In any field, a decade is a milestone — one of those moments when one can stop to look back and reflect on all the hard work that has gone into getting to that point in the journey. For a film festival, it’s particularly remarkable. There is just so much that goes into pulling together a successful festival that it’s no surprise that many (even the good ones) don’t go the distance, and instead stall out as one or another moving part begins to fail.
This week, we get to celebrate a local festival that has made it to the big 1-0. Through April 26, the Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival will present a wide variety of award-winning films from the world over, with screenings at theaters and colleges as well as more unusual venues like the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. One of the great things about the PVJFF is that it’s so spread out, giving filmgoers who don’t live near one of the Valley’s film hot spots a chance to catch a film they might otherwise miss. The full festival schedule is available at pvjff.org, but here’s a look at a few of the films screening this week.
Ari Folman’s fantastic 2009 animated feature Waltz with Bashir screens Saturday night at 8 p.m. at Shelburne Falls’ Memorial Hall. Based on the Israeli writer/director’s own involvement in the infamous Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre during the Lebanon War of 1982, it is a hallucinatory film that begins with a hole in the filmmaker’s memory. When a friend tells him of a terrible recurring nightmare tied to their time in the military, Folman — who was still a teenager when he served — realizes that he can’t recall any details from the period. To get to the truth of what happened, he searches out old comrades and friends whose memories have remained more clear. The stories that tumble out are a terrible reminder of the effects of war, especially on those young men and women sent to the front lines.
To tell his story, Folman turned to a striking animation technique that enhances the surreal, emotionally charged aspects of war. After first filming a live version of the film, Folman used that footage as the basis for a new storyboard that resulted in over 2,000 original illustrations. Those thousands of drawings were then turned into the animated film. But as stylish and arresting as the film looks, Folman never lets us forget his take on war: that it’s “so useless it’s just unbelievable.” For Folman, war is “just very young men going nowhere, shooting at no one they know, getting shot by no one they know, then going home and trying to forget. Sometimes they can. Most of the time they cannot.”
On Sunday at 2 p.m., the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst puts on a screening of musical comedy Mamele, the 1938 film (an early Yiddish “talkie” subtitled in English) starring Molly Picon as a dutiful daughter helping out her family after her mother’s death. That helpful side starts to fade, however, when she meets a handsome violinist who lives nearby.
A light-hearted entry in the festival comes to Greenfield’s Garden Cinemas on Monday night when Eytan Fox’s film Cupcakes screens at 7 p.m. It’s a kitschy musical romp about an international singing contest and the group of friends who enter it as a gag only to find themselves representing the country — an underdog story for the Glee generation.
Also this week: Historic Northampton might seem like an unlikely venue in which to catch a film, but this week the society hosts the third installment of the Fast Forward Film Series, an ongoing series curated by Anne Ciecko, associate professor of international cinema in the Department of Communication at UMass. Showing Sunday at 3 p.m. are Eminent Domain, about a man who has been building a castle in the mountains of Colorado for over four decades; and Lichtstark, about a young photographer who turns to his art to heal some real-life wounds. The directors of both films will be present to discuss their work, and the screenings are free and open to the public.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
