Dead Parent Club
No, not sequel to The Dead Poets Society. That said, this 15-minute film written and directed by actor Mark Fleischmann does involve students and a teacher. Comparisons end there.
It is the first day back at school since student Ollie’s father died. His teacher’s cack-handed attempt at pastoral care is followed by Ollie (Zac Cohen) thinking his classmate Tashkin (Ediz Ozer) is making fun of him and his dead dad. The two have a fist fight in the classroom. But Tashkin knows what Ollie is going through. He has a dead parent too.
The film elegantly conveys the role of ritual in coming to terms with loss. It is beautifully photographed in suburban streets and parks and despite the prosaic setting, it generates a vivid sense of mysticism.
Especially well conveyed is the presence and then absence of Ollie’s dad.
Fish, Chips and Faith
What do you get when you bring together a rabbi, a Muslim and a chip shop? This is the question posed by this small film with a big heart.
The answer is provided by Muslim fryer and chippy owner Jenade Yamin, and Rabbi Anthony Gilbert of Etz Chaim Synagogue and Leeds Beth Din.
When Jenade opened a halal shop in a Jewish part of Leeds, Rabbi Gilbert asked if it might also be kosher.
“I didn’t know anything about kosher food,” says Jenade. “All I knew was that as a Muslim I’m allowed to eat it.”
A potted history illustrated with with engravings relates the 16th-century Sephardi provenance of the British staple (Jewish-style fried fish combined with the British spud). But the heart of Micaela Blitz and Miriam Rosenberg’s six-minute short is the miracle of a place where Jews, Muslims and people of all faiths and none sit cheek by chewing jowl without the slightest sense of unease.
“This is how it should be,” says one Jewish punter.
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Rambling
Since 1969 the mostly Jewish Pennine Wayfarers Rambling Club have been hiking through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world, including the Lake and Peak districts. Jack Levy’s tender film reveals why these Jews of a certain age schlep along often sopping wet but majestic trails beyond their home towns of Manchester and Sheffield.
All levels of observance are represented, says Barry as he stops on a hillside under a slate-grey sky.
“Whatever your observances are, when you’re walking it doesn’t matter,” adds a couple. Another of the many interviewees who have stopped to chat says that he finds mountains much more spiritual than going to synagogue.
Before they set off, the leader of the group gives a little history lesson. It all started in 1932 when a group of working-class men challenged the restrictions placed by landowners that prevented ordinary people enjoying the countryside.
The mass protest was led by Benny Rothman, described in the film as a 5ft tall Jewish Mancunian.
Levy’s camera accompanies the 17 walkers on an outing during which memories of matzah rambles and a fair few shidduchim are shared. It’s not just a walking club but a community, says one of the rosy-cheeked ramblers.
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Mizrahi Mismatch
The sad strains of a clarinet accompanies Menahem as he picks his way through Golders Green streets carrying a plastic bag of shopping. In Arabic, his voice-over describes how he travelled from Aden to Tel Aviv where he met the girl he married.
It seems we are in for a portrait of solitude during which the subject of Misha Mansoor’s film shares memories of his life with the woman he loved and has now lost. That is until we cut abruptly to a lady in an armchair shouting “Menahem! Menahem!”. The girl from Tel Aviv is very much alive. Her name is Judith.
This portrait of an elderly Mizrahi couple may just be the funniest five minutes in the Jewish Film Factory’s selection this year.
“He was a hot-blooded guy who could not keep his pants up,” says Judith. Menahem, now sitting in the chair next to her, responds with a sigh of either exasperation or longing for times past.
Judith says that she was was also “hot-blooded”. It was a relief to get married.
“Three times a day we used to have sex,” she says adding through her raucous laughter, “until one day he told me enough, I don’t have the energy.”
There is grief too. Their son Solomon died, though we are not told why. A photo of a dashing young man bears the dates 1962-2023. But it ends with Judith demanding a kiss from her 92-year-old husband.
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The Last Jewel
Rob Kaplan’s film is a homage to the Jews who shaped London’s diamond and jewellery quarter, Jews such as AR Ullmann. The shop bearing his name is one of the last remaining Jewish jewellery dealers in Hatton Garden, a caption informs us as the camera moves through the famous street.
The founder’s descendents include 88-year-old Joseph, who is described as “the father”. Then there is the next generation Lucy and Max, two of six siblings.
As the camera observes them working in the shadowy, slightly Dickensian interior, Lucy explains that the Ullmanns arrived in London from Budapest because of persecution. Her grandfather Andrew opened a jewellery store in the British capital in 1900. When you have to leave you can’t take your house so you take your jewels, says Joseph.
This shop, which opened in 1950, is completely unique in Hatton Garden and is the oldest in the street, adds Max. It looks it. The gothic typeface of its sign seems to stand in mute judgment of the shouty, shiny shopfronts of the newer outlets.
Compared to them the stock in this “ramshackle antique shop” is brimful of unexpected pieces, says Max. Where else would you get menorahs, chai necklaces, Stars of David and mezuzah pendants, says Ania, older sister to Max and Lucy.
“I like to restore things,” Max as his tweezers drops a tiny diamond into a ring’s vacant space. “I like to feel I’m improving something, not just buying and selling.”
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Oslo Court
Hermione Oldham’s film opens with a recording of Matt Lucas’s Desert Islands Discs from 2006. The comedian asks if he is allowed to take a whole restaurant as his luxury, not only because of the food but the exotic dessert waiter with the distinctly unexotic name of Neil.
We learn almost as much as there is to know about Neil through the silent close-up magic of his hands as he folds a pink, linen napkin into a perfect fan.
Neil who’s more, erm, interesting surname is Heshmat, tells us that he has worked at the 1970s retro restaurant Oslo Court in St John’s Wood since 1974. He is as much as part of the furniture there as the pink table cloths.
“I am loved by the Jewish, thank God,” he says in an accent that is hard to place. His parents were wealthy Egyptians, it turns out.
The place may not be kosher but the air is saturated with Jewish hubbub. North London solicitor David Lister breaks off from lunch to tell us he has been eating there for three decades, one assumes not continuously. He loves the Capodimonte and the décor of the place, which he describes with the insight of the most niche of art historians as “Hendon renaissance”.
It is not clear if Lucas will get the Jewish punters as well as the waiter on his desert island, but the restaurant would clearly not be the same without them.
King of the Jews
Written by Flora Gill and directed by Katie Lambert, this witty comedy boasts Midas Man star Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Mark, the Jewish half of a mixed marriage.
Catriona Stirling is Alice, the non-Jewish mother to the couple’s young son Ezra, who is played by Rocket Muldoon, a name that alone must surely assure the child actor a future in the business.
Ezra has landed a key role in his school’s nativity play, that of King Herod, who Mark forgets is not one of the friendlier three kings in the story.
As the family’s gentile guardian of Jewish heritage, Alice is appalled that the only Jewish boy in the school is being cast as the villain.
Mark sees it as all part of their family’s Christmas tree and menorah-lighting heritage and, anyway, as the Jew in the family he can surely pull rank on Alice about the right to make complaints to the school on behalf of their son.
Gill’s script mines the comedy of a Jewish-gentile relationship in which the militant non-Jewish half is the quickest to confront the school’s insensitivity towards their son’s Jewishness.
“You’re not Jewish,” argues Mark who thinks only he is qualified to complain about such matters.
“I’m a Jewish ally,” objects Alice. “I’m Jewish adjacent. I’m ajewcent.”
Lambert directs with the light touch that Gill’s fizzing script deserves.
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The UK Jewish Film Factory is funded by the Pears Short Film Fund and the Dangoor UKJF Short Doc Fund
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