The following three movies, from Germany, Israel and France respectively, show the international diversity of films at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. In all, 12 countries are represented at the festival.
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Max Minsky and Me
In this German movie, Nellie Edelmeister is a 13-year-old girl in Berlin preparing for her bat mitzvah. But the Hebrew lessons bore her to death.
Nellie is interested only in astronomy and outer space, and her crush on Prince Edouard of Luxembourg, a handsome teenager who is also interested in astronomy.
Nellie Edelmeister dreams of meeting
the prince of Luxembourg in the German film Max Minsky and Me.
Nellie is studious and clever, but typically, she’s a klutz in sports. When her school announces that the basketball team will be playing a tournament in Luxembourg hosted by the charming prince, Nellie is determined to make the team at all costs.
Enter the new kid in school, Max Minsky, who happens to be good at basketball. Nellie talks him into giving her basketball lessons in exchange for doing his homework and gives him the fees his mother is paying her to tutor him.
Much to her mother’s chagrin, Nellie starts skipping Hebrew lessons to practise basketball to achieve her only shot at meeting the prince.
Along the way, she learns about herself and her faith.
Max Minsky and Me is a delightful and charming coming-of-age movie that will please adults and teens. Highly recommended.
In German with subtitles. May 4, 1 p.m. Al Green Theatre and May 6, 6 p.m. Sheppard Grande.
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No Exit
This Israeli feature is a commentary on the recent popularity of reality TV shows and asks the question, just how far would a TV show go to boost its ratings?
The show in question is called Choice of Heart, a mixture of Big Brother and The Bachelor. Ten young women and one man live in a house, their every action captured on camera. The women vie for the heart of the man, who eliminates one of them each week, and at the end the winner gets a cash prize and marries him.
What the women don’t know is that the man is blind. A conscientious objector who served in Lebanon, Eitan comes out of the war psychosomatically blind. The producers of the show outfit him with a special set of glasses with a camera that allows them to see what he “sees.” Backstage, his rehabilitation therapist, Yael, directs his movement through a special prosthetic in his ear, telling him what he “sees” and directs his actions around the house.
Conceptually, this is intriguing, and actually would have made quite an interesting TV show. But after the setup, the first half of this movie moves with the pace of a soap opera. It’s only toward the last half hour that the movie picks up, when some suspense is thrown in and the twists and turns start happening.
When the police are called in to deal with an accident in the house, the cop is also part of another reality show. When one of the girls is taken to hospital, there is a camera in the ambulance, presumably for yet another reality show, and you realize just how much of our culture TV reality shows have penetrated. This is really not far from the truth is it?
In the studio itself, security cameras capture the crew’s every move, and nothing is secret from the glaring viewpoint of the camera.
The ending makes you realize that there is nothing these so-called reality shows wouldn’t do to prop up their slagging ratings.
Though it could have been better, No Exit is an interesting satire and commentary on reality TV shows and our fascination with voyeurism.
In Hebrew with subtitles. May 6, 8:30 p.m. Sheppard Grande.
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Bad Faith
Can intermarriage work?
In this French film, Clara and Ismael have been dating for four years. Clara is Jewish and Ismael is Muslim, and they’re very much in love.
Then Clara tells Ismael that she’s pregnant. They’re both happy about it. But it’s time to tell their parents about each other, and it all goes downhill from there.
Clara goes to her family home to tell her parents about Ismael.
“Is he one of us?” her mother asks.
“French? Yes.”
“OK, but is he…”
“No. He isn’t.”
“That’s OK,” her mother says. “We like the Sephardim, too.”
Meanwhile, Ismael can’t bring himself to tell his mother about Clara and complications begin.
Clara even begins to wonder just what being Jewish means. It’s all about guilt, her friend tells her. “Maybe being Jewish is like eating Italian panini on Pesach and losing sleep over it.”
Clara and Ismael begin to quarrel with each other over the mezuzah she insists on hanging outside their door and what to name the baby. Ismael begins to quarrel with his friends about Mideast politics.
No matter how much they love each other, it becomes obvious that the cultural differences hang like albatrosses around their necks.
Filled with misunderstandings and miscommunications, this modern-day Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful, moving movie.The ending is a nail-biting thriller as Ismael races across Paris to prevent a horrible tragedy.
Bad Faith is a warm, moving and at times funny movie about mixed race relationships and goes a long way to show the cultural similarities that such seemingly opposing ethnicities have. Well worth watching.
In French with subtitles. May 5, 8:30 p.m. Bloor Cinema, and May 7, 3:30 p.m. Sheppard Grande.
For tickets and other information, visit www.tjff.com.