Find it at the movies
JCC MetroWest hosts the New Jersey Jewish Film Festival
“This is a great year for Jewish cinema,” Stuart Weinstock of West Orange said.
He should know. He’s the director of the New Jersey Jewish Film Festival, he’s in charge of film programming at the JCC MetroWest in West Orange, where all the films will be screened, and he teaches about cinema at both Columbia University and Ramapo College.
“I have even more options than usual this year,” he said about the festival he’s programmed for the last few years.
And it’s not because Israelis and other Jewish filmmakers rushed to make movies about October 7 and the war against Hamas in Gaza that followed. Those films will be coming, he predicted, but getting a film from a brainstorm to a theater is a complicated process. It takes time.
“There’s only one film in the festival that’s directly related to October 7,” Mr. Weinstock said. “That’s ‘Of Dogs and Men.’ That film has a unique production story. An Israeli filmmaker, Dani Rosenberg, just took a camera, went down to Nir Oz,” one of the kibbutzim that Hamas demolished and decimated. “The film is special, a unique formal exercise,” as well as a story of tragedy and loss and trauma and maybe hope. “It screened at the Venice Film Festival, and it’s the centerpiece of the New York Jewish Film Festival.
At the JCC, “We’ll have the filmmaker on Zoom to talk about it.”
“Of Dogs and Men” will be screened on Sunday, March 23, at noon; Ms. Rosenberg will speak when the 82-minute film is over.
The films all will be shown in person, Mr. Weinstock said. Most of the discussions that follow many of them will be in person as well, but at times the film’s representative will be on Zoom. The audience, though, will be together in the JCC’s Maurice Levin Theater, watching the screen together.
So if the rest of the films weren’t in response to the nightmare of October 7, and not even particularly in response to the struggle against the proposed judicial reforms that overwhelmed Israeli society all year until that bloody day, why are there so many very good ones?
Covid, Mr. Weinstock said. “During the pandemic, people had the opportunity to hone their scripts and get their productions in the strongest possible shape while it was difficult to get anything off the ground.
“And then, in the last few years, since the pandemic ended, it’s become a lot easier to shoot a movie, and that’s when most of the films were shot.
“Most of what’s available to us for March of 2025 opened in mid to late 2024, so if you back out the production cycle, you see when they were scripted and shot. They were scripted during lockdown.”
The festival will open formally on the evening of Thursday, March 20, with a 7 o’clock showing of “Bad Shabbos,” “a comedy that played well at Tribeca — the audience loved it — and at other Jewish film festivals. “It’s a very New York film,” Mr. Weinstock said. “It’s a very Upper West Side film. It’s a meet-the-parents story, but it’s also sort of a caper. It’s about a young engaged couple — the woman has recently converted to Judaism — and they’re having their usual Shabbat dinner with his parents, but this night her parents — her Catholic parents — are coming to meet his parents for the first time.
“It’s all set up for a culture clash, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that somebody dies in their bathroom, and they have to figure out how to deal with it and still be able to make a good first impression.” (Doesn’t everybody hate when that happens?)
“We’ll have the director and co-writer, Daniel Robbins, and the other co-writer, Zack Weiner, here in person, and two cast members, Meghan Leathers and Theo Taplitz, will join us on Zoom,” Mr. Weinstock added.
In a rare move, the festival will show a film and its sequel. The sequel, “Matchmaking 2,” is what Mr. Weinstock called “the Saturday night spotlight film.”
“It’s an Israeli romantic comedy, and a good date-night film,” he said. “Last year, we showed ‘Matchmaking.’ That film sold out. It has been popular globally, and our community really went for it. And ‘2’ is a perfect sequel. It has even more humor and more depth than the original had, and we rarely get that in a sequel.” But he knew that not everyone who might want to see the sequel had seen the original, and this last year has been so busy that it’s understandble that many people who did see have forgotten some of it. “So in order to make ‘Matchmaking 2’ as accessible as possible, we are showing the first film again, on March 10, at 9,” Mr. Weinstock said. “That’s 10 days before the festival formally starts. “And the ticket is discounted, at $10.
“The movie’s not streaming, and it’s not even available on demand. It’s exclusively theatrical. So this will be a good opportunity for our audiences either to see it for the first time or have their memories of it refreshed.”
The festival features 17 films. That’s too many for even a paragraph about each one, so Mr. Weinstock chose two others, almost at random, to discuss. (Asking him to choose based on merit would be like asking him to name his favorite child. “I love them all,” he said.)
“Seventeen is a good number,” he said. “Our audience can embrace all these films without feeling that they’re being stretched too thin.”
But he mentioned “Hemda (Bliss),” directed by “veteran filmmaker” Shemi Zarhin and set to screen on Tuesday, April 1, at 7. “Zarhin tends to make movies about Mizrachi families,” Mr. Weinstock said. This one’s no exception. “It’s about a married couple, later in life, trying to hang onto the thing they have together as their world keeps getting destabilized.” The couple is played by legendary Israeli actors Sasson Gabay and Assi Levy. “They’re giving career-best performances,” Mr. Weinstock said. “There is so much depth and tenderness in this film, and humor too. I really love it. I hope it doesn’t fly under people’s radars.”
On Thursday, April 3, at 7 p.m., the festival will feature a better-known film, “Sabbath Queen,” the Sandi DuBowski work, filmed over decades, about the always colorful, often profound Rabbi Amichai Lau Lavie. (This newspaper featured a long story about it.) “We’ll have Sandi talk about it,” Mr. Weinstock said.
The festival will end on Sunday, April 6, with the 3 p.m. screening of “Midas Man.” It’s about Brian Epstein, the brilliant, driven, wild, drug-addled Jewish entrepreneur who managed the Beatles. “It’s a pretty straightforward biographical film with great actors in smaller roles,” Mr. Weinstock said. Eddie Marsan and Emily Watson are his parents, and “Jay Leno pops up as Ed Sullivan,” he continued. “They did a great job casting the four young actors who play the Beatles.
“Epstein was a gay man, living at a times when it was not safe to be gay,” Mr. Weinstock said. “The film doesn’t dwell on that, but it is part of his story, and his story is presented honestly. And it’s not just about Epstein discovering the Beatles. He was a very important person in British musical culture. You see him hustle. You see him figure out that his family’s furniture store is not going to be his highest calling. You see him go from there to record sales to music management.
“And you also see the other artists living in the shadow of the Beatles but having their own journeys. Gary and the Pacemakers; Cilla Black, who gets her start as a coat check in a club, a few others.
“You won’t hear a lot of Beatles music in the film,” Mr. Weinstock said. That’s because it’s too hard to get the rights to it. But the festival has come up with a solution to that problem. “We will have a live cover band, that will start playing as soon as the credits roll.”
Many of the films are in Hebrew, many are in English, some are in other languages, and all have subtitles, Mr. Weinstock said. Tickets to most of the films are $15; a few are $18.
For more information about the festival and to buy tickets, go to www.jccmetrowest.org/njjff.
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