White Mountain Jewish Film Festival – FILM FORUM – 2021 –

THURSDAY, JULY 15, at 7:30 PM

SARAH’S KEY 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ud8qGXcPIk

  “… a poignant tale of two females confronted by the madness of history.”

                                                                                    Kirk Honeycutt – Hollywood Reporter

 “Sarah's Key”, based on the New York Times best-selling novel by Tatiana De Rosnay,  starts in Paris, 1942, where ten-year old Sarah is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families as part of the Vel’d’Hiv Roundup.  Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard – their secret hiding place – and promises to come back for him, but she and her parents are dragged from t 

 Sixty-seven years later Sarah’s story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup.  In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own future

Language French/English  - 110 Minutes

Based on Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Directed by Gilles PAQUET-BRENNER
Screenplay by Serge JONCOUR & Gilles PAQUET-BRENNER

Based on the novel by Tatiana DE ROSNAY

Cast: Kristin SCOTT THOMAS: Julia Jarmond,  

           Mélusine MAYANCE: Sarah,

           Niels ARESTRUP: Jules Dufaure

WATCH IT First ON: Netflix, Amazon Prime, I-tunes, Apple TV

Guest Speaker: Coming soon

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Thursday, July 29 at 7:30 PM

American Pastoral          

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzV3lEaEPs

 Based on author Phillip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. A Jewish-American businessman watches his life unravel after his daughter commits a terrorist act in protest of the Vietnam War.

Director: Ewan McGregor

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Riegert, Rupert Evans

Production year: 2016   Rating: R Studio: Lions Gate Films, Inc. Runtime: 108 minutes

WATCH IT First ON: Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTube

American Pastoral: Guest Speaker: Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin Taylor (born 1952) is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series

Recent writing:

Non-fiction

            The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered (2017)

            Debriefing: Collected Stories of Susan Sontag, Editor (2017)

            Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth (2020)

Fiction

            The Book of Getting Even (2008)

Thursday, August 5, at 7:30 PM

On the Basis of Sex                   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28dHbIR_NB4

Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg launches her career fighting for gender equality by proving discrimination "on the basis of sex" is unconstitutional.

Director: Mimi Leder   Production year: 2018 Rating: PG-13 Studio: Focus Features

Runtime: 120 minutes

 Cast: Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Kathy Bates, Sam Waterston

WATCH IT First ON: Showtime, Amazon Prime, Youtube ($13.99)

Guest speaker. TBA 

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Thursday, August 19th   at 7:30 PM

An Act of Defiance

About The Film

A gutsy lawyer risks career and family to defend Nelson Mandela and his inner circle, in AN ACT OF DEFIANCE, a historical thriller set in South Africa’s incendiary segregation era.

Mandela and nine other defendants, including Jewish anti-Apartheid fighters, faced a possible death sentence after their arrest during a summer 1963 raid. Sympathetic white Afrikaner lawyer Bram Fischer defends the activists against charges of conspiracy to commit sabotage and treason. As he fights to expose South Africa’s corrupt, unjust system, Fischer attempts to hide his own ties to the resistance.

This riveting drama expertly combines nail-biting political and courtroom intrigue to explore South Africa’s seminal struggle against racism, and the little-known Jewish figures who sought to end entrenched discrimination in their country.

Film Details: Running Time 123 minutes

Directors:Jean van de Velde

Year: 2018

Language: English and Afrikaans (with Subtitles)

Watch it First on Amazon Prime or Apple TV ($4.99)

An Act of Defiance: Guest Speaker

Stephen Clingman

Distinguished Professor

Stephen Clingman is Distinguished Professor of English and former Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute. He received his BA Hons. from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts since 1989, and was Chair of the English Department from 1994-2000.

 His research and teaching fields include South African literature and politics, postcolonial fiction, transnational fiction, and twentieth-century and contemporary British fiction. Besides his literary critical work, he has also published a biography and memoir, and has written reviews for the New York Times and Boston Globe.

Books:

            Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (1998), a biography of the white Afrikaner who led Nelson Mandela's legal defense at the Rivonia Trial

            Birthmark, a memoir (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015; Amherst: U of Massachusetts Press, 2016).

AWARDS AND ACCOLADES

            1999 Alan Paton Award for Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary; South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction.

            2012 Distinguished Faculty Lecturer and Chancellor’s Medal, University of             Massachusetts

            2014 Jackie M. Pritzen Lecture, Five College Consortium2016 Birthmark longlisted            for Alan Paton Award

Thursday, August 26 at 7:30 PM

TEL AVIV ON FIRE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQQa42URJw

A comedy about Israel-Palestine? Well, Here it is:

Salam, an inexperienced young Palestinian man, becomes a writer on a popular soap opera show after a chance meeting with an Israeli soldier. His creative career is on the rise until the soldier and the show’s financial backers disagree about how the show should end, and Salaam is caught in the middle!

Comedy, 97 minutes

Director: Sameh Zoabi

Hebrew with English subtitles

Watch it First on  Amazon Prime, Youtube, Google Play

Tel Aviv On Fire: Guest Speaker: Susan S. Lanser

         Professor Emerita of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature Brandeis University

Susan S. Lanser & Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Israeli–Palestinian narratives and the politics of form: reading Side by Side

As the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable than the oppositions of content might suggest.

AbstractAs the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable than the oppositions of content might suggest.