The Boston Jewish Film Festival (BJFF) reaches a major milestone this year, as it celebrates its 30th anniversary, making it one of the region’s most enduring and reliably solid film events.
Running November 7–19 at venues throughout Boston, the BJFF has consistently offered LGBTQ-themed films in keeping with its mission of presenting a wide lens though which to examine Jewish identity across genres and continents.
This year, one of the centerpiece films is the Massachusetts premiere of the Israeli feature “Red Cow,” an intimate drama from director Tsivia Barkai-Yacov. Set in an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, it and follows the sexual awakening of a teenage girl living with her widowed father Yehoshua (Gal Toren), an Orthodox Jew with extremist religious views including those forbidding homosexuality. Yehoshua leads a group of Israeli extremists who are raising a sacred red cow they believe will usher in a new age for Jewish people, allowing them to return to the Temple Mount.
“Red Cow” was co-winner (with “The Dive”) of Best Israeli Feature Film and Best Debut Film at the 2018 Jerusalem Film Festival. The festival also honored “Red Cow” Avigayil Kovary as best actress. She plays the teenage Benny, who must come to terms with her longing and desire for the self-confident Yael (played by Moran Rosenblatt, who starred in “Apples from the Desert,” which screened in the 2015 BJFF). Rosenblatt has been nominated for an Ophir Award (Israel’s Academy Awards) as Best Supporting Actress for “Red Cow,” which screens November 15, 7 p.m. at the West Newton Cinema and on November 17, 9 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts.
On the lighter side is the Massachusetts premiere of “David, in Brief,” a short documentary from San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker. Jeffrey Braverman who will attend the BJFF screening. His 16-minute film is part of the “Find Your Tribe Short Film Program,” which features international short films that focus on people searching for community, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places, screening on November 17, 6:30 p.m. at the MFA.
“David, in Brief” is a humorous look at a unique design on boxer briefs: a rendering in the crotch of the genitalia from Michelangelo’s David. A friend of Braverman’s bought the briefs from a street vendor many years ago after visiting the world-famous statue in Florence, Italy.
Braverman did a photo series featuring men clad in the underwear, then made the documentary, which screened last year in San Francisco’s Frameline film festival. It includes conversations with Reb Irwin Keller, a drag performer turned rabbi; and Skyler Cooper, a transgender war veteran turned activist who talk with Braverman about their own “David and Goliath” moments dealing with self-esteem and identify issues.
The Festival opens on November 7 with the Boston premiere of “Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre at 7 p.m. It’s the first major film documentary about one-of-a-kind entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., whose prodigious talents spanned vaudeville, Broadway, television, concerts and film while living at the center of tumultuous social change, from the Depression to the civil rights and anti-war movements. This opening night event begins with a live musical performance with local artists and concludes with a conversation featuring director Samuel D. Pollard.
“I’ve Gotta Be Me” also screens on other dates throughout the festival.
Born in Harlem in 1925, Davis started performing at age three and never stopped. He toured the country on the infamous segregated “chitlin’ circuit” with The Will Mastin Trio, tap dancing with his father and godfather. He was just 64 when he died of cancer in 1990.
In interviews, Davis discusses the horrific physical and mental abuse he suffered at the hands of fellow GIs during World War II. He used his gifts for singing, dancing and impersonations to win allies but mostly to save his sanity. Starting in 1951, Davis’s career exploded as he took the nightclub world by storm with appearances at Ciro’s in Hollywood and later in Las Vegas as a member of Frank Sinatra’s legendary Rat Pack. After a 1954 car crash cost Davis his left eye, he converted to Judaism, the most famous black figure to do so, owing in no small part to the influence of his friend and mentor, Eddie Cantor.
Show business legends interviewed in the film include Harry Belafonte, Billy Crystal, Norman Lear, Jerry Lewis, Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg. But some of the documentary’s most searing sections are those that chronicle how Davis was vilified for his romantic relationships. Actress Kim Novak describes how in the 1950s Harry Cohn, the tyrannical head of Columbia Pictures, threatened to have Davis killed unless he left Novak and married a black woman within 48 hours. Davis married Loray White for one year. In 1960, he was again lambasted by the press and public when he married Swedish actress May Britt. Paula Wayne, Davis’s costar in his early ‘60s Broadway hit musical “Golden Boy.” recounts how their onstage kiss resulted in death threats for both of them.
Besides an entertaining look at Davis’s legendary life and career, “I’ve Gotta Be Me” is an important chronicle of racism in 20th-century America.
For a full line-up, ticket info and more, go to Jewish Film Festival.
