Celebrating a film festival milestone

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LES Rabinowicz founded The Festival of Jewish Cinema in 1990. This year marks Rabinowicz’s 21st year at the helm.

Q: Fame and fortune aside, what drives you to keep going all these years?

A: A great passion for Jewish film. I really get excited by looking at interesting films. I was a film buff long before I started this festival, so I was involved in film culture. We started this festival in 1990 and I certainly didn’t expect to be here all these years later; we thought we’d run one festival and that’d be it. At the time there were a lot of films being made overseas that were showing at major international film festivals like Cannes and Berlin, Venice, Toronto, [but] that weren’t being shown in Australia. We thought it was a great opportunity to bring some of that back to Australia and show it to people here, and as it turned out it was a revelation. The festival is generally considered by my peers overseas to be probably the best program of Jewish films shown at a Jewish film festival.

You talked about your passion for Jewish cinema, but it’s not really a genre. Is there a common thread in Jewish-themed films, something that links them?

We speak about it as a genre even though, strictly speaking, it’s not a genre in the way that the western is a genre or noir is a genre. It’s interesting to have followed the evolution of Jewish film, because films have been made about Jewish subjects and themes since the earliest days of cinema. You can break Jewish films down into a number of things. There are films that deal with the Holocaust, films that deal with Israel and then there are films dealing with things happening in particular countries where Jewish people live. That’s the way it works. There are constants between cultures, constant themes that appear in films about Jews such as family, friendship, marrying in, marrying out and so on. The things you’re familiar with in your own community you tend to find in Jewish films.

Your festival gives Australian Jews the opportunity to see films they otherwise wouldn’t get to see, but how do you think the Jewish condition is represented in mainstream films that do get a general release in this country?

They’re mainly America’s representation of American Jews. It’s an interesting perspective on it and a wonderful place to start, but is it the final word? Of course not. Woody Allen makes great films, not all of them are that funny, but some of them are, and his films are Jewish in character, temperament and humour, but not so much in what’s actually on the screen. Still, they’re profoundly Jewish. There is far more to Jewish subjects, though, than these films have to offer us.

Jews and movies have been inextricably linked since the birth of cinema. What is it about our culture that informs the film experience so well?

Well it’s not necessarily so in Australia. There’s a dearth of Jewish filmmaking in Australia as far as I can tell. Every year we’re inundated with so many documentary films from around the world about survivors, about being Jewish, about living in Israel, about the social problems, but I hardly see any Jewish documentaries being made in Australia. It’s a surprise because we have a very big survivor community here and you would have thought that someone would have sat down and made a film about someone and what they went through, how they survived — there’s a dearth of films about that. The other point, of course, is that there are so few Jewish feature films made in Australia. You get one every few years — Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger was one, that came out a couple of years ago, and the Adam Elliot film [Mary & Max] — but you’d think we can do a bit better than this.

There would be plenty of people very envious of your job, flitting around the world from one glamorous international film festival to the next.

It’s been a pleasure and an honour, but I need to correct you on something. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. It’s very stimulating, it’s very exciting, but we don’t jet-set about from film festival to film festival. We spend some time in Europe, seeing people and creating a profile for the festival, but the events we go to are very carefully chosen and we don’t do them on unlimited expense accounts. There’s a great amount of work involved and people don’t understand the administrative load that goes with running a film festival. Also, the amount of films we need to view — at a 10-day festival, I’ll usually watch between 38 and 50 feature films and attend about 25 meetings, plus a number of other functions to go to. There’s no beer and there’s no skittles — it’s full on.

What qualifies as a Jewish film?

For us, a subject or a theme that’s Jewish, or a main character that’s Jewish, and usually that’s sufficient. In just about every program we’ll include something that’s at the edges of what may or may not be a Jewish film, because it’s not a fixed or finite genre.

Is the FJC a film festival for Jews?

Yes and no. Yes, lots of Jewish people do come, but I think the feature about it from the start has been that a lot of non-Jewish people come to it because of the quality of the films in the program. A lot of people come for the French movies and a lot of people come because our festival is the only place where what we show is shown. We also get a lot of mixed-faith couples. It was found a long time ago that this was something mixed-faith couples do together. We’ve always presented it as something for non-Jews to attend, it’s always been focused as an art-film event. It’s often attended by Jewish people who often aren’t very religious, or who are in just a perfunctory way and who aren’t affiliated with mainstream Jewish communal organisations. One of the great successes of our festival is the number of non-affiliated people, people who don’t turn up for anything else, who come to our festival with great enthusiasm and really enjoy it.

Looking back over the past 21 years, what are the films that stick out in your mind?

The comedy Next Time Dear God, Please Choose Someone Else, Rex Bloomstein’s documentary on Jewish humour, was a revelation when I saw it. Not so much because of the film and its humour, but the audience reaction. To see them laugh so much really stuck in my mind.

There were people buying tickets and scalping them later, I hadn’t seen that at a film festival before so that was quite a surreal moment for us. More recently the film that stands out — the one we get the most requests for — is Just An Ordinary Jew, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film. We showed it three years in a row. It’s an example of why an event such as ours is important because the film, despite being made by a well-known, internationally celebrated director, was missed by almost everyone.

We’ve shown films by Claude Lanzmann — Tsahal and Visitor From The Living, Sobibor. Lanzmann came to our festival twice, that’s an obvious highlight. We’ve shown a number of films that have won Academy Awards following screenings at our festival. Some of Alan Berliner’s documentaries — Nobody’s Business was one of my favourites; Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine was an extraordinary film; Nowhere In Africa was another of my favourites and To Live And Become.

There has been a proliferation of Israeli and Jewish-themed films making it to our shores over the past few years, but that was not always the case. Have you ever struggled to put a program together when the pickings were slim?

We’ve struck a very good year this year, but some years we’ve decided not to show big programs. We had some huge festivals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but then we had one year when there weren’t a large number of movies, or movies that were good anyway. So we only showed what we thought deserved to be shown, because we thought it was important to preserve the brand and our reputation.

ADAM KAMIEN