On a snowy, bitter Monday, 10 days before the opening of the 15th Denver Jewish Film Festival, Roberta Bloom and Sharon Haber are perfecting their routine.
“I may be short, but I can kick your . . . ,” ahem, boasts Haber, festival chair.
“I am well aware of that,” replies Bloom, the festival’s director for five years now.
“You’re from Long Island,” says Haber, who grew up in The City. “What do you know?”
It’s the wiry one-time gallery owner versus the still-working ceramic artist. It’s the Jack Russell terrier taking on the mellow, curious, Bernese mountain dog.
“Who’s going to win if we have a takedown here?” Bloom asks the reporter, who thinks of but does not quote her father: “My name is Wes; I’m not in this mess.”
When the funny, thoughtful tag team’s labor of love opens Thursday with “Nora’s Will” — the charming dark comedy from Mexico — it will not be at its usual home in the Mizel Arts and Culture Center.
Instead, the 10-day fest of movies that speak to and speak of the varieties of Jewish experience will unspool at the AMC 8 in the Cherry Creek mall.
Thanks to a $1 million gift from local philanthropist Elaine Wolf, the Mizel’s Shwayder Theatre is in the midst of a reboot. When complete, the space will go from 300 to 440 seats. It will also get a new name in honor of its donor.
Meanwhile, the fest takes place nearby.
“We feel lucky,” says Haber. “We’ve turned what could have been a negative into a positive. It isn’t home, but it has a lobby. They can get on that new Mickey Mouse thing,” she adds, joking about the mall’s indoor playground.
While the screens may be different, the programming under Bloom, Haber and their viewing committee continues to deepen.
Among the best of this year’s 22 works is Israeli TV journalist Shlomi Eldar’s “Precious Life,” a hit at the Telluride Film Festival.
In the movie, Palestinian mother Raida Abu Mustaffa has already lost two infants to an immunodeficiency disease when 4-month-old Mohammed is diagnosed with the condition.
While they live in Gaza, Raida and Mohammed are being treated at an Israeli hospital across a fortified checkpoint by Dr. Raz Somech. (“CNN Heroes,” take note.) He believes a bone- marrow transplant can save Mohammed.
Getting the money for the operation isn’t the problem. The donor’s back story is itself a wonder. Instead, the challenge lies in finding a match in Raida and husband Faozi’s family, and having that family move back and forth between Gaza and the medical center as tensions go from elevated to explosive.
Heroes and horrors
“Precious Life” is provocative and intimate, a celebration of compassion and a reminder of just how hard it is to struggle beyond ideology, whether you are an Arab mother or a Jewish journalist. (It plays 5:30 p.m. Feb. 17.)
Also, likely to spark a spirited post-film discussion with producer Peter Demas, “The War on the Weak” investigates the American eugenics movement’s role in shaping Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
Two of the institutions supporting research aimed at creating a race of “super men” were the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
Director Justin Strawhand makes clear this was not victimless research. Before providing an embittered and emboldened Austrian material for his tome “Mein Kampf,” American eugenicists practiced their bad science on epileptics, the “feeble-minded, the indigent and others on the margins.”
The great Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes proved not so visionary when he penned in 1927 the majority opinion in Buck vs. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of an institutionalized Virginian named Carrie Buck.
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes,” wrote Holmes. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (6:45 p.m.on Feb. 13)
Having moved to a slightly smaller venue, a handful of shows have already sold out. At deadline Thursday, opening night’s “Nora’s Will” was about to sell out. Fortunately, the beautifully paced tale screens a second time.
The title says so much in this impressive debut from Mariana Chenillo, a new voice in a resurgent Mexican cinema. As the film opens, Nora is preparing for Passover. Everything is just so. Nora, it seems, is a bit of a control freak.
How much so becomes clear. She has done all this in advance of her suicide. Nora leaves ex-husband Jose, an atheist, with burial arrangements.
It’s a quiet comedy of funeral rites and wrongs, religious pieties and deeper ethics. Jose and Rabbi Jacowitz butt heads. But sweet alliances are forged, too. A favorite: the kitchen detente between the rabbi’s apprentice, Moises, and Fabiana, Nora’s devoted and devoutly Christian housekeeper. (5:30 p.m. Feb. 14)
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@ denverpost.com; also blogs.den verpostcom/madmoviegoer
“The 15th Denver Jewish Film Festival” 10-day film event at the AMC 8 Cherry Creek Shopping Center, 3000 E. First Ave. Thursday-Feb. 20. 22 screenings, with guests and opening- and closing-night celebrations. single tickets $9-$10; 10-pack, $70; festival pass, $115. 303-316-6360 or maccjcc.org/film
