Temple Emanu-El Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival / Early March again brings island cinema lovers a unique opportunity: the eighth annual Temple Emanu-El Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. All films are premieres for Hawaiʻi and each of the seven illuminates Jewish culture in careful, poignant ways.

This year’s fest opens with The Little Traitor, written, produced and directed by Lynn Roth, who will be on the island to introduce her film and conduct a post-screening Q&A. The film, based on the Amos Oz book, follows Proffy, an 11-year-old boy in 1947 Palestine. The British are occupying the country, and Proffy and his friends want nothing more than for them to march out. One day, a soldier catches the youngster out past curfew but lets him off the hook. A friendship is struck. The soldier, Sgt. Dunlop, has an interest in the Book of Samuel and the two begin meeting regularly to go over the Hebrew Bible’s lessons. His friends find out and soon Proffy is branded a traitor by both his peers and the larger Jewish community. Doctor Octopus himself, Alfred Molina, plays the soldier. This drama is a sweet take on the dangers of prejudice, and it has a sincere, tear-jerker of an ending. It’s a fine opening for the festival and the post-screening dialogue promises to be compelling.

Another deeply moving take on multi-cultural relations is The Lemon Tree. The Israeli defense minister moves in next door to Salma, a widower tending to the lemon-tree grove left to her by her father. The minister’s secret service deems the grove a sniper threat because it lies on the border between Palestine and the West Bank. It is ordered that the trees be uprooted, but instead of meekly taking the government’s monetary compensation, Salma gets a lawyer and chooses to fight, taking it to the Israeli Supreme Court. The film has a certain quiet power and is almost novel-like in its attention to character: We not only get to know the complexities within Salma and the defense minister, but also those of her attorney–who is attracted to his client–and the defense minister’s wife, who is more sympathetic to Salma’s plight than her husband realizes. Rabbi Peter Schaktman of Temple Emanu-El will be on hand to present the film and conduct a discussion afterward.

Addressing community discrimination in an entirely different way is Beau Jest, a frothy contemporary comedy from James Sherman, adapted from his own play. Sarah Goldman hires an escort to pose as her Jewish boyfriend to please her parents because they don’t want her dating someone outside of the faith. Things, of course, don’t go exactly as planned. Familiar faces in the cast include Seymour Cassel, Lainie Kazan and Willie Garson (Stanford Blatch from Sex and the City). Chances are, if you loved Valentine’s Day, you’re gonna love this.

Documentaries also get their moment in the spotlight. The feature length Inside Hana’s Suitcase tells the surprising journey of a piece of luggage belonging to Hana Brady, a young girl who died in the concentration camps of Auschwitz. The suitcase, improbably, finds its way into the hands of Fumiko Ishioka, the curator of a Holocaust museum in Japan. Fumiko and her class of Tokyo students then make it their mission to discover who Hana was. They eventually learn Hana had a brother who survived and they contact him. The results are expectedly touching and heartbreaking, but director Larry Weinstein presents the footage with a visual flair, employing black-and-white flashbacks and adding computer-enhanced storyboards to the narrative, thereby bringing a vibrant edge to what could have been an overly stolid affair.

A pair of shorter documentaries examine the Jewish religion and spiritual enlightenment in polar opposite ways. Leaving the Fold examines five young people from Brooklyn, Montreal and Jerusalem who wish to escape the ultra-Orthodox community. In Circumcise Me, wackiness ensues with Chris Campbell, a Catholic who decides to convert to Judaism

The can’t-miss offering of the festival, though, is A Matter of Size, a fun, touching and sweet look at Herzl, an overweight man in the Israeli city of Ramla. Dejected after failed attempts to lose weight, he learns that his boss at the Japanese restaurant he works at is a former champion sumo wrestling coach. Inspired that the athletes are actually revered, not vilified, for their size, Herzl forms a sumo wrestling team of his own and he and his friends discover that size really doesn’t matter. In addition to being an entertaining fish-out-of-sport comedy, it’s an eye-opening look into the everyday, light-hearted side of Jewish culture.

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