From 29-year-old Berkeleyan Yoav Potash to 72-year-old Hannie Voyles of Chico, a number of Jewish directors and producers will present their works this weekend at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival.
Documentaries, humor, animation and features round out the marathon three-day screening of more than 60 films, which begins 8:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 15, at U.C. Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall and continues until after midnight Sunday, Oct. 17.
The festival, once the domain of local talent and held initially at Berkeley High School, has gained international cache as it enters its second decade.
Making its Bay Area debut is Robert Greenwald’s “Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties.”
“We received over 200 entries from around the world, and we’ve been compared favorably to the Sundance ‘shorts’ weekend,” says festival director Mel Vapour.
“Nothing Really Happens (Memories of Aging Strippers),” a 90-minute drama, is a highlight of the opening night showings, at 9:10 p.m. Oct. 15. Written and directed by New Yorker Fred Newman and starring Living Theater co-founder Judith Malina, the film is a loving bow to a long-forgotten North Bronx neighborhood — of candy stores on Jerome Avenue and Gun Hill Road, of cherry cokes and egg creams.
Malina is wonderful as Tillie Hirsch, an aging East Village denizen who prowls the neighborhood cafes and stores, recreating, or sometimes creating from whole cloth, the memories of her old Bronx candy store and husband Abraham. Ex-New Yorkers will long for the borscht and Katz’s pastrami she munches at an interview with a Village Voice writer. Those with even longer memories will nod in appreciation at the memory of cherry-marshmallow candy from the Hirsch-Hoffman establishment. Mary Fridley produced “Nothing Really Happens,” which earlier this year won the best drama award at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival.
On a decidedly less serious note, the festival screens Potash’s “Minute Matrimony” at 8:45 p.m. Oct. 15. The satire of pop culture, where anything can be packaged and sold, appealed to the Generation Xer’s wacky sensibilities. The motif is a drive-through wedding chapel where options ranging from Jewish, black and gay are all gleefully rung up on the cash register. A group dance mixing a gospel choir singing “Hava Negillah” and some very confused rabbis is the highlight of the film. Politically correct? No. Funny? Yes.
Voyles’ “Children of Fate,” at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 16, joins a strong documentary lineup. The film is constructed from Voyles’ memories. Born to a Jewish-Catholic family in 1933 Holland, she documents, through historical footage and interviews with survivors, her country’s terrible transformation from a polyglot, tolerant culture to one that became a model country for Hitler’s Final Solution. It documents the change of the Westerbork camp for Jewish refugees from the “camp of hope” to one that became a short stop-off point before the extermination camps. The statistics brought forth by Voyles, who bears the name of a grandmother who perished in the camps, are a chilling reminder of the near-complete (85 percent) elimination of Jews in the Netherlands in just five years.
Also on the political front is Greenwald’s “Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties,” showing at 8 p.m. Oct. 16 . Directed and written by Nonny de La Peña, it follows successfully in the path of Greenwald-produced “Unprecedented” (about the 2000 election fraud in Florida), “Uncovered: The Truth About the Iraq War” and “Outfoxed,” the recent indictment of what the Los Angeles producer calls “the Republican network.”
“Unconstitutional” is a scathing indictment of the USAPatriot Act, and shows the hurried manner in which the bill was ramrodded through Congress. (According to the film, it was printed at 3:45 a.m. and voted on at 11 a.m. the same day.) Greenwald shows the effect of the bill on everyone from Seattle Middle Eastern grocers to an Olympic athlete with a Muslim first name, to small-town librarians, demonstrating the far-ranging and dire consequences of the act.
One-day passes to the Berkeley Video and Film Festival are $5 for students, $8 for others. Two-day passes are $8 and $15, respectively, and three-day passes are $10 and $17.
Festival director Vapour explained the rationale behind ticket pricing: “U.C. Berkeley students are die-hard film buffs and we’ve adjusted our ticket prices for this poor Bush economy and the war.”
The Berkeley Video and Film Festival runs Oct. 15-17 at Wheeler Hall, U.C. Berkeley. Information: www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org or (510) 843-3699.