Quantcast
StarBulletin.com
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Search

HiLife Online

Give us YOUR Weekly Opinion

Reader Poll

How much will you spend on Christmas presents this year?

Sell your stuff in Hawaii classifieds
Subscribe to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin

HI LIFE: FILM FESTIVAL

Keeping a positive Jewish presence

By Star-Bulletin staff

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Feb 20, 2009

(Single Page View) | Return to Paginated View

The long-running film festival organized by local synagogue Temple Emanu-El gets some support from Honolulu Academy of Arts film curator Gina Caruso, as the event moves to the Academy's Doris Duke Theatre this year.

Temple Emanu-el 7th Annual Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival

Place: The Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Time: 7:30 p.m. Saturday through March 1

Tickets: $7; $6 seniors, students and military; $5 academy members; and $3 children

Call: 532-8768

 
Named in memory of the prominent civil rights lawyer who was active in the local Jewish community, the Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival garnered input from Caruso in hopes of featuring films that will attract, according to its stated purpose, "a larger and more diverse audience in support of a strong positive Jewish presence in Hawaii."

The festival kicked off Sunday at Temple Emanu-El with the screening of "The Band's Visit." The remainder of the screenings will take place at the academy, starting Saturday.

The schedule includes:

» "The Debt" (7:30 p.m. Saturday): Nominated last year for four Israeli Academy Awards, this film is a spellbinding cat-and-mouse espionage thriller set in mid-1990s Israel. Rachel, a retired Mossad agent, has a recently published memoir that boasts how she helped capture a Nazi war criminal known as the "Surgeon of Birkenau." But the man was never brought to trial, because he supposedly committed suicide while being held in a safe house somewhere in Europe.

More than 30 years later, a small newspaper reports that a frail, delusional man in a nursing home in the Ukraine claims to be the Nazi surgeon, and he is willing to admit to his crimes. The group of agents involved in the capture decide to keep their national-hero status intact by killing him before the lie gets back to Israel -- and Rachel is the one chosen to carry out the mission.

» "Arranged" (1 p.m. Sunday): A favorite with previous festival audiences, this film is about two young women -- one an Orthodox Jew, the other a Muslim of Syrian descent -- who become good friends as first-year teachers in Brooklyn, where they find that they share much in common, including impending arranged marriages.

» "Beaufort" (7:30 p.m. Sunday): A 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee, "Beaufort" chronicles the lives of a young outpost commander and his weary troops in the months before Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000. The men are occupying the ancient castle of the film's title, a place the army captured years before.

» "Noodle" (7:30 p.m. Feb. 28): Miri, a twice war-widowed flight attendant, is grounded when she finds herself with the 6-year-old son of her Chinese housekeeper after the illegal immigrant is deported. While she plans a journey to China to reunite mother and child, a relationship of love and trust forms between Miri and the boy.

» "Max Minsky and Me" (1 p.m. March 1): With her Bat Mitzvah approaching, a brainy Berlin teenager develops a crush on the prince of Luxembourg. Her only hope for royal romance, however, is to make her school's basketball team, which is going to Luxembourg to compete in a tournament hosted by the prince. But since she has no sports skills whatsoever, she gets a hotshot teenage boy to teach her to become a respectable player.

» "Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh" (7:30 p.m. March 1): A documentary about the Hungarian poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and a modern-day Joan of Arc. Safe in Palestine in 1944, Senesh joined the only military rescue mission for Jews during the Holocaust. Parachuting behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia with the intention of rescuing Hungarian Jews destined for Auschwitz, she was captured, tortured and executed. Her mother, Catherine, witnessed the ordeal while a prisoner with Hannah, and she later became her advocate. The film unfolds through the writings of both women.

The long-running film festival organized by local synagogue Temple Emanu-El gets some support from Honolulu Academy of Arts film curator Gina Caruso, as the event moves to the Academy's Doris Duke Theatre this year.


Temple Emanu-el 7th Annual Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival

Place: The Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Academy of Arts

Time: 7:30 p.m. Saturday through March 1

Tickets: $7; $6 seniors, students and military; $5 academy members; and $3 children

Call: 532-8768

 
Named in memory of the prominent civil rights lawyer who was active in the local Jewish community, the Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival garnered input from Caruso in hopes of featuring films that will attract, according to its stated purpose, "a larger and more diverse audience in support of a strong positive Jewish presence in Hawaii."

The festival kicked off Sunday at Temple Emanu-El with the screening of "The Band's Visit." The remainder of the screenings will take place at the academy, starting Saturday.

The schedule includes:

» "The Debt" (7:30 p.m. Saturday): Nominated last year for four Israeli Academy Awards, this film is a spellbinding cat-and-mouse espionage thriller set in mid-1990s Israel. Rachel, a retired Mossad agent, has a recently published memoir that boasts how she helped capture a Nazi war criminal known as the "Surgeon of Birkenau." But the man was never brought to trial, because he supposedly committed suicide while being held in a safe house somewhere in Europe.

More than 30 years later, a small newspaper reports that a frail, delusional man in a nursing home in the Ukraine claims to be the Nazi surgeon, and he is willing to admit to his crimes. The group of agents involved in the capture decide to keep their national-hero status intact by killing him before the lie gets back to Israel -- and Rachel is the one chosen to carry out the mission.

» "Arranged" (1 p.m. Sunday): A favorite with previous festival audiences, this film is about two young women -- one an Orthodox Jew, the other a Muslim of Syrian descent -- who become good friends as first-year teachers in Brooklyn, where they find that they share much in common, including impending arranged marriages.

» "Beaufort" (7:30 p.m. Sunday): A 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee, "Beaufort" chronicles the lives of a young outpost commander and his weary troops in the months before Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000. The men are occupying the ancient castle of the film's title, a place the army captured years before.

» "Noodle" (7:30 p.m. Feb. 28): Miri, a twice war-widowed flight attendant, is grounded when she finds herself with the 6-year-old son of her Chinese housekeeper after the illegal immigrant is deported. While she plans a journey to China to reunite mother and child, a relationship of love and trust forms between Miri and the boy.

» "Max Minsky and Me" (1 p.m. March 1): With her Bat Mitzvah approaching, a brainy Berlin teenager develops a crush on the prince of Luxembourg. Her only hope for royal romance, however, is to make her school's basketball team, which is going to Luxembourg to compete in a tournament hosted by the prince. But since she has no sports skills whatsoever, she gets a hotshot teenage boy to teach her to become a respectable player.

» "Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh" (7:30 p.m. March 1): A documentary about the Hungarian poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and a modern-day Joan of Arc. Safe in Palestine in 1944, Senesh joined the only military rescue mission for Jews during the Holocaust. Parachuting behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia with the intention of rescuing Hungarian Jews destined for Auschwitz, she was captured, tortured and executed. Her mother, Catherine, witnessed the ordeal while a prisoner with Hannah, and she later became her advocate. The film unfolds through the writings of both women.

(Single Page View) | Return to Paginated View



Story tools

Email  Email   Print  Print   Save  Save   Popular  Most Popular   Reprint  Subscribe

Share this story