Tuesday, Thursday, January 29, 31
Casa Cultura, Mesones 71
$100 members, $125 non-members, includes two films and a glass of wine

Jewish Film Festival

January 29th: KEDMA -- 1pm in English, 5pm in Spanish
TORN APART -- 3pm in English, 7pm in Spanish

January 31: LOST LUGGAGE -- 1pm in English, 5pm in Spanish
PI -- 3pm in English, 7pm in Spanish

By Carole J. Stone

On January 29 and 31, the Comunidad Hebrea En San Miguel de Allende (CHESMA), AC, hosts a Jewish film festival at the new Casa Cultura. The four films being shown have been carefully selected for variety, interest, and relevance.

Kedma: This historical tragedy is set during the opening stages of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The film follows the fate of a group of refugees from the Holocaust who are illegally brought to Israel. Upon arriving, they escape being chased by British soldiers only to be drafted into the war to fight a grueling battle against Arab irregulars.

Amos Gitai, the film director and screenwriter, intended the film to be a more realistic answer to Otto Preminger’s Exodus. In fact, the final shot of Kedma is identical to the final shot of Preminger’s film.

Torn Apart: An Israeli and an Arab fall tragically in love during the 1970s Middle East conflict, in this Israeli-Arab version of Romeo and Juliet. Adrian Pasdar and Golden Globe nominee Cecilia Peck star as lovers torn apart by the harsh realities of Middle East turmoil. As Laila, Peck is the perfect complement to her lover Ben: thoughtful where he is headstrong, vulnerable where he is bold. Escape is the couple’s only hope. Torn Apart brings the complex Arab/Israeli conflict to a personal, visceral level.

Left Luggage: While escaping from Nazis during World War II, a Jewish man buries two suitcases full of things dear to his heart. Of his family, only he and his daughter Chaya survive. Chaya, a beautiful modern girl, becomes a nanny in a strictly observant Hasidic family with many children. She develops a special bond with the youngest of the boys, who seems incapable of speaking, and she encourages him to learn and recite the Four Questions for Passover. This film focuses on themes of tolerance and of personal growth.

Pi: This story, about a mathematician and his obsession with mathematical regularity, contrasts two seemingly irreconcilable entities: the imperfect, irrational humanity, and the rigor and regularity of mathematics, specifically number theory.

Unemployed and living in a drab Chinatown apartment in New York City, Max Cohen, a number theorist, believes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers.

Max tries to program his computer, Euclid, to make stock predictions. Then Max has Euclid analyze mathematical patterns in the Torah. With both analyses, Euclid displays a 216-digit number series on the screen before crashing. Forced to explain the number, Max winds up in a nearby synagogue, where he is asked to reveal the number by people who believe it was meant for them to bring about the messianic age.