Mourning work(s) New Jewish film at Brandeis BY MATTIAS FREY
	"Jewishfilm.2005: From Auschwitz to America and Israel" At the Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque, Sachar International Center, Brandeis University through April 10.

Years before Sigmund Freud left Vienna to escape Nazi persecution, he composed an essay on "Mourning and Melancholia." According to Freud, mourning is the response to a real loss, whereas melancholia is the reaction to an imagined loss. The 10 films — most US or Boston premieres — of the "Jewishfilm.2005" series at Brandeis plumb the historical and contemporary depths of mourning and melancholia and show how porous the boundaries between them often are.

Personal mourning forms the backdrop of Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer’s new documentary Goodbye Holland: The Extermination of the Dutch Jews (2005; April 3 at 2 p.m., with the filmmaker present). Using as a frame the story of his relatives, who were betrayed by neighbors, Lindwer investigates the complicity of ordinary Dutch citizens in the deportation of 100,000 Jews. Goodbye Holland corrects the portrait of the Holocaust in the Netherlands that Anne Frank’s unfinished diary — and even more its subsequent stage and screen incarnations — paints. As a witness attests in the film, Frank wasn’t as convinced of the universal goodness of every person after she arrived at Bergen-Belsen.

Widowed Once, Twice Bereaved (2004; April 3 at 4:30 p.m., with the filmmaker present) moves to a contemporary site of mourning, today’s Israel, where Orna Ben Dor chronicles five women whose husbands or children were killed in the suicide bombing at a Haifa restaurant in 2002. Dor examines loss at the private level. No government monument can express or alleviate these women’s pain. Each retreats to her own private memorial: one woman preserves her daughter’s room full of Beatles posters and photographs; another finds solace in dinners with her dead children’s friends. In the process, Dor elegantly captures Freud’s notion of mourning work — "Trauerarbeit" — eternally in progress.

The series’s most original documentary is In Satmar’s Custody (2003; April 10 at 4:30 p.m.), a devastating indictment of the ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jewish sect. Based in Brooklyn and elsewhere in Greater New York, Satmar refuses to recognize Israel and lobbies Yemeni Jews to emigrate to its enclaves in the US instead. The film follows one such Yemeni couple, Yahia and Lauza Jaradi, whose transplantation to the Satmar community proves disastrous. Nitzan Gilady delivers a stranger-than-fiction story of group coercion with a poetic, elliptical style.

If the documentaries deal most immediately with mourning, the fiction features are studies in melancholia. Metallic Blues (2004; Saturday, April 2 at 8 p.m.), a German-Israeli-Canadian co-production, sketches a generation of Germans and Israelis who know the Holocaust only from hearsay. Two small-time Israeli car dealers think they’ve driven a hard bargain on a lightning-blue ’85 Lincoln Continental stretch limo, and they proceed to Düsseldorf hoping to unload the car for a hefty profit. They at first envision Germany as an Autobahn playground, but their dreams dissolve into an increasingly hallucinatory confrontation with a history they never experienced. Although a film that gives voice to characters’ stereotypes risks reinforcing them, Metallic Blues ably describes an unfortunate situation that persists in both countries.

Turn Left at the End of the World (2004; April 10 at 7 p.m.) is the brightest film of the series. Set in 1968 in a tiny village in the Negev desert, this coming-of-age sex dramedy was a huge hit at Israeli box offices last year. The film’s colorful texture and carefree vibe transport viewers to a simpler time. But even this spicy tale of Indian and Moroccan Jewish immigrants has a dark subtext: nostalgia always implies melancholia in the way it evokes a past that can never be recovered.

A note for early birds: tonight, March 31, at 6:30 p.m., there will be a screening of Amerikaner Shadkhn/American Matchmaker (1940), Edgar G. Ulmer’s delightful Yiddish-language romantic comedy. Beautifully restored by the National Center for Jewish Film thanks to generous contributions, the film’s reappearance ends years of real cinematic loss. I ask myself what Freud would name this, an instance of how mourning works.