Jewish Film Festival: “You have to face reality”

The Berlin Brandenburg Jewish Film Festival is taking place for the 30th time. And this year’s edition is likely to face a particular challenge given the Gaza war and the protests in Israel against the Netanyahu government?

Right now it is particularly important to show very different Jewish voices and different perspectives on reality, history and everyday life. This is all the more important in order to understand that there is not one Jewish perspective, but also antagonistic perspectives. We show this in 71 films from 15 countries.

A big problem is that many festivals don’t know how to deal with the events of October 7th. What is your solution?

Everyone expects statements and confessions. You shouldn’t allow yourself to be seduced into having to make a confession, but should start talking to each other. We recently spoke to the media about reconciliation and rapprochement. I think reconciliation is a big word, but getting closer is not that difficult. It is important to learn to tolerate different positions. Our job as film festivals is to offer perspectives and analysis and to open up space through communication. Politicians have to find solutions, but a film festival can be extremely helpful in finding solutions.

How do you rate the atmosphere at the festival?

The mood is of course very thoughtful. When you see a film like “The Future” or “The Vanishing Soldier,” where a soldier flees the Gaza Strip, the film takes on a completely different relevance due to the October 7th attacks and subsequent developments.

Only the films “Supernova: The Music Festival Masasacre” and “Home Front” shown at the festival were made after October 7th. “Confronting fear” is the name of a series of events during the festival. Is it possible to talk about terror and trauma in such a context?

We think about how we can avoid the fear of terror and how we can keep public spaces open for debate and political discourse without giving in to the pressure that terrorists want to put on us. The aim of every terrorist action is to divide society and create fear. It doesn’t matter whether they are so-called individual perpetrators or organized groups.

The documentary “Supernova” shows cell phone videos from contemporary witnesses of October 7th. That sounds intense.

Yes. The scenes are awesome. You are slowly drawn into the event. At first, people don’t even understand that a Hamas attack is happening. You see people dancing and celebrating, and then there is a scene where you hear something popping and at first you think of fireworks. But then you notice rockets on the horizon and see how people are being shot and killed in the most cruel way. This was one of the hardest films I’ve seen recently. We don’t leave the audience alone, but instead offer conversations after such films in order to be able to process what they have seen. After “Supernova,” for example, we speak to a survivor of the Hamas attack, whose brother is still one of the Hamas hostages.

Should these images be shown at all or not for ethical reasons?

We thought about that for a long time too. On the other hand, this is just as much a part of our history as the Shoah. These are also unbearable images. We must endure these images as a warning. The film is important, especially given the fact that many clubs quickly and unthinkingly expressed their solidarity with a Palestine that Hamas had in mind.

Another series deals with anti-Zionist propaganda. How important is looking back to understand the present?

Shortly after the end of the war, until Stalin’s death, the term Zionism or anti-Zionism was coined as a fighting term without actually clearly defining what it meant. It is nothing more than an unclear slogan that was coined during the Nazi era in the way in which it is used again today. Zionism overlaps with socialist and even communist ideas. The word anti-Zionist comes up again today when someone doesn’t want to say that they are against Israel or an anti-Semite. There are obviously some traditional lines of thought that refer to history and keep recurring. But history only repeats itself in facets, it is never the same.

What common thread runs through the films at the festival?

The films we show, regardless of whether they are an art house film or a commercial film, observe social processes and history very closely and look at them in a very diverse way. “Vishniac” portrays the photographer Roman Vishniac, who documented the cities in Eastern Europe before the Shoah in the early 1930s. And “Rabbi on the Block” is about a black, Jewish community in the USA where services are almost “gospel-style,” while in the comedy “Between the Temples,” a young cantor realizes that he can no longer sing and escapes from the synagogue into a music bar. In “South Seas,” however, a German and an Israeli negotiate their identities at the swimming pool while Iron Dome is seen in the sky fending off rockets.

What were taboos for you when programming the festival?

We don’t show any perpetrator material. Hamas used the October 7 images to make propaganda. We also consciously avoided action films and thrillers. There are enough films that use terrorist attacks as a dramatic motif. We didn’t want that. This is not fun or entertainment, these are terrible events that threaten us all. And you have to face the terrible reality.