When emailing and skyping with Guy Davidi, the 33-year old Israeli co-director of “5 Broken Cameras,” opening May 30 in New York at the Film Forum, one encounters a sophisticated — albeit imperfect — speaker of English, with a vaguely British accent. His views, however, are always sharp: “My belief is that the construction of…
In feature films the deaf have made for exotic yet sympathetic characters. From Jane Wyman as the saintly eponymous innocent in “Johnny Belinda” (1948) to Marlee Matlin’s Oscar-winning turn as a self-possessed, sexually confidant woman in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986), their portrayal measures our society’s slow acknowledgment that the deaf are, well, people….
Photo by Tracy Collins “Our city grows so fast that there is some danger of the events and incidents of more than ten years gone being totally forgotten.” So wrote Walt Whitman in the early 1860s, describing the development of Brooklyn. But could the poet and long-time Brooklyn resident have foreseen the battles waged between…
Image Courtesy of First Run Features In 1909 and 1910 more Jewish settlers left Palestine than arrived, mainly because there was no work to be had. To reverse the trend, Zionist organizations purchased Arab land and gave it to immigrants. It was the birth of kibbutz — essentially communist collectives where everything was communally owned…
Born to agnostic Jewish parents, Simone Weil was a French philosopher, a social and political activist, pacifist, prolific writer and Christian mystic. Today, she is barely remembered. Now, a new documentary has brought Weil back to the attention of American audiences. In “An Encounter with Simone Weil,” New York filmmaker Julia Haslett is moved to…
Watching the documentary “The Island President” is like watching a political thriller — only its story is not fictional and the cast is not made up of movie stars. Most important, the stakes are very real. In fact, they are so high that the existence of an entire country hangs in the balance. The underdog…
Oscar winner Michael Moore has signed on to help an Israeli filmmaker produce his next documentary — a project that will focus, in part, on the small minority of Germans who defied the Nazis during World War II. Moore, who received an Academy Award for the 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” has agreed to match…
On January 12, HBO will broadcast “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.” For filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, this marks the end of an 18-year, three-movie odyssey that resulted in the freeing from prison of three apparently innocent young men. In June 1993, high school students Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley — known as…
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