Ohad Milstein’s award-winning documentary “Summer Nights” instantly wins the viewer’s heart with its central subject, the director’s 6-year-old son Alva. Not only is the boy cuter than the proverbial pair of bug’s ears, he’s also incredibly curious, possesses a wonderfully beatific smile, and proves entertainingly playful.
Milstein’s film admittedly has elements of a home movie about it. The bulk of the movie follows Alva as he enjoys the summer before he enters first grade. The events captured by Milstein’s camera seem trivial: a shirtless dance to music, a loving hug of his father, and a climb to the top of a high dive platform.
But Alva doesn’t realize a couple of big life moments are occurring. First, the director is about to have a new significant other in his life, and he’s not sure if his son will accept her. The more difficult moment is Milstein trying to figure out how to explain the concept of death to his 6-year-old son.
Of the two moments, the boy’s acceptance of the new mother figure turns out to be less onerous. Alva feels trusting and comfortable enough to put his feet in the new woman’s lap and let her clip his toenails. It’s the same degree of trust and comfort he shows his father when the older man cuts the boy’s hair.
The director needs to turn to his father for advice on figuring out the right way of talking to Alva about the concept of death. But he’s soon reminded why his father’s non-touchy-feely manner of child-rearing didn’t sit well with him. Ironically, it’s the task of re-framing the photograph of Alva’s great-grandfather that finally offers an entry point for talking about the sensitive subject with the boy. The re-framing process also reminds the director’s father that his carpentry skills aren’t what they used to be.
Throughout the film, the director’s tone of voice with his son is usually that of a whisper. Father and son thus come across as emotional equals and confidantes. The director also makes sure his face never appears on screen. That creative decision helps the viewer focus on the boy’s face and see his unfiltered joy at experiencing life. There’s no sense of artifice or playing to the camera.
Mischief, curiosity, and eagerness to explore are some of the feelings flitting across Alva’s face. By contrast, the face of the director’s father is marked by a pronounced reserve. There’s no question he cares for the director, but there’s also a noticeable emotional distance in his words.
“Summer Nights” will not make the viewer feel six years old again. But it will remind viewers of the joy of discovering the hugeness of life’s possibilities. Alva’s thanking the bees for making the honey he slathered on his bread slice is his way of showing his enjoyment at eating something good. Then again, even though the viewer senses Milstein is present, seeing a pajama-clad Alva climbing what looks like a small hill will still spark some nervousness.
Milstein’s film may not inspire a viewer to have a kid of their own. But it does make the viewer grateful for the director’s willingness to share some of Alva’s life via the camera.
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What’s the difference between a gentrifying colonizer jerk and somebody who seriously wants to fit into a multicultural neighborhood? Gay architect Ben, the protagonist of Idan Haguel’s dark comedy “Concerned Citizen,” thought he was liberal enough to know the difference. But the consequences of his supposedly innocuous call to the cops spurs him to question his own hidden racism and even the nature of his own future and that of husband Raz in Tel Aviv’s Neve Sha’anan neighborhood.
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Two details from the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree Of Life Synagogue made the crime feel particularly heinous. First, at public events, victim Rose Mallinger regularly and sincerely recited the prayer for peace. Her slaying appeared to be a rebuke of such ideals. The other was that the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh was not only a heavily Jewish area, but was also the setting for the classic public television children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The killings felt like a wholesale rejection of Fred Rogers’ ethos of genial love for one’s neighbor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the killer turned out to hail from a neighboring town.
Many readers are likely to be familiar with the details of the actual Tree Of Life killings thanks to media coverage. But such readers might not be familiar with how Squirrel Hill’s residents worked to collectively heal in the wake of such a terrible crime. Fortunately, Patrice O’Neill’s documentary “Repairing The World: Stories From The Tree Of Life” arrives to show that three-year process.
O’Neill’s film travels to various parts of Pittsburgh to meet both the survivors of the shooting victims as well as people ranging from high school students to an ex-Pittsburgh Steeler doing their part to help the community heal. Over a three year period, “Repairing The World” follows everything from spontaneous rallies to enactment of a gun control law to prevent future mass shootings.
One uncomfortable truth revealed by O’Neill’s film is that the shooting wasn’t an aberration but an inevitability. Brad Orsini, the security director for the Jewish Federation, notes that the Squirrel Hill area had been struck by a concentration of anti-Semitic incidents in recent times. The podcast for local racists, “Live From Steeltown,” openly speaks of turning Pittsburgh into a white ethnostate.
The most damning bit of information comes from former S.F. Bay Guardian reporter turned Pro Publica reporter A.C. Thompson. He’d been studying what the white racists were saying on social media since 2015. The Pittsburgh shooter had been radicalized by online anti-Semitism. The Tree Of Life synagogue had been targeted because it housed the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Local racists believed the charitable organization allegedly helped “dangerous” immigrants enter the U.S. and furthered the mass replacement of white people.
O’Neill pointedly avoids identifying the Tree Of Life shooter by name or face. The rationale, that people are still innocent until proven guilty in this country, is true enough. But it could also be argued that helping add to the accused mass murderer’s notoriety does nothing to help the families devastated by his alleged malicious acts heal. The bigoted circles the accused killer ran in may try to exalt him as a martyr. But that appellation feels neither earned nor deserved especially when compared to the legacies and sacrifices of a Steve Biko or a Harvey Milk.
If the mass shooting proved sadly predictable, what proves wonderfully surprising are the different ways the members of Pittsburgh’s community rose to the occasion to help each other heal. High school student Emily Pressman helped organize a public gathering the evening of the shooting. She and her friends just wanted to have a space where people wouldn’t feel alone, yet the turnout greatly surprised her. The 10/27 Healing Partnership brought together families, survivors of the shooting, and Jewish organizations. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette devised a very appropriate headline to honor those slain at the Tree Of Life.
What’s more heartening in the film is seeing how the Pittsburgh community avoided a “you’re on your own” attitude in favor of supporting other communities hit by mass shootings. One touching anecdote mentions how Squirrel Hill representatives visited the Mother Emmanuel church community in the wake of their mass shooting incident and were greeted with love.
O’Neill takes time in the film to celebrate the lives of those lost to anti-Semitic hate at the Tree Of Life. Brothers David and Cecil Rosenthal, for example, were considered the unofficial mayors of the neighborhood. Cecil in particular embodied Pittsburgh’s spirit of a city small enough where everybody knew everybody. Also touching is seeing the Remembering Rose get together, where Mallinger family members remember their lost bubbe.
But what are the next steps that can be taken to prevent future Tree Of Life shootings? Pittsburgh residents publicly suggesting a visiting Orange Skull and family denounce the anti-Semites who worship him was a nice effort. However, the events of January 6, 2021 showed why the Orange Skull would never have denounced the anti-Semites he considered his supporters. Similarly, a 2019 attempt at establishing a stronger gun control law in Pittsburgh got shot down thanks to an NRA lawsuit.
Private citizens speaking up when they observe hate speech or hate incidents does provide a good start in this direction. Silence in the face of such speech winds up acting as implicit encouragement to the racist speaker to do more and worse. Yet how can the First Amendment be effective if inaction results in listeners believing anti-Semitic lies? On the other hand, where’s the line between legitimate political criticism and hate speech? What if someone wraps a legitimate criticism of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in anti-Semitic language?
If the answers posed by the problems represented by the Tree Of Life shooting aren’t immediately apparent, O’Neill’s film shows that people can and will do far more than pointlessly invoke thoughts and prayers to truly help their community heal in the wake of such tragedies.
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In the SFJFF Closing Night Film, Eran Kolirin’s “Let It Be Morning,” an abrupt Israeli military lockdown upends the life of successful Palestinian businessman Sami. The enforced stay in his birth village forces Sami to confront both his unspoken prejudices regarding the villagers he left behind and his illusions about his success. Rueful humor helps the characters’ metaphorical passage to a new day feel less onerous. Yet it’s unclear for Sami and the other villagers what that new day holds.
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An SFJFF must-see film is “Remember This.” Directors Jeff Hutchens and Derek Goldman adapted for the screen David Strathairn’s extraordinary solo performance show “Remember This: The Lesson Of Jan Karski.”
Karski, the character played by Strathairn, may seem an insignificant little professor at Georgetown University. But when filmmaker Claude Lanzmann finds Karski, he gets the professor to talk about his experiences during World War II after a 35-year silence. It turns out Karski was a messenger to the Polish government in exile during the war. More importantly, he tried to warn world leaders of the Nazi annihilation of Poland’s Jews while there was still time to stop it. Lanzmann would use his interview with Karski in his classic Holocaust documentary “Shoah.” But Strathairn’s show generously fills in the details of Karski’s backstory,
Given the visual austerity of the film’s setup, it may seem hard to believe that the film will take the viewer everywhere from the White House to the midst of the Nazi conquest of Poland. The black and white film is set on a stage containing just a table, two chairs, and a suit of dress clothes.
What ties the film together is Strathairn’s performance as Karski. His character speaks both of the sometimes larger-than-life events he experiences and the emotional toll they took on him. To supplement Karski’s recollections, the table winds up representing everything from a window ledge to the door of an old house. Sound effects and inventive use of lighting also help create the mood of a particular moment.
His photographic memory made Karski perfect for messenger work for the Polish Underground. He could be a tape recorder and a camera without risking carrying incriminating papers through Nazi-occupied territory. On the other hand, that memory also meant that he could never forget seeing the use of quicklime to kill Jewish prisoners or the sight of human beings reduced to starving animals.
The title of the play comes from the continual request of Karski’s guide in a Polish ghetto to not forget the suffering and horrors inflicted on the Jews imprisoned there. But it’s also a rebuke to those who would prefer out of either complicity or denial to avoid accountability for the occurrence of these deliberate crimes against humanity. While Karski’s recollections never go into graphic specificity, the emotional impact on the former Resistance man comes through clearly in Strathairn’s performance.
It’s to the credit of “Remember This” that it exhibits a rich variety of emotional colors over the course of its running time. There’s the irony of a young Karski being supportive of the Nazis after hearing Hermann Goering speak. The excitement of close calls comes in stories of Karski’s escape from the train carrying unsuspecting Polish prisoners to what would be the Katin Forest massacre as well as his escape from a Nazi-controlled hospital before he breaks and reveals sensitive information about the Resistance. But the strongest emotion generated by “Remember This” will be angry frustration at Western leaders’ unwillingness to believe or act on his information regarding the Nazis’ methodical extermination of the Jews.
The lesson that Jan Karski’s experiences ultimately offer is one that can be applied to today’s American politics. Far too many Americans still believe the GQP line that the judicial torching of Roe v. Wade or the passage of anti-transgender laws will have only limited effect on American life and that people who protest otherwise are being “hysterical.” How many Americans still refuse to believe that the GQP has turned into a party of Christofascists? Yet that sort of disbelief about the scope of human evil was precisely what kept FDR and Churchill from intervening to stop the Holocaust…and save six million lives.
To be fair, there are more avenues of communication (e.g. cell phone videos) now than in Karski’s time to alert the public and their elected decision-makers to avoid the dangers society faces. Yet such avenues may not in themselves be enough. Warning over the past 15 years of the effects of climate change and the sacrifices needed to stop it hasn’t exactly yielded any decisive government action which can halt its effects.
(“Summer Nights” screens at 6:00 PM on July 28, 2022 at the Albany Twin (1115 Solano Avenue, Albany).
“Remember This” screens at 2:50 PM. “Concerned Citizen” screens at 8:45 PM. Both screenings take place on July 24, 2022 at the Castro Theatre (429 Castro Street, SF).
“Repairing The World: Stories From The Tree Of Life” screens at 2:00 PM. “Let It Be Morning” screens at 7:45 PM. Both screenings take place on July 31, 2022 at the Albany Twin (1115 Solano Avenue, Albany).
For tickets and further information about the films, go to www.sfjff.org .)
