As usual, the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the premiere events on the cinematic calendar, presented several films of Jewish interest. This year, the focus was on documentaries, and the topics ran the gamut from the Kasztner affair during the Holocaust to the lives of Jews in Baghdad before and after the Six Day War.
Joe Balass, a Montreal filmmaker born in Baghdad in 1966, has few personal memories of Iraq, since he and his parents escaped when he was four years old. But in Baghdad Twist, a 33-minute National Film Board of Canada production, he looks back at his family’s past in Iraq through the media of an extended interview with his mother, family photographs, home movies and archival images.
He thereby produces a film that is by turns nostalgic, haunting and terrifying.
The recurring image in Baghdad Twist is a dimly lit dance floor at a wedding reception in the mid-1960s, where smiling, formally dressed middle-aged couples enjoy themselves. Judging by the vibes this harmless image conveys, one can’t begin to imagine that Baghdad’s venerable Jewish community was on its last legs. Certainly, the scene captured on Super-8 film took place before Saddam Hussein and company seized control of Iraq, which had been home to Jews since the Babylonian period.
Baghdad Twist begins as Balass’ mother remembers the city of her youth, the house by the river in which she was raised and the boiling hot summer months she endured. “Those were the days,” she exults as old photographs of her and her husband in their bloom appear on the screen.
Not much times elapses before she discusses the precipitous decline of the community in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war, in which Iraq participated.
“We started not to be comfortable,” she observes, saying that Jews took to remaining inconspicuous.
As the political climate in Iraq worsened, Jews emigrated. Among those who departed were Balass’ maternal grandparents. Their departure, shortly after his mother’s marriage, did not have much of an effect on his self-confident mother. “I was young and didn’t think about that,” she says. “I didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
She describes the early 1960s as a “nice, calm” era. “I was Iraqi, a Jewish Iraqi, and that was it,” she says, savouring the memory of a milkman who milked his cow at her doorstep.
But in the aftermath of the Six Day War, in which Iraq also took part, everything changed. Iraqis who had Jewish friends suddenly turned cool and distant. “Arabs started to hate us,” she laments. Radio stations urged Iraqis to spy on their Jewish neighbours. “We were scared to death,” she admits. Balass’ paternal grandfather was arrested and imprisoned three times, accused of transferring funds to Israel.
The public hanging of Jews in Baghdad, to the chants and cheers of thousands of bystanders, was the last straw for Balass’ parents. As his mother puts it, “”If we stay, we are dead. If we leave, maybe we’ll survive. I don’t know.” They depart in a hurry, food still in their fridge, and a chapter in the history of the Diaspora ends on a sombre note. Balass, to his credit, distils the essence of that atmosphere succinctly and competently.
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Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Jeff Goldblum as a German Holocaust survivor who finds his way to Israel in the 1950s, is a graphic but unsatisfying film about the terror and humiliation of persecution and the redemptive powers of laughter and hope.
Adapted from a novel by Yoram Kaniuk, Adam Resurrected is set in prewar and postwar Germany and in Israel.
The opening sequence, taking place in a small Tel Aviv hotel in 1961, introduces us to Adam Stein (Goldblum), a cabaret comedian and circus performer who was once dubbed “the funniest man in Germany.” Stein, after apparently trying to kill a woman, is escorted by two gentle attendants to a waiting car and returned to a mental institution in the desert for Holocaust survivors.
The film, whose expressionist cinematography captures the blinding landscape of a desert and the misty darkness of a concentration camp, shifts back and forth between the present and the past as Stein’s journey from mirth to horror unfolds. In scenes from Berlin, circa 1926 and 1936, Stein shows off his mettle as an entertainer. Even Nazis in the audience are amused by his wicked sense of humour. But as Germany is Nazified, Stein stands on the precipice. Told one night by stormtroopers that, as a Jew, he has no place in the new Germany, Stein, rather naively, protests. “I’m not political,” he bleats out, not realizing that his days are numbered in Berlin.
In a further flashback, following Stein’s trip back to the sanitarium in Israel, he disembarks from a train, barking dogs at his heels in a bleak concentration camp. The sarcastic German commandant, Klein (Willem Dafoe), recognizes Stein and adopts him as his personal entertainer. On his orders, Stein gets down on all fours and acts like a dog. Later, at the institute in Israel, Stein heals a young man who has been brutalized and can only communicate through barks.
The movie, which also stars the Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer as an empathetic nurse, is bathed in a surreal, almost otherwordly aura, making it virtually impossible for a viewer to identify with its passions. Goldblum delivers a strong performance as a survivor who seeks to overcome his trauma, but Adam Resurrected is hardly the stuff of high, riveting drama.
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Killing Kasztner, by Gaylen Ross, is a clinical, blow-by-blow account of the Kasztner affair, one of the most intriguing and still controversial episodes in the annals of the Holocaust. The person at its beating heart, Rudolf Rezso Israel Kasztner, was a Jewish lawyer, journalist and Zionist activist based in Budapest who headed an outfit known as the Aid and Rescue Committee during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. His claim to fame or infamy, depending on one’s interpretation, rests on two related developments. Kasztner conducted negotiations with Adolf Eichmann and his colleagues in 1944 to save imperilled Hungarian Jews from the gas chambers. In exchange for a handsome ransom, he also facilitated the departure of more than 1,600 Jews on a special train to neutral Switzerland via the Bergen-Belsen camp.
After the war, Kasztner and his family immigrated to Israel. In 1953, while employed by the Israeli government, he was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator. There was a libel trial, during which the judge ruled that Kasztner had “sold his soul to the devil.” The Supreme Court overturned much of that lower court ruling, but the die was cast. In 1957, a young right-wing radical named Zeev Eckstein assassinated him, adding a fresh and unnerving layer to an already convoluted case. Ross’ absorbing documentary – which implicitly portrays Kasztner in a sympathetic light and raises disquieting issues about his trial and death – features testimony from Eckstein, Kasztner’s articulate daughter Zsuzi, her three daughters, the son of the lawyer who prosecuted Kasztner and the publisher who made hay out of the trial.
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The Heart of Jenin, by Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter, recounts the story of a Palestinian father from the West Bank who donated the organs of his 12-year-old son, shot by an Israeli soldier, to five Israelis, including a girl from a haredi family in Jerusalem. This impassioned film, breathing humanity and exuding sorrow, underscores the yawning gap between Israelis and Palestinians, even as they are both in a state of mourning.