Compromised land Disillusionment and faith at the Boston Jewish Film Festival BY PETER KEOUGH
	The 15th Annual BostonJewish Film Festival At the Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Coolidge Corner, and the West Newton and in the suburbs, November 6 through 16.

Lots of people yearn for a lost Eden, but not everyone gets to see that Eden torn to pieces every night on CNN. The history of the Jews is that of Everyman writ large and catastrophically. Brutal dispersal from one’s origins, murderous persecution, a return to a homeland that proves more problematic than promised. Perhaps because of the dire nature of recent events, the selections in this year’s Boston Jewish Film Festival, some three dozen features spread over 11 days and several locations interspersed with assorted panel discussions on trenchant topics, seem particularly grim and ambivalent. In these films, the conflicts between tradition and progress, family and independence, isolation and assimilation, God and Mammon, look at times irresolvable or doomed to disaster.

At their darkest, though, a glint of if not hope then at least humor shines through, as in Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s delightful James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003; November 8 at 9:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with actor Salim Daw present), the best film in the festival and one of the best films of the year. James (played with limpid depth and gritty humor by Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe), a young pilgrim from the fictitious African village of Entshongweni, travels to Israel to be the first from his Christian community to set foot in Jerusalem, "the center of the universe." But the Promised Land turns out to be more like the Promised Scam. At the Tel Aviv airport, James is arrested as an illegal alien and then "redeemed" by Shimi (Salim Daw), a dealer in immigrant labor, whereupon he endures such unexpected torments and temptations as hourly wages and shopping malls. James’s determination to visit the Holy City withers before the assaults of greed, selfishness, and cynicism. But not entirely: a remnant of purity and faith endures, as does a wry sense of humor, and they make this sardonic allegory of innocence and corruption uplifting.

A kind of reverse of James’s journey takes place in Nicholas Racz’s inventive and unnerving The Burial Society (2002; November 9 at 7:30 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room and November 15 at 9:15 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts). The film finds Sheldon Kasner (Rob LaBelle), a loan officer at the Hebrew National Bank, at a turning point in his life: his employers are holding him upside down by his ankles from a bridge. So Sheldon resolves to makes some changes. He takes on a new identity, moves to a small town, and joins up with the three elderly men in the local chevrah kadisha, the Jewish burial society that tends the dead. Will this be an opportunity for Sheldon to experience rebirth in the Promised Land? Or is it a scam to bilk money launderers of $2 million? Racz uses achronological narrative and an unreliable narrator (LaBelle is an engaging mix of the hangdog and the enigmatic) to keep you guessing.

In The Burial Society, it’s said that the dead awaken to the blinding light of the Promised Land. Those in Amos Gitaï’s Kedma (2002; November 9 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts) have escaped death and had their eyes opened to something less promising. It’s May 1948, and the decks of the battered cargo ship the Kedma are overflowing with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Dumped on a barren beach, they blunder into the bloody birth pangs of the Israeli War of Independence, fleeing British patrols and finally finding "refuge" in the Jewish guerrilla army. The film concludes with a savage and apparently pointless battle and the shocking recognition that the refugees are re-enacting their Holocaust escape, with variations. Gitaï’s vision is Beckett-bleak and controversial. It’s also pedantic, its unmitigated pessimism reiterated by voice-in-the-wilderness harangues from representative characters.

A different fate awaits the Holocaust survivors in Michel Deville’s serene but prickly Un monde presque paisible/Almost Peaceful (2002; November 16 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with Michel Deville and co-writer and producer Rosalinde Deville both present), a splendidly humane ensemble piece about Jews resettling in Paris in 1946. Monsieur Albert (Simon Abkarian) offers shelter to camp survivors and refugees in his tailor shop. As they stitch together clothes, they also weave stories from their past and try to patch together their broken lives, often via unrequited or ill-judged loves and other attachments. But Michel Deville is far less obvious in his metaphors than that description would suggest; he captures the evanescence of joy and the burden of remembrance with acute detail and gentle irony.

The theme of remembrance lies at the heart of Daniel Blaufuks’s collage Under Strange Skies (2002; November 11 at 7 p.m. and November 12 at 8 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner screening room). Ostensibly a documentary about his German Jewish family’s flight from Nazi Germany to Lisbon (which was called "Europe’s waiting room" because it served as a transit port for thousands of Jews seeking refuge in other countries), it delves into the mysteries of memory and the fleeting illusion of home. The filmmaker’s narration interweaves with the recollections of his grandfather and of such famed Lisbon refugees as Heinrich Mann and Alfred Döblin, highlighting a montage of old photos, home movies, and archival footage of delicate beauty.

A more palpable artifact is featured in Pearl Gluck’s disarmingly whimsical memoir Divan (2003; November 12 at 8:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with director Pearl Gluck present). The sofa of the title belonged to a distant ancestor of the filmmaker who lived in a small Chassidic town in Hungary in the 19th century and offered it to a famed rebbe to spend the night. Legend has it that the rebbe complained of a lump in the couch, and that when Gluck’s forebear investigated, he found a chest full of gold.

Gluck hopes to retrieve that couch — minus the gold but filled with generations of memories — in order to placate her fundamentalist father, who has pretty much disowned her because of her "slipping" from the strict patriarchal rules of their Brooklyn Chassidic community. What follows is her pilgrimage through Hungary to obtain the couch; along the way she ponders her roots and her estrangement. A climactic postmodern twist restores her bond to the past and her family while vindicating her need to invent herself.

Gluck’s transformation of an object into something human and beloved inverts that ultimate tale of family rejection, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2002; November 11 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts), in which the human takes a turn for the worse. Russian director Valery Fokin is stark but puckish, the near monochromatic imagery evoking the gothic creepiness and mordant glee of Polish movie posters. How quickly one’s tenuous bonds to the family prove to be when one is turned into a giant cockroach, as meek clerk Gregor Samsa discovers one morning. Mimed by Evgeny Mironov without special effects and with little make-up, Gregor makes for a touching bug, and Fokin captures much of Kafka’s black comic spirit in pursuing this hideous cosmic joke to its oddly liberating punch line.

Meanwhile, in present-day Buenos Aires, Samy Goldstein (Ricardo Darín) awakens one morning after 40 years of troubled sleep and broken dreams to find himself changed into a monstrous TV star. The hero of Eduardo Milewicz’s irrepressible if flawed Samy y yo/Samy and I (2002; November 6 at the Museum of Fine Arts and November 12 at 7 p.m. at the West Newton, with Milewicz present at the MFA screening) has more than a little Woody Allen about him: he’s a cerebral neurotic loser whose dream of becoming a great novelist has faded into drawing material from his icy girlfriend and his stifling mother and writing jokes for a bad TV comic. Then Mary enters his life, a mystery spitfire who transforms his petty woes into a reality TV show that everyone finds hilarious. Why do they laugh? What’s the alternative? Milewicz’s weakness for Woody Allen is balanced by his taste for Jorge Luis Borges, who’s alluded to in the title (his story "Borges y yo") and in the tale’s penchant for the cryptic and the cosmically ironic.

The theme of repackaging or reinventing the bogus and rejected into something redemptive takes a troubling turn in Hany Abu-Assad’s extraordinary documentary Ford Transit (2003; November 11 in the Coolidge Corner screening room). In a Jerusalem divided by roadblocks separating Arab from Israeli, a fleet of Arab-driven taxis has sprung up to deal with the need for alternative transportation. Nearly all the vehicles are white Ford vans formerly used by the Israeli police and sold cheaply second-hand to the Palestinians. Abu-Assad follows one such driver, the low-key and dry-witted Rajai (who looks alarmingly like Derek Jeter), as he takes his fares past armed guards and tanks and through treacherous detours, occasionally venturing into transporting contraband like forged CDs for the black market. Rajai’s passengers have a lot to say about such topical issues as President Bush’s most recent speech and suicide bombers, and the film feels a little staged when B.Z. Goldberg, director of the documentary Promises (which was shown at the Boston Jewish Film Festival a couple of years ago), pops up in the back of the van to discuss the psychological implications of the Israeli occupation.

But Abu-Assad’s self-reflexive, self-conscious style and sensibility conjure Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, and they enhance the film’s realism and humanity rather than detaching the viewer. Like all those, Jew and non-Jew, caught up in this land of promise and perversity, Rajai shows a perseverance to match his tragedy. The Ford quits on him in the end, but he gets out to continue his journey.