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As a member of the Jewish Film Festival, organized by the Jewish Community Center, Sonoma County, I preview movies to help decide which ones to play at the Festival. I watched the following movie as part of this volunteer effort.

The most succinct summary of “The Five Houses of Lea Goldberg“– a documentary, narrated in Hebrew– is early on as we read the subtitles: “This is the story of the loves, poems and fears of the woman who chose Hebrew and Hebrew chose her.” Lea Goldberg was a prolific, influential Israeli poet, born in 1969 in Lithuania and died in 1970 in Jerusalem. The “five houses” in the title refer to the five segments of the movie, as titled below

• First House: The House of Hebrew – about her early years, including how she found Hebrew
• Second House: Tel Aviv 1935 – the war years and how she found home in Palestine in 1933
• Third House: House of Love – on her love life, including a long unrequited love with Avrhama Ben Yitzhak
• Fourth House: In Perpetual Motion – on her work and style
• Fifth House: The Last House – her struggle with cancer and death

I admit I never heard of Lea Goldberg before and I am not much of a poetry aficionado, but I liked this movie for these reasons:

• It was structured as a poem, which fit very well its topic.
• The music was soothing and the songs were beautifully sang, I wish a soundtrack would be available.
• Incorporating innovative animation, evoking Monthy Python but without their harsh humor, added a lot visually and brought even more life to the old photographs used.
• All the doc’s talking heads–her friends, literary theorists, editors–had either fond things to say of her or explained her art with real good analytic sense.

The description at the distributor’s site reads:

Lea Goldberg was a prolific poet, author, playwright, translator and researcher of literature. Her writings, regarded as classics of Israeli literature, remain extremely popular among Hebrew speakers where she is considered the feminine equivalent of Bialik.

Although Lea Goldberg died 41 years ago she is still an enigmatic figure – a powerful woman who lived with her mother and never married, a woman who reinvented herself from the ashes of the First World War and became Israel’s most beloved poet.

The film is a cinematic fantasy in five acts using animation, after effects, still photos, original music and interviews which, taken together, celebrates the story of L.Goldberg.

Trailer:

On the surface the Hungarian film “Team Building” (titled in English even in Hungary) is a simple film: employees go for a weekend “team building” retreat, where the unusual situation and their interpersonal relationships make things complicated. But it is a clever movie and it has three more additional layers of meaning.

The most obvious layer is about the consequences of the imbalanced power setup. The participants of this event are at a location they are not used to (city folks in the middle of an isolated forest inn) and in a situation they are not used to: being led by an “expert” in team building who barely speaks their language. The fact that his Hungarian is so poor is a symbol, that he is truly from another world: the cultural differences are deeper between him and his audience than the language ones. Tactics and conflict managing methods that may work elsewhere are at best meaningless in this Eastern European country and at worst are inadequate empty cliches that evoke hostility. The key to this struggle is how people react when they are presented with the “expert”, who in this situation has supposed to have power over them. Some embrace this imposed position, others mock and play along with it coyly, while there is one who vehemently opposes recognizing it.

This point leads to a slightly deeper layer, moving from the interpersonal to the personal level. A main theme of the movie is about the tension between authenticity and loyalty. If I am myself, with all that entails, where should my loyalties lie? To put it in another way: how much of a compromise is acceptable to maintain the consistency of one’s self-image. The firm that sent these people to the retreat expect ultimate loyalty from them. In return they may offer a shiny financial future, but in reality they just graciuosly allow eking out a living, if at all.

Which leads the deepest  question the movie revolves around: who the real enemy is and how that relates to survival. The “expert” is an easy person to pick to hate, being a triple outsider (country of origin, language, position), and being an unlikable fellow on his own. Some might also think that a person can be one’s most influential enemy: the inner fights are hard to work through. But by the end we learn that the real problem is structural: it is the (capitalist?) system that is the cause of the suffering and puts even survival into jeopardy. This set-up, where the corporation is the overlord and the individuals are reduced to cogs in the wheel, is endemic and all one can try to do is walk out of it. For a while.

I know that the above was long on analysis and short on telling the story. For that watch the trailer below or read the summary from the production company:

To what extent does the nowadays so popular brainwashing referred to as team building help us find our way in everyday life? In what respect does it help us answer the fundamental questions of our lives? To what extent is a person from a former communist country capable of adopting the values dictated by this “brave new world”? And how much can a coach imported from a western country understand the sometimes far too Eastern European conditions? A film about a country, which conquered its freedom in 1989. Did it really succeed?

Trailer:

As a member of the Jewish Film Festival, organized by the Jewish Community Center, Sonoma County, I preview movies to help decide which ones to play at the Festival. I watched the following movie as part of this volunteer effort.

Kid’s Haven: Refuge from the Holocaust is a 45 minutes long documentary, directed by Roel Oostra, about university students in The Netherlands mainly Trutije van Lier, who saved the lives of 150+ of Jewish babies and toddlers by organizing transit houses, safe havens starting in 1940. The film has lots of photographs, some archival footage and built around interviews with the heroes, survivors, and historians. The narrator and about half of the people interviewed were speaking English, but the rest was in Dutch with English subtitles.

After watching probably dozens of Holocaust documentaries I still think it is very important to make sure that those who saved lives would be honored. This documentary does a great job of it and I learned, again, about great and brave people who did just that. What I particularly enjoyed in this movie, compared to others, was the relatively positive tone. This was accomplished with the help of three details. It helped, of course, that they actually manged to save lots of lives and some of those kids are now grateful, mature adults who were willing to talk about their memories. Second, seeing episodes of their and their descendants’ lives now, 65 years later showed that it was worth it: these people went on living a full life. Third, intercutting scenes from the lives of young people today, with the photographs of the heroes of the movie, when they were young created a sense of continuity as the youth of today were studying at the same institutions.

The text on the cover of the DVD reads:

“KID’S HAVEN, Refuge from the Holocaust” is a television documentary on the organized resistance of couragous young students from Utrecht and Amsterdam, during the second World War.

Risking their own lives, they saved hundreds of Jewish infants from certain death. They were angered, the outraged by what they saw around them. This was simply not going to happen.

The film focuses on the determined effort of students from the Utrecht Corps and UVSV to sace as many Jewish children as possible from the Holocaust, and in particular the work of young Truitje van Lier and her creche. “Kid’s Haven”, firt asylum and transit house which saved the lives of 150 Jewish toddlers and babies.

This film inspired by the thesis of historian Bert Jan Flim “Saving the Children”, was produced in meoroy of the fact that on May 5th 2010 Holland celebrated the end of Second World War, exactly 65 years ago.