by Josh Stenberg
Mahjong & Mahashas, an autoethnographic documentary from Carolyn Saul, combines recent interviews of her family and friends with archival footage of Sydney’s small Bagdadi Jewish community. Accounts of food and of “mahjong junkies” in 1950s multiethnic Singapore are entertaining, as are brief glimpses of the vibe of Sephardic Jewry in late White Australia. A beneficiary of the JIFF short film fund, one gets the sense that this is the prolegomena for a full-scale treatment.
Where Mahjong records and instantiates the capacity of a small community to survive, Chris Bennett’s and Stephanie Osztreicher’s The Stones examines personal mourning, taking the Jewish practice of leaving visitation stones on graves as title and central image. Some of the turns that the movie takes verge on sentimental and shopworn, and the tweeness of the music irked. Yet the idea of stones being posted from all over the world, with voice-overs in many accents and Hebrew as well as English, was poignant, and the tangibility of grief represented as a heap of stones works well on screen. The final shots of a mourning young woman on the beach with the pile of mourning stones, recreating a photograph of the aunt she is morning, create a powerful and lasting effect.
Samuel Lucas Allen’s CUT is the most narratively experimental and polished of the shorts, also the one most open to interpretation. Like The Stones, it is built around Jewish practices — not only the circumcision alluded to in the title, but notably kapparot, which furnishes a silent, staring Chassidic man and a rooster exacting – or perhaps offering — sacrifice. Perhaps, given a closeted affair with a fellow adolescent, other synonyms for rooster are intended. William Bartolo is compelling as a troubled Sydney schoolboy, off-balance and defensive about sexuality and ethnicity. Topics as weighty as violent antisemitism and homophobia might be a trifle challenging for a film this short to sustain, and relationships with father and lover both seem to require a little more development. But with its irruptions of surrealism and its troubling study of casual cruelty and racism, CUT’s ambiguities are productive.
The Swap, the evening’s comic relief, is an over-the-top switched-at-birth fantasy involving a Polish Jewish and an Italian Jewish family, set in 1960s and 1980s Melbourne. While the caricature of (two different) extroverted, accented Jewish family life is not exactly original, it’s hard to fault a production with verve and wit and some extremely committed acting turns. Animation neatly bookends a kind of extended Jewish joke in the old style. As director Natasha Kaminsky suggested, a Jewish film festival in southern spring of 2023 can certainly do with a divertissement like this.
Infinitely more sobering was Demonstrating for Democracy: On the Frontline of Israel’s Protest Movement, a 5-minute whirlwind tour from Melbourne documentarian Danny Ben-Moshe, taking the audience into the recent protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial reforms. The film is a bitter reminder of how different Israeli society’s concerns were mere months ago. The images are arresting proof of a country in turmoil and of people —joyfully, angrily, earnestly — defending democracy and demanding a more civil society. These scenes are a terrible dramatic irony for a November 2023 audience, given what is coming. Impossible not to feel chilled by the film’s final voice-over: ‘it is hard to know how this story will end.’ Hard indeed.
The Jewish International Film Festival 2023 Shorts program will screen at Classic Cinemas Elsternwick in Naarm / Melbourne on Thursday November 9 at 6.15pm.