in the headquarters, spying, thinking. For me, it’s enough.
One of the most shocking moments for me was when Edda told me that she knew my family had lost someone in the concentration camps. She did not have the details right. She thought it was my grandfather’s mother, not my grandmother’s mother. She’s a little mistaken with the details but it shows that she and therefore her parents knew some of what happened. That means my grandparents were sitting over there in the garden where we were, discussing the death of someone from their family with a man who was a Nazi. Did they ask him if he received their letter asking for help? Did he tell them he could not help them? There were a lot of lies over there.
My favorite character in the movie was your grandmother’s friend. What a beautiful face. I felt I knew your grandmother by seeing her friend.
She was my grandmother’s closest friend and like an aunt to me. When I first approached her, she did not want to be filmed. She was the only one, and I could not understand why. It took me almost a year to persuade her. But she said, “I will give you half an hour, but you come alone.” I told her I had to bring a cameraman and a sound man, and she said, “No, no, no.” In the end, it was only me and the cameraman. I figured she would see it is not threatening and she would let me stay longer. The cameraman said, “Be careful. Remember who you are dealing with. Ask the questions you want in the beginning not as usual at the end.” After 32 minutes she told me it is enough. Three months later she passed away. Her daughter was so happy that I captured her in her beauty. There’s such elegance in those characters.
Why did your grandmother keep the Der Angriff newspapers even though they were filled with anti-Semitic propaganda?
There was something emotional about it, a memory from a very, very important event in their life. The idea was to keep an eye on the Nazi and push him to include more Zionist material in his story. There may be a possibility my grandfather even edited the article. It was something very vivid at the time and maybe she forgot about it. She never opened it again. Maybe she forgot about it.
The film is telling an amazing story about a Nazi and a Jew, but really it is a movie about family, what you know about your family, what you want to know, what you can know. Those questions anyone can identify with, especially in America, a place of immigrants. Some people who see the movie tell me, “I want to ask my parents more about our history.” And some say, “I need to get rid of a lot of the things in my house!”
One of the most daring rescue missions of the post WWII era was the Raid on Entebbe in 1976. Terrorist groups called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German Revolutionary Cells hijacked an Air France plane with 248 passengers aboard. The flight was redirected to Uganda. The non-Jewish passengers were released and left and the crew was released but insisted on staying. They Jewish passengers were held hostage while the hijackers demanded the release of 53 convicted terrorists from Israeli prisons. The Israelis were given 48 hours to respond. They chose to rescue the hostages instead of negotiating.
The commando mission was led by 30-year-old Lt. Col. Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, older brother of the man who would become Israel’s Prime Minister. All but two hostages were rescued and all eight terrorists killed in an expertly conducted mission that took just 58 minutes. All of the Israeli soldiers survived except for Yoni whose heroism and dedication were celebrated throughout the world. This thoughtful and stirring documentary tells his story.
The film draws on Yoni’s own words, which described the conflicts he felt about being a soldier and his passionate devotion to Israel, and on interviews with his family, his wife of four years, and the woman he was living with at the time of his death, and archival footage that shows us his gallantry and spirit.
This is a touching and inspiring story, powerfully told. Those who die young, especially those who sacrifice themselves to save others, are often reduced in memory to a name on a memorial or elevated to superhuman proportions to protect us from thinking about how we might measure up. This movie is filled with warm memories and specific details about a real person and what makes it so compelling is the reminder that by the time it ends we feel not just the admiration for his heroism but the sharp pain of his loss.
that described life in the war. It’s horrible. I am a Jew; I don’t so much identify with them, but still I can understand and ask the question, “Could he do something?” If you look at his career, you won’t find him in the concentration camps. He is in the headquarters, spying, thinking. For me, it’s enough.
newspapers even though they were filled with anti-Semitic propaganda?
, which described the conflicts he felt about being a soldier and his passionate devotion to Israel, and on interviews with his family, his wife of four years, and the woman he was living with at the time of his death, and archival footage that shows us his gallantry and spirit.