Toronto Jewish Film Festival: Gone Digital, Yes, But Still Exploring the Human Experience
By Linda Barnard
Call it the 28th Toronto Jewish Film Festival: the sequel.
TJFF2020 returns with its fall edition October 22 to November 1, screening more than 50 features documentaries, and shorts for part two of the online fest.
After deciding to go digital in the wake of the global pandemic and presenting the first half of the lineup in May 2020, the TJFF has expanded its reach to allow viewers across Ontario to stream festival films.
A scene from The Crossing.
The festival opens with director Eytan Fox’s gently moving, inter-generational relationship drama Sublet, starring Tony Award-winning actor John Benjamin Hickey as a middle-aged New York Times travel writer who comes to Israel to explore the “real” Tel Aviv.
The trip will put needed distance between Michael (Hickey, excellent) and his husband in New York, giving him space to grieve a difficult loss. The buttoned-down writer sublets an apartment to immerse himself in a Tel Aviv neighbourhood but arrives to find young filmmaker Tomer (dynamic newcomer Niv Nissim) still in residence in the chaotic unit.
Free-spirited Tomer scoffs at Michael’s clichéd itinerary. He agrees to act as tour guide, their five-day exploration of the energetic city encouraging the emotionally stuck Michael to embrace life. Gradually, Tomer also finds himself changing, as he reluctantly examines his attitudes about people and relationships.
With compelling performances from the two leads, Sublet has echoes of Fox’s 2012 film Yossi, which also examined a gay man at midlife.
Fox will participate in a live Q&A via Zoom following the screening, one of a group of special guests and live events from programmers.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
TJFF artistic director Helen Zukerman said in a press release that expanding the festival’s digital footprint allows more people to experience films during COVID restrictions.
“Arts and culture, like never before, have provided a much-needed escape from the reality of the past few months and with this in mind, we’ve curated a selection of films that is sure to captivate, inspire, and touch your soul,” she said.
Also on the TJFF fall lineup is Emma Seligman’s delightful debut feature Shiva Baby, a hit with Original-Cin critics at its Toronto International Film Festival screening in September and director Beth Elise Hawk’s documentary Breaking Bread, about a Muslim Arab woman and MasterChef Israel winner who creates a food festival to bring Jewish and Palestinian chefs together to craft traditional foods.
Dust off your glam-ware for the documentary Army of Lovers in the Holy Land (dir. Asaf Galay) about flamboyantly ’90s camp act Swedish dance-pop group Army of Lovers. And get the inside scoop on Beth Myerson, Miss America 1945 in The One and Only Jewish Miss America (dir. Codi Ruttenbur).
The Crossing (dir. Johanne Helgeland) is a Norwegian family drama about child siblings who come up with a plan to save two Jewish youngsters hiding in their home by taking them across the border into neutral Sweden to reunite them with their parents.
The festival closes with Shari Rogers’ documentary Shared Legacies: The African-American Jewish Civil Rights Alliance, described as “a timely documentary that revisits the crucial lessons of Black-Jewish cooperation that serves as an urgent call for renewed solidarity in times of rising intolerance.”
For tickets, passes and the full schedule, go to tjff.com.