MAHONING VALLEY Film festival has universal theme

The focus is on broadening the community's cultural and educational horizons.
By DEBORA SHAULIS
ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
It's called the Schermer Jewish Film Festival, but there's universality in the themes of the movies to be shown in this local, inaugural event.
The festival, made possible by Schermer Scholar-in-Residence Program at Youngstown State University and a host of sponsors, begins Saturday at Austintown Movies 3. Three feature films will be shown there on three different days, and a pair of documentaries will be shown during one afternoon in YSU's Debartolo Hall Auditorium.
"We really wanted to have enough of an appeal so that it would attract some non-Jewish people as well," says festival chairwoman Sherry Weinblatt.
While many other Jewish film festivals have popped in cities as a way to energize nonactive Jews, the impetus here "was to broaden our educational and cultural landscape of our community," Weinblatt said. Youngstown's Jewish community is small but active and organized, she noted.
Proud of partnership
Weinblatt is proud that the film festival already has developed into what she called "a community partnership." It has the support not only of Jewish sponsors, but non-Jewish as well. Weinblatt cited the participation of The Flick Clique, a film advocacy group, in the movie selection process and the cooperation of Austintown Movies 3, which is managed by a small, Cleveland-based theater chain.
Moviegoers are invited not only to view the films, but to attend dessert receptions and participate in discussions with local experts. "We want an experience," Weinblatt said. "These movies have depth to them. They require some sharing of the experience and questions and answers. It's a more educational approach to watching a movie."
"Nowhere in Africa," the Oscar-winning foreign film that will be shown first, will resonate with people who have had to start their lives over in an unfamiliar place. It's the story of a Jewish family that flees the Nazis in 1938 by moving from Germany to Kenya. Making the adjustment to their new lives is easier for 5-year-old Regina than her parents.
The documentaries to be shown Nov. 9 link the Jewish experience to that of blacks. The first delves into the history of the song "Strange Fruit," which was popularized by singer Billie Holliday. Its lyrics -- "black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" -- referred to the lynching of blacks, but the author of the song was a Jewish schoolteacher. The other film, "From Swastika to Jim Crow," focuses on German Jewish refugees who enrolled in predominantly-black U.S. colleges.
Romance and its complications are explored in "Gloomy Sunday," a German film about a Jewish restaurant owner, the beautiful assistant whom he secretly loves, a smitten young pianist who composes a heartbreaking song for the woman and a restaurant patron who also has his eye on her.
At the end
The festival will close on a classic note with "Exodus," a 40th-anniversary re-release of the film about the creation of the State of Israel. It starred Paul Newman as the leader of an Israeli resistance movement, Eva Marie Saint as a non-Jewish nurse and others who portrayed Jewish refugee passengers on a ship that escaped detention in Cyprus but faced a blockade by British boats outside their homeland. The movie is a fictionalized account, but the real story will be told by Schermer Scholar-in-Residence Zev Siegel of Pittsburgh, who was a passenger on Exodus, Weinblatt said."Nowhere in Africa" and "Gloomy Sunday" are recommended for adults ages 18 and older, Weinblatt noted.
The Schermer Scholar-in-Residence Program was established in 1980 in memory of the Schermer family, who supported efforts that benefited young people, educational efforts, the Jewish community and the Mahoning Valley.
shaulis@vindy.com