Boston Jewish Film Festival '19

Fig Tree (2018)

Dir. Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian

Director Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian drops you right into daily life in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa during the long Ethiopian Civil War. The year is 1989, and American audiences plunge into a completely new culture with the backdrop of a chaotic war, where teenage boys are “kidnapped” to supply the government’s army.

The protagonist Mina (Betalehem Asmamawe), 16, is Jewish and lives with her grandmother (Weyenshiet Belachew) and her brother Rata (19), who has lost his arm in the war. A Christian woman and her son, Eli (Yohanes Muse), also live with the family. Mina grew up with Eli, and now, in adolescence, they are in love. The family goes to great lengths to hide Eli from the constant army raids to round up boys. When her chores are done, Mina steals away to meet Eli at their trysting spot, a giant fig tree.

A wheeling-dealing government official arranges papers and transportation for Jewish citizens to immigrate to Israel, and Mina’s grandmother has been working with the woman to arrange the family’s escape. Mina’s mother is already in Israel. But Mina’s distraught—how can they leave Eli and his mother behind?

The film captures “first love”—its childlike innocence awakening to sexual desire. These beautiful scenes between Mina and Eli, more than anything else in the movie, bring us into the family circle and the terrible ordeals the members endure. We experience what it really feels like to witness a son or your love being snatched by the enemy—being captive and abused to face what horrible fate?

Because we dive straight into the lives of Mina's family without any back story or exposition, we have to work fast to learn the characters’ names, their customs, the war situation, and the plot. This full-immersion method of storytelling is the most effective way for an audience to experience a foreign world and crisis situation as if in it themselves.

In Fig Tree, women play a strong role. They absorb all the tragedies occurring around them; they keep life going for everyone else. They’re the bulwark and the source of wisdom for children and men to depend on.

The movie’s cinematography also tells the story (and won Israel's equivalent of an Oscar). Even though we’re in a tense, scary, unpredictable war zone, the film is quiet, told more through the actors’ faces and the scenery than through their dialogue. We become familiar with this setting and its culture; we become part of the community. Mina’s family could be ours; we know the members that well, We easily identify with one character’s anguished words, “I can’t deal with all their evil anymore!”

Fig Tree is a beautiful, honest look at our world and the violence and cruelty that pervades it.

My Polish Honeymoon (Lune de Miel, 2019)

Dir. Élise Otzenberger

Élise Otzenberger’s film My Polish Honeymoon offers audiences an enjoyable time-out for its quirky characters, honest realism, humor, and poignant moments. The structure is a road trip. The film opens with thirty-year-old Anna (Judith Chemla) in a high-anxiety state just before her departure for Poland with her husband Adam (Arthur Igual). They are Parisians, but Poland’s the homeland of both their grandparents who were Jews during the Holocaust. Anna’s grandmother survived and settled in Paris, but Adam’s grandfather was among those in Zgierz, north of Łódź, where not one Jew remained after the war. The trip centers on a commemorative ceremony for the murdered families of Zgierz.

Anna’s parents arrive to babysit six-month-old Simon, while Anna and Adam take a postponed “honeymoon” to Poland. Both the film’s title and the honeymoon idea have several connotations to ponder.

In the opening scenes, as the couple tries to get out of their apartment for the airport, Anna’s high-voltage personality that controls everyone and everything sets the stage for striking realism in the story. Her behavior is somewhat off-putting at first—she barks orders and rudenesses to her loved ones—but actually, this style of family communication is what goes on inside most people’s homes. Ultimately, Anna’s histrionic behavior, her swings from exuberance to total collapse, warm us to her, for she also comes across as authentic, likeable, sincere, deep, and human. In this way, the film imparts truth about how individuals love and care for each other despite daily annoyances, grievances, and friction. The most intense scene between Anna and Adam—a shattering, pain-inflicting argument—is a universal with couples and an achievement of the film for capturing it.

Another achievement is the movie’s funny moments. They, too, are so real. While the film is dealing with an overall heavy subject—close relatives who have or have not survived genocide and what that means for their descendants—it simultaneously lets us enjoy present-day, hilarious moments. My favorite scene is when Anna arrives in Krakow, overflowing with excitement for discovering her family’s homeland and culture. It’s cold outside. She goes into a shop to buy socks from a pretty Polish woman her own age. Immediately they hit it off, babbling away in their own languages—French and Polish—with lots of hand motions and laughter. The Polish woman “understands perfectly” what Anna wants (socks) and brings out a samovar. They go on talking and agreeing on everything with the aid of their exuberant sign language—“Yes, of course, exactly, I know just what you mean!” They hug goodbye with effusive appreciation for their encounter. This is a marvelous “real moment” in the movie, capturing how people can communicate their warmth and innate humanity without understanding each other’s language. Adam witnesses the scene with a baffled face: “Is this for real?” Yes, Adam, it happens.

The movie’s central theme is remembrance. A survivor of the concentration camps gives a talk to adolescents in a plundered Jewish cemetery. She shows them a photograph of herself as a child imprisoned in Bergen-Bergen. She says, “I bear witness. Look at me in this photograph and don’t believe anyone who tells you the Holocaust didn’t happen.” Remember.

Adam sees a jolly-looking tour bus for Auschwitz, along with souvenir kiosks. He says it’s like Disney—offensive commercialization of the Holocaust. He has a point. And yet, to get multitudes to the site and its horrors, so that they remember, and honor remembrance, buses might be needed, and perhaps the souvenirs touch the heart and memory long after the visit. It would help if the buses’ sides weren’t blazoned with “Auschwitz” and “Schindler,” turning the Holocaust a money-making industry.

The movie doesn’t exonerate present-day Poland. It judges it, or allows its characters to judge the place, the people, the past. Anna’s grandmother’s house in Kazimierz is gone. Its place in a line of other houses is an empty, overgrown lot, as if her house alone was swiped from the landscape—her past, her aberrant Jewishness eradicated. Why is the lot still empty? Almost a century has passed. It’s like a symbol of the erasure, in a bad way, not a memorializing way. We’re told that once she settled in Paris, she was “over being Polish, over being Jewish. She was now a good French woman, a Parisian.”

Although Anna had brought her son’s foreskin to Poland, thinking she might bury it in the homeland, she instead takes it back to Paris, where Adam buries it in one of their potted plants on the apartment’s window ledge. They are Parisians. They are Jewish-Parisians. Paris, not Poland, is home.

The movie’s soundtrack by David Sztanke (pianist, singer, arranger, composer, and performer) is notable. Lots of Chopin (Szopen was a Pole), and all of the music expertly matched to the mood of each scene. When soft and tender, when touching loss and grief, the music never slips into sentimentality; it always hits the accurate feeling.