Citing budget constraints, Durham’s Carolina Theatre has morphed its annual Jewish Film Festival into a five-month series, featuring a single showing of a different Jewish film each month. Instead of featuring an average of a dozen new and classic Jewish titles over a single weekend, theatre director Jim Carl explained in an e-mail, the Jewish film series consists of one classic and four new titles, exploring themes of Judaism and Jewish culture. Last month kicked off the series with the 1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers.
For the remaining four months, the series will showcase international films new to the Carolina area. This month features Rosenzweig's Freedom, a German film about a young Jewish attorney defending his brother, accused of murdering a neo-Nazi leader in the 1990s (showing March 28th, see review below). April brings Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good (2001), a documentary about an unassuming Englishman who quietly saved 669 children during the Holocaust. The film, out of the Czech Republic, is the first effort at bringing his remarkable story to light (showing April 25th). May’s film, When Grandpa Loved Rita Hayworth (Czech Republic 2000), is a drama about a Czech girl that emigrates to Germany with her family in 1969. They struggle to find their footing in the new land just as Neil Armstrong is doing the same in the first moon landing. (showing May 23rd). Finally, in June the series concludes with the Israeli Watermarks - a documentary about the legendary Jewish sports club Hakoah and seven fearless female swimmers, who battled the odds and managed to become champions in the face of Nazi repression (showing June 27th).
Rosenzweig’s Freedom
Neo-Nazism is alive and well in modern Deutschland according to Liliane Targonwik's troubling 1998 German courtroom drama, Rosenzweig's Freedom. The less-than-optimistic fictionalized story of modern anti-Semitism was originally commissioned for television, but, thanks to a solid script and several fine acting performances, has gained recognition beyond Europe. Targonwik's dreary pessimism is gripping, but it's at the expense of every German in the film portrayed as at least mildly anti-Jew.
Fiery Benjamin Sadler plays Jakob Rosenzweig, a Jewish lawyer in 1991 defending his blue-collar brother Michael (Christoph Gareissen) against a legal system that has prejudices waiting around every corner. Michael stands accused of murdering a neo-Nazi leader, following a Skin-head assault on a refugee shelter where Michael's Vietnamese fiancée was housed.
Sadler steals the show with a bold and compelling performance, responding to the film’s shockingly casual racism with a sharp anger that seems frighteningly organic. Sadler’s Jakob regards every non-Jew with thinly-veiled cynicism, having spent a lifetime on his toes in a hostile environment. Sadler brings such searing intensity to the role that we embrace his suspicions despite our own inclination to see the good in humanity.
Unfortunately his brother Michael is not quite so well represented. Gareissen, looking like a degenerate hybrid of Will Ferrell and David Hasselhoff, is lost under the layers of make-up supposed to make him look “haunted.” He tries desperately to invoke empathy, but his overwrought performance only manages to leave the audience wondering, "So, is he, uh, like mentally handicapped, or what?"
Nevertheless, with the exception of Gareissen, every other actor does an admirable job of conveying the gravity of their roles. The neo-Nazis all look like fanatical murderers (laughing hysterically at a video game titled Concentration Camp Manager III), and conversely, each one of the good guys maintains an icy resolve to stand up for human rights. The undercurrent of systematic prejudice and subsequent distrust brought to life by these characters throughout the film is positively harrowing. Targownik's Germany is still clearly plagued by the shadow of the Holocaust.
The most intriguing moment of the film occurs when German lawyer Fritz Ahrendt is leafing through the Rosenzweig family photo album with Jakob's mother Rosa. The film has already cleverly established that now good guy Ahrendt had been a Hitler Youth, while Rosa spent her teenage years in a concentration camp, where her entire family was murdered. Ahrendt's sincere, yet stumbling, attempts at reconciliation and understanding create a biting reminder of their shared, though drastically different, past. Rosa reacts with an insistent amnesia, demanding that those years remain “forgotten”—- otherwise they'd “never have been able to start over.” This is the film at its best, most resonant point. These themes will linger long after the courtroom drama has ended. Targownik wants the audience to remember that the Holocaust is only gone because the country has chosen to ignore it, but the continuation of rampant ethnic violence and resentment has left little room for healing.
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