Jewish Film Festivals in Brazil
by Andre Soares
August is the month for Jewish film festivals in Brazil.
The 11th São Paulo Jewish Film Festival is currently taking place in Brazil’s largest city. It’ll be followed by the 3rd Rio de Janeiro Jewish Film Festival (Aug 16-23) and by another Jewish film event in Porto Alegre.
Among the São Paulo screenings are Dror Shaul’s Adama Meshuga’at / Sweet Mud, a kibbutz-set drama that shared with Aviva My Love last year’s Ophir Award for best Israeli film; Miguel Littin’s La Ultima luna / The Last Moon, about the friendship between a Jew and a Palestinian in 1914 Palestine; and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Ein Ganz gewöhnlicher Jude / Just an Ordinary Jew (above), in which the Downfall director tackles the issue of "Jewishness" in today’s Germany.
The São Paulo festival will also screen three Eytan Fox productions: Walk on Water, an affecting drama about a Mossad agent (Lior Ashkenazi) who discovers he can’t go on living the life of a merciless avenger; The Bubble, a somewhat meandering — but haunting all the same — Romeo and Juliet tale involving two young men, a Palestinian (Yousef ‘Joe’ Sweid) and a Jew (Ohad Knoller); and episodes from the Israeli TV series Florentine, about young Tel Aviv residents too immersed in their own lives to spend time debating Middle East politics.
Fox is expected to be present at the festival.
São Paulo, Rio, and Porto Alegre are home to the vast majority of Brazil’s Jewish population — somewhere between 100,00 and 200,000 people, depending on the source.
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