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Sixty Jews recently meet at a Utah resort to discuss what it means to be Jewish in 2011. The identity summit, Reboot, included some notable pop culture makers (Jenji Kohan, creator of “Weeds,” and Ben Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker). One its founders Rachel Levin told the New York Times: “For so many years, being a Jew was defined by the Holocaust on one side and Israel on the other.” So the retreat redirects the lens to more current issues: Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and eventual anti-Semitic slurs, and whether folks can unplug enough to observe the Sabbath.
The 14th Miami Jewish Film Festival, running this Saturday to January 30, is screening the requisite Holocaust and Israel-themed films. But there’s also a film about a Yeshiva baseball team, a Grammy-winning klezmer band, and a Miami-specific phenomenon: Jubanos. Still, this is a film festival and the point is to see intoxicating narratives unfold around breath-taking images. Here are the most promising films at this year’s MJFF. We’ll leave the identity crisis to Reboot.
Protektor
The most critically acclaimed of the festival, Protektor is Israel’s submission to the Best
Foreign Language Film category of the Academy Awards and the winner of
the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award at the Denver International Film
Festival. Described as visually stunning, the noir tale follows a
husband and wife in Prague just before German occupation in 1938. It screens once during the festival — Wednesday, January 26, at 9 p.m. at Regal Cinemas South Beach.
