It'll be Semite on the night

Jason Solomons offers an overview of the UK Jewish Film Festival.

Nov  2 2006

Bar mitzvahs are hot right now. It won't be long before the UK Jewish Film Festival, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, can have a bar mitzvah of its own, but for now it will have to be content with screening several films about this cornerstone event in Jewish culture.

The festival opens on Wednesday with 'Sixty Six', the embellished story of director Paul Weiland's own bar mitzvah and its clash with England's victorious World Cup Final. It's a thrill to kick off the festival with a British film. Anglo-Jewish life is too rarely reflected on the big screen, especially accompanied by big advertising campaigns, with posters proudly screaming that it's from the same camp as 'Bridget Jones' Diary' and 'Love Actually'. Please God it should have their success.

I've been on the board of the UKJFF for two years now and was very keen to make this crowd-pleasing film our gala night. The rest of the programme fills in the bigger picture of where Judaism is at around the world. The other bar mitzvah film is 'Glow Ropes: The Rise and Fall of a Bar Mitzvah Emcee', which actually won at the New York Latino International Film Festival, illustrating that UKJFF films come from a wide variety of sources. This very indie comedy is more about the party organisers than the bar mitzvahs but it shows how Jewish culture is far more mainstream in America than over here.

Indeed, this is one of the eternal struggles for the UKJFF and its director Judy Ironside. Jewish content can be found in most American films: just look at the credits and there'll be Jewish names among the director, the stars, the producers and even the caterers (though probably not the gaffers or the stunt men). The festival prefers to look elsewhere, visiting festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Jerusalem and Venice and garnering films from Israel, Palestine, Argentina, France and Holland.

Israel's Amos Gitai will be visiting this year, with films including 'Free Zone' for which Hannah Lazlo won Best Actress at Cannes – though for me, a festival highlight will be the film's remarkable opening scene featuring Natalie Portman crying, set to a gorgeous new arrangement of a traditional Pesach song about a goat.

France is always a rich source of Jewish film (there are 750,000 Jews there, compared to 250,000 in the UK) and Chantal Akerman's films and visit should be hot tickets. French films tend to encompass the wider diaspora, too, often focusing on the delicate issues of Arab Jewry in films such as Laila Marrakchi's 'Marock' or Eran Riklis' 'The Syrian Bride'.

I'm particularly proud to have personally secured two screenings of 'Black Book' for the UKJFF, the new film from 'Basic Instinct' and 'Total Recall' director Paul Verhoeven, about a beautiful Jewish woman (the spectacular Carice van Houten) and her ordeal through WW II.

I caught the first screening of this at Venice and, thrilled by its rip-roaring adventure style allied to controversial political content about sex, survival and Israel, knew it would 'sex up' our programme and give our audiences an early taste of something extraordinary, a film that will, I think, go on to high-profile awards success.

It all helps position the UKJFF, which started life as an idea among cinephiles in Brighton, as a launch pad as well as an archive and summary of current Jewish issues and trends. There are, unbelievably, over 70 Jewish film festivals around the world (mainly in the USA, where even the tiniest Jewish community likes to get involved) so it's important that the UK version carves out its own identity, bringing a diverse experience of world Jewish culture to British audiences – check 'Harley Son of David', for example, about hairy Jewish bikers remembering the Holocaust.

We're looking forward to next year already – and putting something aside for that bar mitzvah.

The UK Jewish Film Festival runs until Nov 16. See ukjewishfilmfestival.org.uk for full times and venues.

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