Jan. 12, 2005 From Woody to cricket at NY Jewish film fest By URIEL HEILMAN NEW YORK If art is a form of self-projection and film qualifies as artistic expression, then a Jewish film festival is a unique opportunity for Jewish self-reflection. And if the lineup at this month's 14th annual New York Jewish Film Festival is any indication, we Jews are still obsessed with our two dominant themes in the last century: the Holocaust and Israel-often in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. These two themes are the explicit subjects of many of the 29 movies selected for the festival, which runs through January 27 in Manhattan, and they crop up as subtext in almost all of the rest. This is not to say that the festival's movies are a monolithic lot; they also explore our neuroses, humor, inadequacies, families and diversity-and the rest of the things that set us apart and within humankind. Even in Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman's "Lost Embrace," ("El Abrazo Partido"), one of the few feature-length fiction pieces in this festival's lineup, the Holocaust makes an unlikely appearance. The protagonist, a rootless Argentine 20-something named Ariel, seeks to escape the economic depression of present-day Buenos Aires by using his survivor grandmother's provenance to apply for Polish citizenship and thereby make his way to Europe. But rather than the Holocaust, it is his absent father who is the great source of Ariel's angst-even though he left Argentina for Israel shortly after Ariel's bris. In everything, Ariel seems to be trying for escape-from his mother's affections, from his absent father, even his girlfriend's sexual attentions. The film's harried camerawork reflects this sense of rootlessness, but the camera and Ariel's life gradually grow steadier as this sometimes hilarious and ironic tale reaches its end. The Holocaust and anti-Semitism is the backdrop of British filmmaker Paul Morrison's "Wondrous Oblivion," a story about a budding friendship between a boy who loves cricket and his black neighbors in postwar Britain. As the neighbors tsk-tsk disapprovingly, the Jewish family members are caught between the friendly gestures of their new Jamaican neighbors and the hostility of the white, non-Jewish neighborhood in which they strive for acceptance. Thank God for the redemptive power of cricket, which brings this heartwarming story to its redemptive climax. Israeli director Savi Gabizon's "Nina's Tragedies," about a 14-year-old boy coming of age, is expected to be as big a hit among the festival's target audience as it was in Israel, where the film won 11 Ophir awards. In the movie, Nadav develops a boy's crush on his widow aunt, and he struggles with his feelings toward his dying estranged father and his aunt's new beau. Most of the festival's offerings are documentaries and, inevitably, many are about the Holocaust. Yael Kipper Zaretzky's "Permission to Remember" explores a man's claims to have saved the life of 50 Jews during the war. Sam Ball's "Poumy" is a 30-minute family documentary about a French woman's resistance during the war, told by the very articulate woman after whom the film is named; she died in 2003. Anja Salomonowitz's "You Will Never Understand This" presents three narrative of the Holocaust through the stories of three elderly Austrian relatives-a survivor, a socialist and a bystander. Yaron Zilberman's "Watermarks" is about a Jewish Austrian swim club formed after the Jews were banned from Austrian professional sports in the 1930s. Daniel Anker's "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust," presents the contrast about what the Jewish film industry in America was doing while the Jews in Europe were getting gassed. Among these the most poignant of the Holocaust documentaries is "Rene and I," about twins who survived Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's infamous experiments at Auschwitz. This riveting story, told by siblings Rene and Irene, as well as by the people who helped them along, is at once both heartbreaking and hopeful-and surprising to the end. "I always tried to be good, because I wanted to be Dr. Mengele's favorite child," Irene says with a sad half-smile as she tells of her days at Auschwitz. Irene, a bit more so than her twin brother, seems to have gone through more traumas than possible for a single person: losing her parents, being subjected to experiments by Mengele while seeking his approval, bouncing around from family to family in Europe after the war, getting sent to America and then being rejected by successive American families. But despite her multiple traumas-including a most surprising one toward the end, where we learn belatedly about one of the most remarkable aspects of this story-the portrait of Irene that emerges clearly is one of more than just another survivor. She and Rene turn out to be singular, wonderful people-both devout, both sweethearts, both dedicated to others and to each other. It's a relief to watch "Rene and I" after all the movies in the festival about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the differences between victim and oppressor are not so clear cut. "Another Road Home," a documentary by Danae Elon, daughter of Israeli author Amos Elon, is the story of two families struggling to come to terms with their relative positions within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and toward each other. Danae goes to New Jersey to look for the Palestinian children with whom she grew up in Israel-their father was her longtime babysitter-and when she finds them things grow only more complicated. Here, it is the Jews who can do no right and the Palestinians who are portraits of warmth, victimhood and fecundity. When Danae, a single woman in her 30s, finds the Obeidallahs in America, her adoptive country too, they welcome her into their homes and their family lives. She eventually brings her parents from Italy-they left Israel a long time ago-and they bring their father from Bathir, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. The Elons clearly are uncomfortable being Israeli, and they take pains to make clear what they don't like about Israel. By contrast, the Obeidallahs are proud Palestinians who are sincere, warm and at peace with themselves-something the guilt-ridden Elons apparently lack. Danae appears to be flummoxed by the complexities of the film's subjects, and her interviews turn out to be desultory, sometimes incomprehensible and often dissatisfying. By the time Amos Elon tells his wife at the end of the movie, "I don't believe in 'home,'" you're not surprised. Israeli director Dov Gil-Har's superior "Behind Enemy Lines" takes the same subject and explores its complexities and moral ambiguities far more directly, following around an Israeli police officer and a Palestinian journalist-both veterans of a successful two-week, pre-intifada coexistence program in Japan-as they take each other to points of conflict on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian fault line. The Israeli takes the Palestinian to Jerusalem's Moment café weeks after the suicide bombing there, Jaffa Street and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, and the Palestinian takes the Israeli to the refugee camp of Jenin, military checkpoint and-in of the films more telling moments-the Israeli's own home in the "settlement" of Ramot. Among the festival's other notable films are "Letters from Rishikesh," Daniel Wachsmann's drama about a Russian-born Israeli who goes to India in search of his peripatetic daughter; Michael Rainin's short "Waiting for Woody Allen," a sometimes nonsensical but occasionally hilarious hasidic take on Samuel Beckett's famous similarly named play; and Elliot Malkin's "My Bris," about he bagels-and-lox experience of a 1970s American bris.