Reel
News
VOLUME
1, NUMBER 3 - AUGUST 2003
Atlantic
Drift
Trembling Before G-d
All I've Got
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Atlantic Drift
In
1940, many European Jews were already aware that the Nazis' gruesome annihilation
plans would soon become a reality. On 3 September of that year, several
thousand people left Vienna and Bratislava aboard three ships. The refugees
hoped to reach Palestine, at that time a British mandate, down the Danube
River via the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This is their story.
ATLANTIC
DRIFT begins with a letter: "Dear Hannah…". The letter
is accompanied by the diary of 17-year-old Ruth Sanders, which the director
uses as the backbone for the story of a traumatic emigration. Between
1941 and 1945, Central European Jews who had managed to escape the Nazis
at the last minute, were brought to Mauritius by the British military.
The emigrants' hope of a Promised Land ended right there, in the state
prison of Mauritius, and the dream of a new life in Palestine turned into
a nightmare. Hannah was one of these inmates. 
Accompanied
by her son Shlomo and by Ruth's diary written during those years, the
old woman returns to Mauritius. She visits the prison in which her husband,
the painter Fritz Haendel, took his life, ignorant of the fact that his
wife was pregnant with his child. While the son accompanies his mother,
he is also in search of the story of his father. Watercolour paintings
and drawings, the only things he inherited from the father he never met,
assist Shlomo in his search.
Trembling
Before G-d
TREMBLING
BEFORE G-D is an unprecedented feature documentary that shatters assumptions
about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told
personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian,
the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma - how
to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism 
and
the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality.
As the film unfolds, we meet a range of complex individuals - some hidden,
some out - from the world's first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to closeted,
married Hasidic gays and lesbians to those abandoned by religious families
to Orthodox lesbian high-school sweethearts.
Many
have been tragically rejected and their pain is raw, yet with irony, humour,
and resilience, they love, care, struggle, and debate with a thousands-year
old tradition. Ultimately, they are forced to question how they can pursue
truth and faith in their lives. Vividly shot with a courageous few over
five years in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, London, Miami, and San
Francisco, TREMBLING
BEFORE G-D
is an international project with global implications that strikes at the
meaning of religious identity and tradition in a modern world. For the
first time, this issue has become a live, public debate in Orthodox circles,
and the film is both witness and catalyst to this historic moment. What
emerges is a loving and fearless testament to faith and survival and the
universal struggle to belong.
All
I've Got
A
72-year-old grandmother dies and finds herself on a ferry that will take
her across the river to the hereafter. On the ferryboat she meets her
first love, who was killed in a road accident in which they were both
involved when they were young. She is presented with a fateful choice:
to start life afresh as a 22-year-old - her age at the time of the accident
- and to relinquish all her memories of the life she has lived with her
husband and children; or to remain a 72-year-old woman with all her life's
memories intact. If she chooses the second alternative she will get off
the boat when it reaches its destination and will never be truly reunited
with her beloved, who has been waiting for her on the ferryboat for fifty
long years.
The
4th Annual Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival
Cine-Art House Cinema, Wanchai
November 22 - 30, 2003
Tickets go on sale starting November 1st.