Jewish Film at its Finest

By Alisha Kinman
Unversity of Florida

"After a scary movie about the world almost ending, we can walk into the sunlight and say, ‘Wow, everything's still here. I'm OK!' We like to tease ourselves. Human beings have a need to get close to the edge and, when filmmakers or writers can take them to the edge, it feels like a dream where you're falling, but you wake up just before you hit the ground." – Steven Spielberg

A genius. A cinema mastermind. A Jew.

Director and Executive Producer Steven Spielberg captivated and horrified audiences with the 1993 Holocaust film, "Schindler's List." He brought to the spotlight a story that made stomachs turn as he dug deep into the hearts of his audiences. But bringing a Jewish identity to the big screen doesn't have to be as frightening.

In Gainesville, Florida, also known as the home of the Gator Nation, located two hours north of Tampa, the University of Florida's Hillel recently hosted its first annual Jewish Film Festival.

During the festival, documentaries, short films, feature length, and foreign films were screened each Monday and Tuesday for three weeks. The first film featured was "The Yankles," a comedy about a Jewish baseball team that hires a former baseball coach who has had trouble with the law. Documentaries and foreign films were also a highlight of the six-day event. One of the films, "A Film Unfinished," was a heart-wrenching documentary about recently discovered raw propaganda footage from the Holocaust. "The Name My Mother Gave Me," a documentary directed by Israeli filmmaker, Eli Tal-El, followed Ethiopian and Russian Israelis who journey to discover their ancestral roots. Although typically different in genre and mood, each film gave the audiences a different story while tying it into Judaism.

Amanda Soloman, a student at the University, the Manoa Art chair, and the director of the film festival, had brought about the idea of the festival when I sat on UF Hillel's Manoa Art Committee in early 2010 (Manoa means Engine in Hebrew; at UF the Hillel student leadership group is called Manoa). In September of the same year, Soloman put a task force together of passionate students and film enthusiasts to make the dream a reality. Throughout the fall semester, Soloman held weekly screenings of Jewish films and recruited relentlessly through the semester.

Ranked in 2009 by Hillel as the largest Jewish student body population at any public university in the United States, it was just an instinct that the university would have potential to generate a large crowd from north central Florida. After all, the "Fiddler on the Roof" film adaptation (1973), and the "Hebrew Hammer" (2003) shouldn't be the only films that glorify the Jewish population.

When measuring the audience's interest in film geared toward a specific culture like French cinema or Cantonese cinema, the director must make the audience feel as if the cultural barrier is dissolved. But in Judaism, culture is not as easily defined. It is not just the Jewish beliefs, but the interaction between others, the distinct need to remember one's past, and the need to cherish a homeland that will make a person understand what it means to say "I am a Jew."

Alisha Kinman is a junior at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She is majoring in Public Relations with a minor in Communication Studies, and is very active in the local Jewish community. She is a public relations intern at the Hippodrome Theatre, a local professional theater, and loves to watch all genres of movies in her spare time. 

[Posted 4/5/11]