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At the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, the Avalon Theatre, the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, the National Gallery of Art East Building, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to Dec. 14
Because commercial distributors are generally more interested in fictional fare than documentaries, thematic film festivals are often left with an assortment of first-rate documentaries and second-string features. That's not the case with this year's Washington Jewish Film Festival, the fest's 14th annual installment. To judge from slightly less than half the 40 entries, this seems to be an equally fine year for fiction and nonfiction.
A powerful performance by Anouk Aimée and a disturbing sense of place distinguish director (and Holocaust survivor) Marceline Loridan-Ivens' semi-autobiographical Birch Tree Meadow (Dec. 14 at the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center). Aimée plays Myriam, a Franco-Polish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau who attends a meeting of fellow ex-prisoners in Paris, then on a whim decides to visit Poland. Myriam meets old friends, hostile Poles, and a guilt-wracked German photographer who's meant to be her dramatic foil. Aimée's true co-star, however, is bucolic but haunted Birkenau, the horror-fraught landscape whose name translates as "birch tree meadow."
Polish director Agnieszka Holland is the product of a Jewish-Catholic marriage, and her Julie Walking Home (Dec. 13 at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and Cultural Center) has an element of spiritual autobiography. Julie (Miranda Otto) is the daughter of an old-fashioned Polish Catholic; her longtime partner, Henry, is Jewish. There's no conflict, because neither of them is religious. When the couple's son Nick becomes seriously ill, however, spiritual issues push into their lives, and Julie takes her son to Poland to meet mysterious faith healer Alexei (the ever-messianic Lothaire Bluteau). Characteristically, Holland ultimately ventures into murky narrative territory, but the film raises fascinating issues.
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