Herald Sun Article

A BRIGHT young New Yorker raised as an Orthodox Jew rebels against his upbringing and becomes a neo-Nazi thug.

Some sick scenario calculated to offend? No, it is loosely based on a true story and the theme of The Believer, a critically acclaimed new film by American director Henry Bean, which is to be released in Melbourne as the opening attraction at the 2001 Festival of Jewish Cinema.

"Some organisations in the US have threatened to boycott The Believer if it gets a commercial release, but it's really a fascinating exploration of Jewish culture and history," festival founder-director Les Rabinowicz says.

"The film was inspired by the case of a young religious Jew from Queens, New York, who joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. It's been winning awards wherever it's been shown since it took the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival in January."

As usual, Rabinowicz scoured the world to secure the latest attractions for the popular annual festival, which opens at the Trak Cinema, Toorak, tomorrow and will also be held in Sydney, Perth and Canberra.

Of the 26 films from eight countries, 17 will be Australian premieres -- several of them direct from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals -- and there is sure to be a commercial box-office hit among them.

"That's been the pattern in previous years," Rabinowicz says. "Last year's opener, Into the Arms of Strangers, which documented the Kindertransport rescue operation on the eve of World War II, did very well when it got a general release.

"So did several others in previous years, including The Governess with Minnie Driver and A Price Above Rubies with Renee Zellweger, though the festival is also a great opportunity to see exceptional films that may not get another screening in Australia."

Special guest at the Melbourne opening will be French director Claude Lanzmann, whose latest film, Sobibor, documents the extraordinary events of October 14, 1943, when a group of Jewish prisoners, including some Soviet soldiers, staged a successful uprising against their Nazi captors at Poland's notorious Sobibor death camp.

Another powerful true-life drama is Karl Francis's One of the Hollywood Ten, starring Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi as American director Herbert Biberman and his Academy Award-winning actor wife Gale Sondergaard, two of the many who were blacklisted by Hollywood during the 1940s for their supposed communist affiliations.

There's also plenty of light relief in the festival -- Rabinowicz recommends French blockbuster Would I Lie to You 2 and Israeli director Amos Kolleck's new romantic comedy Queenie in Love, plus some top documentaries, including Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness, about a Japanese envoy who saved numerous Lithuanian Jews during World War II.

AUSTRALIA will be represented by Melbourne filmmaker Monique Schwarz's Mamadrama, but only in Sydney because the documentary about the role of Jewish mothers in cinema is currently showing at the Classic Cinema, Elsternwick.

Otherwise, there will be no Australian films in the festival -- nothing new, but sad all the same, Rabinowicz says.

"America and Europe produce films with Jewish themes almost compulsively and there's no shortage of great material in Australia, but nobody in the industry is recording it on film. That's such a shame."

- Zelda Cawthorne