Small nation, big cinema

Now in its fifth year, the Israeli fest returns to Chicago with a strong slate of interesting films addressing manifold political, social and personal facets of modern Israeli life. The series kicks off with Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor’s A Matter of Size, a droll and handsomely made comedy about a good-hearted fat guy whose job in a sushi joint inspires him to organize his equally chubby buddies into a sumo-wrestling league as means of standing up to Israel’s vehemently negative cultural attitude toward obesity. It may sound like a one-note ethnic joke, but the stalwart cast and smart, big-hearted script add up to a sweet and touching film and a moving plea for fat acceptance in the bargain.

Based closely on real-life events, Renen Schorr’s The Loners is the plainly told but nonetheless compelling story of two Russian recruits in the Israeli army charged with diverting munitions to Hamas. Railroaded into a military prison where they are violently harassed as traitors, they take hostages and demand a retrial, but their friendship is stressed to the breaking point during the resulting siege.

The Israeli fest would be incomplete without a drama dedicated to exploring the tensions between the pious and the secular sides of Israeli society. The titular siblings in Igaal Niddam’s ponderously schematic Brothers are a secular kibbutznik and a devout lawyer who reunite after years of non-contact to talk out their differences in dialogue so stilted you could plotz.

Israeli features about gay life and coming out have become a genre unto themselves in recent years, but Haim Tabakman’s Eyes Wide Open falls well short of the mark set in 2002 by Eytan Fox’s Yossi & Jagger. The mirthless, workmanlike drama concerns an orthodox butcher who falls helplessly for a handsome homeless youth he hires as a shop assistant.

Keren Yedaya’s absorbing kitchen-sink drama Jaffa is another tale of concealed and forbidden love, this time between the daughter of a gruff garage owner and a Palestinian mechanic in his employ. Leonid Prudovsky’s gently engaging Five Hours From Paris offers a look at middle-aged romance in the vein of low-key character study. A melancholy and divorced cab driver struggles to overcome his fear of flying so he can fulfill a lifelong ambition to visit Paris. His life is complicated when he becomes smitten with his son’s married music teacher.

All of the three docs available for preview were well worth seeing. Nitza Gonen’s Children of the Bible offers an illuminating guided tour of Israel’s subculture of black Ethiopian Jews, led by idealistic, Ethiopian-born rapper Jeremy Cool Habash, who has dedicated himself to reconnecting Israeli-born Ethiopian youth with their cultural roots while urging their conservative religious elders to stop resisting certain inevitable and salutary aspects of assimilation. Dan Setton and Itzik Lerner’s Yes, Miss Commander! examines a human reclamation project designed to turn young ex-convicts and reforming drug addicts into disciplined members of the Israeli army. The drillmasters are female officers, which adds extra social tensions to an already fraught environment. Falling somewhere between doc and drama is David Ofek’s affecting The Tale of Nicolai and the Law of Return. Cast in the form of a folk tale, it re-creates a Romanian emigre’s Kafkaesque misadventures as a guest laborer in Israel who could qualify for citizenship if only he knew the rules of the right of return. Though whimsical in tone, the film throws a sober and quizzical light on Israel’s peculiar standing as a secular democracy with racially selective immigration policies.

The Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema runs Thursday 21 through October 31. For more information, go to chicagofestivalofisraelicinema.org.

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