A young Algerian in France is radicalized under Nazi occupation in 'Free Men.'
The 12th annual Jewish Film Festival kicks off its multi-weekend celebration of culture and tradition from Israel and points beyond. Here are a couple of highlights from the first weekend.
In Free Men,Younes, a young Algerian immigrant living in Nazi-occupied Paris, makes a living by selling whatever he can procure from the black market to his fellow immigrants. The reluctant hero is dragged into the French resistance when his apartment is raided by the police in search of his cousin. At first Younes agrees to serve as a police informant at his mosque in order to avoid jail time. Soon the friendships he forms with the hodge-podge of Jews and revolutionaries at the mosque convert him from reluctant participant to full-fledged rebel. Screens Friday at 6:15pm.
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in Darkness chronicles the life of an important Jewish writer. Sholem Aleichem revolutionized the culture by writing in his native Yiddish at a time when it was considered unrefined: good Jews, it was thought, wrote in Hebrew. Aleichem came of age just at the time when the East European Jewry was experiencing one of the moments of its greatest upheaval, the Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s. As a shtetl Jew, he was able to lovingly and humorously capture the essence of a dying tradition caught up in the inexorable tide of modernity. The most famous of these characters was Tevye the dairyman, adapted to the stage and later to film for Fiddler on the Roof. By the time of his death in New York in 1916, Aleichem was acknowledged as a seminal founder of Yiddish literature and godfather to a new age of Jewish writers. His influence was so great that 200,000 people flooded the streets to witness his funeral procession. Screens Sunday at 2pm.
The films will be screened at Temple Beth-El, 3055 Porter Gulch Rd, Aptos. More information can be found at santacruzjewishfilmfestival.com.
