The St. Louis Jewish Film Festival returns for its 31st year with its typically eclectic mix of narrative features and documentaries about the Jewish experience. The first week’s entries are all centered around World War II in some way, but even within that scope, the tones range from intense drama to revenge fantasy to documentaries that are equal parts heart-breaking and life-affirming. All showings are at the B&B Theatre West Olive 10 at 12657 Olive Blvd. in Creve Coeur unless otherwise noted.
The festival opens with a powerful documentary on genocide and the need for empathy. The primary throughline of Marc Bennett and Tim Roper’s For the Living (03.15, 3:00pm) is the annual Ride for the Living, an event where bike riders gather at Auschwitz and ride the 60 miles from there to Krakow, Poland. The trip was inspired by Marcel Zielinski, a still-living survivor of Auschwitz who, when he was freed from the camp as a child, took the same journey alone on foot to return to his family’s home. The filmmakers draw parallels between the Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Armenia, even the American West, not just exploring what happened but why it happened and how we can (hopefully) prevent the next one. It’s a thought-provoking piece that should be required viewing at high schools everywhere. The screening is followed by a Q&A with Roper and producer Lisa Effress.
Following an opening night sponsor reception (attendance included with your ticket to either of Sunday’s films), the headline event of opening night is a screening of Nuremberg (03.15, 7:00pm), the critically acclaimed historical drama from director James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man) that stars Rami Malek as an American psychologist tasked with interviewing high-ranking Nazis, including Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, prior to their war crimes trials at Nuremberg.
Oren Rudavsky’s wide-ranging 2024 documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire (03.17, 3:00pm) captures the life of Wiesel—the Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and author of the seminal Holocaust memoir Night—in his own words and voice, including powerful remembrances of his time in Auschwitz that are recreated with evocative animation by Joel Orloff that looks like oil paintings in motion. But the film is not just a life story, but an exploration of what effect one man’s life can have on the world, captured in conversations with Wiesel’s wife, sister, son, grandchildren, contemporaries, students, and even current-day high schoolers reading Night in class. The film’s most priceless scenes, though, come from seeing Wiesel dress down two presidents—Reagan and Clinton—to their faces in public settings for their shortcomings. Also, a bonus local connection: some of the film’s archival materials came from the collection at Webster University. The showing is followed by a Q&A with Dr. Erin McGlothlin, professor of German and Jewish Studies and the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Holocaust Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Based on a true story, Judith Colell’s Frontier (03.17, 7:00pm) follows Manel Grau (Miki Esparbé), a customs officer at the Spain-France border. Haunted by what he survived in the just-concluded Spanish Civil War, he can’t help but see himself in the suffering of the Jews attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France and he uses his position to start smuggling as many as he can across the border, risking his life as well as his family’s in the process. The film is nominated in 8 categories at the upcoming Gaudí Awards, the preeminent film awards for the Catalonia region of Spain. The film screens in Spanish with English subtitles.
Taking a page from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, Dominik Sedlar’s Vindicta uses the backdrop of World War II for a reality-inspired revenge tale. In this case, Hannah (Devon Ross) watches her family brutally murdered by a Nazi soldier, but takes advantage of a momentary distraction to take revenge and kill him in kind. Going into hiding under an assumed name, she soon becomes obsessed with clandestinely murdering as many Nazis as she can…until, that is, a fateful encounter with a handsome Nazi soldier who she can’t dispatch quite so easily, and who suddenly becomes infatuated with her and wants to whisk her back to Berlin with him even though he knows Hannah is Jewish. Vindicta’s two screenings at the festival (03.18, 7:00pm at Alamo Draft House; and 03.19, 7:00pm at B&B Theatre West Olive 10) are two of its very first showings, but the two reviews logged on Rotten Tomatoes so far laud its “exquisite direction and a star-turning lead performance” and call it “beautifully shot and edited.”
Based on the bestselling novel At the Wolf’s Table by Rosella Postorino, Silvio Soldini’s The Tasters (03.19, 3:00pm) tells the story of a group of women during World War II, taken from their remote village and forced into the unenviable role of food tasters to prove that Hitler’s meals haven’t been poisoned. Separated from their family and always terrified that their next meal could be their last, the women form a fragile team that gets rocked to its foundations as the Allied forces close in on Berlin. The film screens in German with English subtitles.
Stay tuned for a rundown of week two’s films in the coming days. | Jason Green
The St. Louis Jewish Film Festival runs March 15-26. Tickets to individual films are $16, and an all-festival pass with access to all 12 films is $102.69. For the full schedule or to purchase tickets, visit here.
