13th annual Jewish Film Festival to import a world of cinema

Preview

Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

Jan. 30-Feb. 20 at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre (opening night only), United Artists North Point Market 8, Georgia Theatre Company Merchants Walk, Lefont Sandy Springs, United Artists Tara Cinemas 4 and Atlantic Station Stadium 16. Tickets go on sale Jan. 3. Full lineup expected to be posted Monday at www.ajff.org.

Films: 71. Screenings: 124. 2012 attendance: 30,000, up 15 percent from 2011.

The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival has a way of racking up big numbers. But the most important one for the city’s largest film gathering, whose 2013 lineup is being announced Monday exclusively in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, could be 24.

That’s the number of countries that produced films for the festival, which will run Jan. 30 to Feb. 20 at multiple metro locations.

“This is the only chance to see these films, many coming off the international film festival circuit, in Atlanta,” AJFF executive director Kenny Blank told the AJC. “They have screened at Toronto or Berlin or Tribeca or Sundance, but they are not opening even in the art house cinemas here in Atlanta.”

The dearth of commercial screenings here for the festival’s international and domestic films, which are mainly aimed at mature audiences, helps draw non-Jewish cinema fans to the AJFF. A quarter of the audience at the country’s second-largest Jewish film festival (after San Francisco’s) is non-Jewish, according to AJFF audience surveys. In fact, many of the films are themselves only loosely Judaic in theme.

The yearly mix of films varies, depending on the 400 entries filmmakers submit to the AJFF, but this year’s lineup is particularly strong in music and arts-related titles, biographies, gay-themed films and coming-of-age stories.

The opening-night feature, the American-made documentary “Hava Nagila (The Movie),” showing Jan. 30 at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre (the fest’s only new venue), is squarely in the music category. The film charts the growing cultural impact of the Hebrew folk song.

“It’s certainly uplifting and there’s something to be learned there,” Blank said, “but it’s primarily a fun and humorous look at pop culture through this wonderful Jewish melody known by anyone who’s been to a Jewish wedding or bar mitzvah.”

Other AJFF highlights:

• Music: "A.K.A. Doc Pomus," about the disabled songwriter behind "Save the Last Dance for Me" and many other hits; "El Gusto," about Chaabi, an Algerian musical form uniting Spanish rhythms and Arabic vocals; "Orchestra of Exiles," about the roots of the Israeli Philharmonic; "Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy."

• Coming-of-age dramas: In "The Dandelions," a French-Jewish girl seeks escape from the smothering love of her Tunisian mom, Holocaust-obsessed father and the grandmother with whom she shares a bedroom.

• Documentaries: In "The Last White Knight," filmmaker Paul Saltzman, a former civil rights worker and 1960s activist, returns to Mississippi to encounter the man who once assaulted him, KKK member Byron "Delay" De La Beckwith Jr., son of the man convicted of killing civil rights leader Medgar Evers. "The First Fagin" links the infamous "Oliver Twist" character to a 19th-century Jewish convict.

• Biographies: "Joe Papp in Five Acts"; "Koch," about former New York Mayor Ed Koch; "Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir."

• Firsts: "Tiger Eyes" is a first-time adaptation of a Judy Blume novel; the author and director-son Lawrence Blume are expected to appear at at least one of three screenings. "The Rabbi's Cat," a French animated film based on Joann Sfar's best-selling graphic novel about a rabbi and his "kosher" kitty, will mark the fest's first 3-D screening.