Film Festival Kicks Off Under the Shadow of Oct. 7
Politics will be unavoidable at the 30th Jewish Film Fest Berlin Brandenburg, Germany’s largest Jewish film fest, but organizers want to focus on the movies: “Films aren’t there to provide answers, but to ask different questions.”
For Germany’s largest Jewish film festival, which kicked off June 18 and runs through June 23, politics are unavoidable.
Eight months into the ongoing war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and just a week after Europe-wide elections that saw surge in support for the far-right, the JFBB and its program are filtered through the daily headlines from Rafah, Brussels and Berlin.
Impact of Oct. 7
Dani Rosenberg’s thriller The Vanishing Soldier is about an Israeli recruit serving in Gaza who goes AWOL and returns home, only to realize that his family, and the country, thought he had been kidnapped by Hamas.
Noam Kaplan’s sci-fi drama The Future imagines a new algorithm designed to predict terrorist attacks.
“People will watch these films differently than they would have before Oct. 7.”
People may view the JFBB differently as well. This year’s Berlin film fest was overshadowed by disruption and debate around Gaza. The awards ceremony turned sharply political as most award winners used their platform to call out the Israeli government for its actions in the war.
Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, whose No Other Land won the best documentary prize, spoke of “apartheid” in his home country. Ben Russell, the American co-director of Direct Action, winner of the best film in Berlin’s Encounters sidebar, took to the stage wearing a Palestinian black-and-white keffiyeh scarf and used the word “genocide” to describe Israeli military action in the region.
“I think the Berlinale wasn’t well prepared for this debate and that led to unfortunate results,” says Buder. “We’re better prepared because we are used to addressing these issues in more complex manner. My position has always been films are not there to provide answers, or political statements, but to ask different, deeper questions about the issues at hand.”
The JFBB celebrates its 30th anniversary this year! The struggle is to not be “instrumentalized by any one group,” says Buder. “To make it clear we are not an anti-Muslim festival, and we are not an Israeli film festival, we are a Jewish film festival.
We have Israeli films but the goal is to provide wide range of perspectives, and to broaden the discussion of Jewish life to being all about the war, or about the legacy of the Holocaust.”
This year’s JFBB selection includes Nathan Silver’s offbeat rom-com Between the Temples, starring Jason Schwartzman as a cantor suffering a crisis of faith who begins to fall for his adult bat mitzvah pupil, played by Carol Kane.
Amir Moverman’s experimental documentary Reflections on Synagogue examines questions of Jewish history and migration and the reality of Jewish life in New York, through an examination of all 70 synagogues on the island of Manhattan; to Adar Shafran’s Israeli sports comedy Running on Sand, about an Eritrean refugee who gets mistaken for the new foreign player of a struggling soccer team and discovers his survival depends on his performance on the pitch.
“We hope to be able to work more closely with the U.S. majors in the future to secure bigger studio films for the festival,” says Buder.
