Has Sephardi cinema finally come of age ?

The recent New York Sephardic Film Festival has been attracting record attendances and it's been a bumper year for Sephardi cinema, Nick Johnstone writes in The Jewish Chronicle.

"Ravit Turjeman is excited. She has just finished her first stint as programme director for the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, in collaboration with the Yeshiva University Museum and American Sephardi Federation/ Sephardi House. It is now in its 12th year, having launched in 1990 and gone annual in 2001. Turjeman hopes this year’s selection of films, co-programmed with Lynne Winters, director of programming for the American Sephardi Federation, will further broaden the audience for Sephardic-themed film.

“The point of the festival,” explains the New York-based Israeli, whose parents left Morocco for Israel in 1964, “was to show through culture, through film, a type of Judaism that people are not very familiar with. Right now, it’s still exotic for people to see these Sephardic traditions in Judaism because whenever one thinks about a Jewish person, the immediate image is a white male Eastern European. These films offer a new, refreshing look at the different Jewish traditions and at the same time they’re really great cinema.”

"This year, on account of a big publicity push and the trickle-down effect from a golden year for Israeli cinema, she and Winters are expecting record attendance. Highlights of the festival’s line-up include Rina Papish’s Ladino — 500 Years Young (a documentary about Ladino singer Yasmin Levy), Operation Mural (a documentary retracing the 1961 Mossad operation which saw 500 Jewish children escape Morocco for Israel), Tomer Heymann’s Black Over White (a documentary following musician Idan Raichel to Ethiopia), Vivienne Roumani-Denn’s The Last Jews Of Libya (the history of a Jewish family for whom Benghazi was once home), and Mohamed Ismail’s Goodbye Mothers (a controversial Moroccan film made by a Muslim director telling of intimate Muslim-Jewish relations in Casablanca in 1960).

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