As an antidote to the reflex to view the Jewish experience solely through the lens of the Holocaust, film festivals keep popping up around the country with broader perspectives of theme and era and geography.
With the screening of four selections from the eighth annual New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival over the next 10 days at Dartmouth College, the Upper Valley Jewish Community (UVJC) aims to show its members and their neighbors multiple new angles of culture and history.
“It’s not a downer; it’s very uplifting,” Susan Israel, who heads the UVJC committee that picks the films to show in Hanover, said this week. “They’re all a little bit different. They’re thought provoking. They make you wonder about how we treat others, how we do what’s right and what’s good.”
Take Dough, which will close the Hanover venue of the festival on April 10 in room 013 of Dartmouth’s Carpenter Hall. The comedy stars Jonathan Pryce as the owner of a struggling bakery in Israel that sees a jump in business after his new, Muslim apprentice starts mixing a certain controlled substance into the bread dough.
“It talks about tolerance, overcoming prejudice,” Israel said. “It doesn’t speak only to people of the Jewish faith.”
Nor does Once in a Lifetime, which will be screened Sunday afternoon at 4. The based-on-actual-events dramatization, which won the audience award at the 2015 Boston Jewish Film Festival, follows a class of French high school students from many cultures, some of them on the spectrum of energetic to unruly, who take on a research project about child victims of the Nazi concentration camps.
“These films are charged with emotion,” Israel said. “They are films you would not see unless you were at a Jewish film festival.”
On Tuesday night at 7, the UVJC will screen Raise the Roof, a documentary that won the audience award at the 2015 Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival. It depicts 300 volunteer artisans and builders from around the world who spent 10 years restoring part of an 18th-century wooden synagogue in Poland. Joel McCarty, executive director of the Timber Framers Guild in Alstead, N.H., who made several trips to Poland, will answer questions after the screening.
“They’re all incredible stories,” Israel said. “They’re the kind of stories that give you pause, make you really think about who we are. We’re definitely part of a bigger world.”
That world extends to South Africa, where Jewish lawyer Albie Sachs survived a maiming while working to break down his homeland’s apartheid system of segregation. The documentary about his efforts, Soft Vengeance, which was named best international film at the Encounters Film Festival in Great Britain, will be shown on Thursday night at 7.
The Hanover branch of the festival opened Thursday night with Rock in the Red Zone, a documentary that follows a troupe of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East who are struggling to make their music amid rocket attacks from Hamas on Sderot, an Israeli city on the border with the Gaza Strip. The UVJC committee chose the five from among 12 that the statewide organizers of the festival made available for the screenings at Dartmouth.
“This is the seventh time that we’ve been part of the festival,” Israel said. “When we heard about it the first year, we wanted to get involved. It’s not only for our community, which is about 210, maybe 220 family units, to get together, but a way for people to find out about our being here, and about our culture.
“It’s a great way to share it.”
From Sunday through April 10, the Upper Valley Jewish Community hosts screenings of four movies from the eighth annual New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival, in room 013 of Dartmouth College’s Carpenter Hall, next door to Baker Library.
Dartmouth College alumnae Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, whose previous collaborations include the acclaimed Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, unveil their latest documentary, In My Father’s House, at the school’s Loew Auditorium in Hanover on Thursday night at 7. The 93-minute film follows Oscar- and Grammy-winning rapper Che “Rhymefest” Smith around Chicago’s South Side over a period of 18 months, while he struggles to reconnect with the father who abandoned him more than 20 years before.
Rhymefest, who will perform a free concert at the college’s Collis Common Ground next Friday, will join the filmmakers in discussing the project. To reserve movie tickets ($5 to $9) and learn more, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
Tonight at 6:30, the White River Indie Film Festival and the Main Street Museum in White River Junction will kick off “Alt: Cinema,” a monthly series of the political movies of maverick director Robert Altman, with a screening at the museum of Tanner on Tanner, the presidential-campaign satire that Altman assembled with cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Filmmaker, composer and writer Allan Nicholls, a friend and longtime collaborator of Altman’s, will introduce the movie and answer questions at the end. Admission is by donation of $2 to $20. For more information, visit mainstreetmuseum.org.
Dartmouth film professor Bill Phillips expects to screen two of his documentaries on May 13, during the White River Indie Film Festival in White River Junction. While organizers have yet to post a schedule on the web site for the May 13-16 festival, Phillips said recently that Sabra, his film about acclaimed printmaker Sabra Field of East Barnard, is tentatively scheduled to show at 10 a.m. (on the 13th) in the Schleicher Studio at Northern Stage, to be followed by a 30-minute Q & A. Phillips added that he anticipates the festival showing On the Trail, his 30-minute film commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Green Mountain Horse Association’s annual, three-day 100-mile competitive trail ride.
For more details about the festival, which are expected in April, visit wrif.org.
Next up in the Chandler Film Society’s series of Sunday movies, on April 17, is Mother, the Albert Brooks comedy co-starring Debbie Reynolds as the idiosyncratic parent of a writer struggling with a mid-life crisis. The lights go down in the Upper Gallery of Randolph’s Chandler Center for the Arts at 6:30 p.m. General admission costs $6 for film-society members and $9 for others. For more information, visit chandler-arts.org or call 802-728-6464.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304. Movie-related news also can be sent to highlights@vnews.com.