Polanski has drawn parallels between his case and that of Dreyfus, whose wrongful conviction for treason became a flashpoint of French anti-Semitism.
The Venice International Film Festival starts today and runs through September 8. And of course, Jewish directors are bringing their A-game.
The details are salaciously short.
“If I criticize the place I live, I do it because I worry,” the director said. “I do it because I want to protect it. I do it from love.”
In Amos Gitai’s film “Ana Arabia”, premiered in Venice this week, a Palestinian whose late wife was an Auschwitz survivor and Muslim convert treks to Arab cities to find a dentist instead of one five minutes away in Tel Aviv.
William Friedkin, the U.S. film director who scared up a fright with “The Exorcist” and set pulses racing with thriller “The French Connection” in the 1970s, will get a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Film Festival, organizers said on Thursday.
A movie combining a sexual fetish with elements of Jewish folklore and Israeli foreign policy has won a prize at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals.
If “Barney’s Version” does one thing really well, it’s recreate the blithe comic tone of the Mordecai Richler novel on which it is based.