Movies

SHOSHANA: two lovers amid a deepening conflict

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Photo caption: Irina Starshenbaum and Douglas Booth in SHOSHANA. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

The thriller Shoshana is a historical drama set in pre-Israel Palestine that revolves around a love story between two people on different sides. The Jewish journalist Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) is a committed Zionist and a supporter of the paramilitary group Haganah. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is the Assistant Superintendent of Criminal Investigation for the British authorities.

All of the significant characters in Shoshana were real people, and the story takes place from 1933 to 1944. We don’t see many movies set in this time and place. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine for 400 years, until the Ottomans were expelled by the British in WW I. The British then took over governing Palestine, with its majority Arab population and small Jewish community, under an international agreement – the British Mandate – and with a policy that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Arab residents have been living with a few Jews, but are horrified by the specter of mass Jewish immigration, and they revolt. Tit for tat murders begin between Arabs and Jews, which the British try to suppress. Soon there are rival Jewish paramilitary organizations, each with a different take on how to deal with the British, with the Arabs and with each other. When the British sharply limit Jewish immigration and frustrate the efforts to form a Jewish-majority state, the Jews react with anger against the British.

It becomes a lethal gam of three-dimensional chess. Shoshana does a pretty good job in helping the audience track who is who – and who wants to kill who. Shoshana was directed by the veteran Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude, The Claim, A Mighty Heart and The Trip movies).

Thomas Wilkin and Shoshana Borochov forge an 11-year relationship in an environment that becomes more stressful every year. But Thomas is unwilling to stop being a British policeman, and Shoshana is unwilling to put aside her Zionist beliefs. They love each other, but not enough for either to abandon deeply-held values or their personal identities.

What could doom their relationship is not just arguing politics at the dinner table, but something more ominous – there are plenty of players who want each of them dead. The situation is explosive – often literally. And neither can hide in a Tel Aviv still small enough that everybody knows each other.

The British are trying to cope with what we now know as asymmetrical warfare. A British officer sneeringly asks a Zionist terrorist why he is blowing up women and children, and gets the reply “Because we don’t have the resources that you do“. Ironically, the British in Shoshana are themselves employing mass reprisals, extrajudicial executions and torture that would clearly be considered war crimes today.

Of course, British colonial rule was known for arrogant, racist, and culturally tone-deaf twits, and they are represented by Shoshana‘s villain, police official Geoffrey Morton (the fine actor Harry Melling).

Arabs and their cause may not be depicted in depth in Shoshana, but are shown as victims of both Jewish terrorism and British atrocities.

The historical events constitute the origin stories for both the nation of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The British throw up their hands and fal to provide for Palestinian self-determination within the borders of Palestine. The Jewish organizations in Shoshana later evolved into the two major Israeli political parties of the past 75 years, and the Haganah morphed into the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel has since become a military power and now faces its own asymmetrical warfare.

Given the impact of this history upon the current day, we might have expected more films about this period. After all, there are a zillion films about the Holocaust and a lot set in post-1948 Israel. In 1960, Otto Preminger made the blockbuster film Exodus from the 1958 Leon Uris novel which was the biggest best seller in US since Gone With the Wind. Exodus was set in the period between 1946 and 1948. (My parents saw Exodus at a drive-in with me as a small boy in the back seat.) No less than the pioneering Zionist leader and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion said of the novel, “as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel“.

Shoshana is far more clear-eyed and nuanced than Exodus. Shoshana reflects a historical setting that was complicated, and tells the story of lovers’ inner conflicts amid a dynamic and perilous external conflict. Shoshana releases into theaters this weekend.

MADE IN ETHIOPIA: it’s just like China used to be

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Photo caption: MADE IN ETHIOPIA. Courtesy of POV.

In the scintillating documentry Made in Ethiopia, businesswoman Motto is the face of a huge, new Chinese industrial park in Ethiopia. How huge? A factory with 3,000 workers is just one of its 130 businesses – and Motto is working on an 18,000-acre expansion.

Motto is smart, zealous, charismatic and utterly non-ironic. Along with the other Chinese, she has drunk the Koo-Aid and sees the park as entirely benevolent – bringing large scale employment and investment to a poor and neglected society. A visiting Chinese official exclaims, “it’s just like China used to be!“.

All of the workers are Ethiopian, who earn $50 per month in what is essentially a clean and gleaming sweatshop. All of the supervisors are Chinese who have left their families behind in China. The local farmers feel ripped off by their government, and an armed rebellion may be brewing. Apart from a global pandemic, what could possibly go wrong? In their first feature, directors Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan have created a brilliant exploration of clashing cultures and economic imperialism.

I screened Made in Ethiopia for the SLO Film Fest, where it made my Best of the SLO Film Fest. Now it’s on PBS’ POV. You can stream Made in Ethiopia on the PBS app or directly at the POV website.

Two Nuggets at this year’s SFJFF

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Photo caption: Logan Lerman as Isaac and Molly Gordon as Iris in OH, HI!. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), always a major event for Bay Area cinephiles, opens tomorrow. The program offers 70 films from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, the US and the UK and Uzbekistan. Here’s my festival preview.

This year, I’m recommending two nuggets:

Oh, Hi!: This dark romantic comedy begins with a couple heading off to a countryside vacation rental for their first romantic getaway. All is lustful fun until they discover that each has a different perception of what their relationship is and where it is headed. What could have been a merely awkward or hurtful moment precipitates an extreme reaction, and escalates into an absurdly funny situation. Oh, Hi! is the sophomore feature for writer-director Sophie Brooks, who has created a broadly funny, over-the-top situation that is sharply observant about relationships tending to evolve at different speeds for the participants. It’s a very smart screenplay. Oh, Hi!, which premiered at Sundance, is releasing into theaters soon; see it early at the SFJFF. (Full review to be published on July 23.)

THE STAMP THIEF. Courtesy of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

The Stamp Thief: We don’t expect a Holocaust-related documentary to get wacky, but The Stamp Thief combines a historical whodunit and a real-life comic heist. It begins with tracking down a fourth-hand oral account of Nazi-stolen valuable stamps hidden in Poland: Is it true, who was the Nazi, where did he stash the loot and is it still there? And here’s where The Stamp Thief gets zany. Because the Polish authorities have not been supportive of the restitution of Nazi loot, our heroes decide to find and recover the stamps with a ruse. The team masquerades as a film crew shooting a romantic drama; they plan to dig around Polish basements until they find the stamps, under the noses of the Poles. What could possibly go wrong? How does the team navigate the moral ambiguity of lying for a good cause? Do they find the stamps? Do they get caught? What follows is Sherlock Holmes meets The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, an unusually colorful documentary. Full review.

The SFJFF runs through August 3 in select San Francisco and Oakland venues. Check out the program and buy tickets at SFJFF.

Here’s the trailer for Oh, My!.

THE STAMP THIEF: amateur detectives running amuck

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Photo caption: THE STAMP THIEF. Courtesy of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

We don’t expect a Holocaust-related documentary to get wacky, but The Stamp Thief combines a historical whodunit and a real-life comic heist.

The Stamp Thief’s shaky premise is based on what is at least a fourth-hand oral account: As Nazis looted the possessions of Jews heading to the death camps, one German officer pocketed highly valuable, easy-to-hide stamp collections. As he fled after the war with his family, he buried the stamps in the basement of the apartment building, intending to return and retrieve his booty. But, because the location was now behind the Iron Curtain in Poland, he was never able to go back.

Naturally, this story raises some fundamental questions, starting with whether it is true. If so, who was the Nazi and where did he stash the stamps? Has someone else found the stamps, or is the treasure still buried?

Gary Gilbert, after a distinguished career as a movie producer (Garden State, The Kids Are Alright, Margaret, La La Land) aspires to track down the truth, hoping to recover the stamps and to restore them, if possible, to the heirs of the original owners. The story comes from a series of potentially unreliable narrators, so Gilbert and colleagues must first undertake an impressive detective investigation, armed at first with not much more than a possibly tall tale and an old photo of two girls in front of a house.

And here’s where The Stamp Thief gets zany. Gilbert is both a man with a sacred mission and a bit of an adventurer. Because the Polish authorities have not been supportive of the restitution of Nazi loot, Gilbert decides to find and recover the stamps in secret. His plan is to take a faux film crew to Poland on the false pretense of shooting a romantic drama, and digging around until he finds the stamps, under the noses of the Poles. His team includes documentarian Dan Sturman, the The Stamp Thief’s director, who films their escapades. What could possibly go wrong? Gilbert’s cause is righteous, but he may not even be able to operate a metal detector competently.

How does the team navigate the moral ambiguity of lying for a good cause? Do they find the stamps? Do they get caught? What follows is Sherlock Holmes meets The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

And was the distrust of Polish attitudes justified? There is one local fixer whose behavior is heroic, but the Polish government and the apartment dwellers do not cover themselves with glory here. Gilbert also happens upon a breathtakingly offensive tchotchke common in Polish households.

With its historical whodunit, an operation of deception, generational antisemitism and buried treasure, The Stamp Thief is an unusually colorful documentary.

NO SLEEP TILL: turbulent weather, turbulent lives

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Photo caption: Jordan Coley and Xavier Brown-Sanders in NO SLEEP TILL. Courtesy of Factory 25.

In Alexandra Simpson’s engrossing art film No Sleep Till, a hurricane is about to hit downscale Florida beach towns; the tourists are already gone, and workaday Floridians prepare to evacuate or hunker down. The storm is merely the setting for a compendium of short stories, as Simpson reveals essential truths about her characters, one or two at a time – a lost crush, a solitary obsession, a resuscitated friendship. Each chapter is so authentic, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t watching a cinema verité documentary.

No Sleep Till is the directorial debut of Alexandra Simpson, who also wrote, edited, produced and collaborated on the sound design. Simpson and cinematographer Sylvain Froidevaux capture the ominous weather, which mirrors the turbulence in the lives of the characters.

Simpson is a writer of uncommon economy. One character is a middle-aged woman, whom we meet when she and her workmates are regretfully let go by their boss. We see her again when she returns to the motel room where is living with an unrelated roommate of convenience. And, finally, when she goes to the motel pool and contemplates her lot in life. She’s probably on screen for less than three minutes, and she doesn’t utter a line, but Simpson still is able to tell us so much about her and make us care about her personal heartbreak.

Another highlight is when one young guy (Jordan Coley) persuades his reluctant buddy (Xavier Brown-Sanders) to join him on an evacuation road trip, in which their friendship evolves. Both Coley and Brown-Sanders are excellent in their first feature film performances.

The characters in No Sleep Till deliver meals, service swimming pools and staff souvenir shops; nobody has a sexy movie job like architect, writer or detective. One guy doesn’t have any job; he devotes his life to storm chasing, living in his truck with meteorologic gear and little food or clothes.

No Sleep Till premiered at the Venice Film Festival Critics Week, where it won two awards including best film. No Sleep Till is starting to roll out into arthouses, beginning July 18 at NYC’s Metrograph. I’ll let you know when it hits California theaters and the internet.

KILL THE JOCKEY: surrealism in the stables

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Photo caption: Nahuel Perez Biscayart and Ursula Corbero in KILL THE JOCKEY. Courtesy of Music Box Pictures.

In the surreal Argentine comedy Kill the Jockey, Remo (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) is a once-champion jockey, who is zealously self-sabotaging his career; self-medicating with alcohol and even swiping the racehorses’ drugs and the booze left on a good luck altar, he has become utterly unreliable. Remo can only emerge from his narcosis to demonstrate his passion for his wife Abril (Ursula Corbero). Abril is also a jockey, and her racing career is on the upswing, although she will soon have to pause it to have their baby.

Both Remo and Abril ride for a mobster (Daniel Jimenez Cacho), who, against all available evidence, has concluded that Remo can still win a big race. As a result, Remo suffers a brain injury, which spurs catatonia and, eventually, a major change in his identity. Remo leaves the hospital without being discharged, and wanders the city in a walking stupor, unaware that both a frantic Abril and the mobster’s murderous goons are searching for him. At this point, Remo is not an ideal gunowner, but he gets a pistol, and the lives of Remo, Abril and the mobster take significant twists. Kill the Jockey morphs into a fable of identity.

Nahuel Perez Biscayart in KILL THE JOCKEY. Courtesy of Music Box Pictures.

Director and co-writer Luis Ortega tells this story with plenty of droll absurdism. Inexplicably, the mobster usually carries an infant, a mounted brass band suddenly appears, the possessions of a coat pocket include a live fish, and there’s ceiling-walking. Kill the Jockey has its share of LOL moments in the first half of the film.

Early in the film, Abril launches a celebratory dance, is soon joined by Remo, and the two move together as unhinged marionettes. It’s as if figures in a Dali painting broke into a sensuous dance. This is a spellbinding scene, the best one in Kill the Jockey and, possibly, in any movie this year so far.

Unfortunately, the second half of Kill the Jockey, with more Remo and less Abril, is not as compelling. Ortega keeps throwing in the entertainingly bizarre, but the film loses momentum as Remo transforms.

I first saw Nahuel Perez Biscayart as the star of the psychological Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons. He’s a good choice to play the tragicomic Remo, a broadly funny character that morphs into a heartfelt one. But the most interesting performance in Kill the Jockey is Ursula Corbero’s as Abril – brimming with charisma and vitality; Abril must navigate her life and Remo’s as Remo’s condition keeps changing dramatically.

Kill the Jockey is Argentina’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar and has been nominated for significant awards, including the Goya (best Iberoamericano film) and the best film at Venice Film Festival. It releases into theaters this weekend, including the Laemmle NoHo in LA, the Roxie in San Francisco and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

BIX BIEDERBECKE: AIN’T NONE OF THEM PLAY LIKE HIM YET: rediscovering a lost jazz legend

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Bix Biederbecke in BIX BIEDERBECKE: AIN’T NONE OF THEM PLAY LIKE HIM YET

The thorough documentary Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet rediscovers a lost jazz legend. Bix Biederbecke was a cornet prodigy and an age peer of Louis Armstrong. His love for and obsession with music was undermined by alcoholism, and he drank himself to death at age 28 in 1931.

Biederbecke was an innovator and soulful performer. One of his bandmates compares the thrill of listening to Bix to hearing a woman say, Yes.

This superbly-sourced documentary was released in 1981 release, and includes interviews filmed in 1978-1980 with fellow musicians and band-mates, including his friend, Hoagy Carmichael. Bix’s sister also appears. There are also recordings of Bix’s performances.

Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet has made my list of Longest Movie Titles.

This is a bit of a Lost Film, having been very, very hard to find on streaming platforms over the last few years. Bix Biederbecke: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet can now be streamed on Amazon.

DRONE: stalked by a mystery

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Photo caption: Marion Barbeau in DRONE. Courtesy of Frameline.

Émilie (Marion Barbeau) is stalked through Paris by a mysterious drone, in Drone, a thriller that explores issues of privacy and the male gaze. A magnificent 4-minute opening sequence, introduces us to the vulnerability caused by the voyeur drone. Émilie is funding her architecture studies by working as a cam girl, a situation where she is physically detached and in control of her male customers. But there is no detachment or control whenever the paranoia-inducing drone suddenly appears.

There are exhilarating set pieces in a parking garage, a motorcycle chase and an abandoned factory, as writer-director Simon Bouisson and cinematographer Ludovic Zulli keep their drone camera in pursuit of the story’s stalker drone. In his first theatrical feature, Bouisson keeps the tension pounding, all the way to the ingenious ending.

Marion Barbeau in DRONE. Courtesy of Frameline.

Émilie is a recent architecture graduate from Lilles who has earned a high-powered fellowship in Paris. As her fellowship project, she chooses an adaptive reuse of an abandoned factory. Of course, even without the drone, we would fear for Émilie’s safety as she wanders around the dark, creepy, abandoned factory and takes long solo jogs through the city at night.

Who is flying the drone? Is it a camgirl customer who has hacked the firewall? Is it her toxic male classmate? Or her swaggering, entitled boss? Or, perhaps most terrifying, nobody at all?

Émilie is relationship-shy, but reluctantly intrigued by a DJ. Will the budding romance put both women in drone-jeopardy?

Marion Barbeau, a former ballet dancer, is superb as Émilie. Émilie, so vulnerable throughout the movie, is remarkably strong and determined, which lifts Drone above the ordinary woman-in-peril genre. Barbeau is able to project Émilie’s fundamental badassness.

I’ve listed Drone in the special Festival Films category of my Best Movies of 2025 – So Far. I screened Drone for Frameline (where it was my favorite film), and I’ll let you know when it has a theatrical or VOD release in the US.

BOB MACKIE: NAKED ILLUSION: the man who invented the red carpet

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If ever a fashion designer dominated the Hollywood red carpet, it is Bob Mackie The biodoc Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion tracks his remarkable life and career, and his impact on the evolution of the red carpet.

Director Michael Miele had the cooperation of Mackie and Mackie’s design director Joe McFate (one of the producers). That leveraged access to Mackie clients Cher, Carol Burnett, Bernadette Peters, Pink, Mitzi Gaynor and Miley Cyrus, and to fashion icons RuPaul and Tom Ford, who all appear in this biodoc. So do members of Mackie’s very complicated family. Cher alone is worth the ticket price.

I saw Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion at a SLO Film Fest screening with Bob Mackie and Joe McFate in person; Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion won the SLO Film Fest’s Best Documentary Feature.

MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN: the first casualty of war is truth

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Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.

Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.

Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.

Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.

More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.

Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,

I saw Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the SLO Film Fest; I’ll let you know when it gets a theatrical or VOD release.