Sephardic Culture, Through The Generations
Three diverse films at annual festival worthy of theatrical releases.
It is an absurd mistake to think there is such a thing as “Sephardic” culture. On the contrary, there are many Sephardic cultures, almost as distinct from one another as fingerprints, certainly as different as the similarly variegated Ashkenazi cultures.
A look at the program for this year’s New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, which opens on March 12, should serve as a vivid reminder of that basic reality. The musical traditions of Algeria on display in the opening-night screening of “El Gusto” are utterly unlike the musical culture outlined in the program of shorts on the Bukharian Jews of Queens, or the Moroccan music of “Khoya: Jewish Morocco Sound Party,” another festival event.
The musical connections always seem to come to the fore in this series, but gradually the festival has also risen in stature to the point where it usually screens several films that will be theatrically released. Three of this year’s films are particularly worthy of mention.
With the 1995 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires back in the news, this is a fortuitous moment for the release of “God’s Slave,” a taut thriller directed by Joel Novoa Schneider. The film is a Venezuelan-Argentine co-production, which is appropriate because one of its central characters is a sleeper agent working in Caracas who will be sent to Argentina on a terrorist mission. Novoa, himself a Venezuelan, offers a pair of protagonists: Ahmed (Mohammed Alkhaldi), a Muslim militant whose parents were assassinated during the Lebanese Civil War, and David (VandoVillamil), a Mossad operative who saw his older brother killed in a suicide bombing in 1967.
Novoa keeps the two apart for almost 50 minutes, with Ahmed building a life for himself as a doctor, husband and father in Caracas before being called to Buenos Aires by his controller, while the bulk of David’s screen time is spent tracking terrorist threats against the Jewish community of the Argentine capital. Novoa interweaves their activities quite deftly, thanks in no small part to a terse but evocative screenplay by Fernando Butazzoni. When their paths finally do cross, it is a collision with ramifications that echo for several minutes. Not surprisingly, the second and last time they come together is the film’s impressively staged climax, a modest, efficient gunfight that is the culmination of a series of betrayals.
more...
[hr]
It would be interesting to see these films. Have to wait for them to pop up on Netflix.
= new reply since forum marked as read
