BLANK SLATE MEDIA June 21, 2019
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JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL SID JACOBSON JCC TO HOST ANNUAL EVENT BY G R AC E M CQ UA D E
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he Sid Jacobson Jewish Community Center’s Edward & Bernice Wenger Center for the Arts will present the 26th annual Randi & Bruce Pergament Jewish Film Festival running from June 26 through Aug. 8. The festival will feature six films over the course of the summer, a nice mix of documentaries and dramas from around the world that will be shown in the JCC’s Rubenstein Auditorium. Julie Assael, senior adult program coordinator at the SJJCC, took some time for a phone interview to discuss this year’s festival and what local filmgoers can expect this time around. “We’re excited about our selection of film dramas and documentaries, which is a fabulous lineup,” she said. “They’re in several different foreign languages, including Hebrew, German, Polish and Yiddish, and subtitled in English. That’s really what makes this film festival different and stand out from the others.” Assael is new in her position at the JCC, so she has not had a chance to view the films yet, but she spoke a little bit about the selection process. “The films have been selected by a team that consults with JFFs around the country to find out which recently released films have resonated with their audiences,” she said. “The team is very knowledgeable about films… so they were very carefully selected.” The festival kicks off at 7:30 p.m. June 26 with a few opening words followed by a screening of “Shoelaces” (2018), a 90-minute Israeli drama directed by Jacob Goldswasser that is in
“LACES” Hebrew, with English subtitles. It is about a father who abandons his special needs son at a young age. Years later, when the father’s kidneys begin to fail, his now grown son wishes to donate his kidney and save his father’s life. Assael said every film that is screened at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday evenings is shown again the following Thursday af-
ternoon at 2 p.m. “We serve a lot of older people who like to come, but don’t drive at night so the daytime performances work very well for them,” she added. On Wednesday, July 10, and Thursday, July 11, the film festival will feature “The Cakemaker” (2017), a GermanIsraeli drama about a German baker having an affair with a married Israeli
man who dies in a car crash, leading the baker on a quest to find out more about his dead lover’s wife and son. The film is told in English, Hebrew and German. The JCC will screen “Who Will Write Our History” (2018) on July 17 and July 18. This U.S.-made documentary tells the story of historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who joins a group of journalists, scholars and leaders in the Warsaw ghetto to defeat the Nazis — not with guns or fists, but with pen and paper. The film is narrated by Academy Award nominee Joan Allen and Academy Award winner Adrien Brody. Continued on Page 52