Shalom, y’all!

Harvey Hoffman jokes that he became director of this month’s Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival because he is retired and had the time. Truth is, the organizers of Jewish Cinema South, an umbrella organization for several film fests, first asked his wife, Paula, to

serve as director. She would only accept if Harvey could help as well.

From there, the Hoffmans attended a conference in Jackson, Miss., to watch all 18 movies they could choose from for Baton Rouge’s first Jewish-themed film festival. The most important thing they learned, Harvey says, is that putting on a film festival is not a one-man job. They’ve since gotten volunteer help from members of the Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge. And Harvey and Paula’s son Kenneth Hoffman, director of education at New Orleans’ National WWII Museum, is helping, too. He plans to speak at the festival about one of the films’ stories, the true-story drama Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Closest to Harvey’s heart are the two films being screened twice each on the final day of the festival. The first is The House I Live In, a short, Academy Award-winning tolerance piece starring a young Frank Sinatra.

The second is Strange Fruit, a documentary about the 1930s protest song written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, and made famous by Billie Holiday. The documentary explores the effect the song had on the similar struggles of African Americans and American Jews to gain equality in the United States.

“In 1968, when I was 10 years old, my father—a Jew from Brooklyn—began teaching at Howard University,” director Joel Katz said in a

phone interview. “This was the height of the Black Power movement, so talks around the dinner table often turned to black/Jewish relations. So the film resonates with parts of my background, but I also chose to make a documentary about the song because I thought it was a good story.”

Katz will appear at the festival to talk about Strange Fruit.

Similar film festivals in Austin, Houston, Nashville and Shreveport that were once part of Jewish Cinema South now are operating

successfully on their own. But Harvey says it’s too early to say if Baton Rouge will follow suit.

Regardless, the Jewish Film Festival is a welcomed cultural and historically-minded addition to the city’s slowly snowballing movie

industry. Here’s a preview.

Paper Clips (2003)

Thursday, Jan. 25

8:30 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Free for students.

Independence Park Theater

(225) 926-4236

Former coalmining town Whitwell, Tenn. (population 1,600) is home to one of the most unique and touching Holocaust memorials in the United States. In 1998 Principal Linda Hooper of Whitwell Middle School tasked her students with creating a memorial for Holocaust victims as they studied the tragedies of WWII and Nazi Germany. It was decided that the students would collect a paper clip for each Jewish person killed during the Holocaust. That meant 6 million paper clips.

The collection began modestly, but as word of the project spread, paper clips poured in to tiny Whitwell from 19 countries, 49 states, and the likes of Steven Spielberg, Bill Cosby and presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The students easily surpassed their goal, eventually amassing nearly 30 million paper clips. Now, 11 million (6 million representing Jewish casualties and 5 million representing others like gypsies and homosexuals who suffered) are housed in a WWII-era railcar donated as a permanent home for the memorial. Students themselves give tours to the thousands of tourists who travel to Whitwell to visit the memorial each year.

The documentary follows the project from its inception to completion in 2001. It tells the story through the eyes of four Holocaust

survivors who journey to the memorial and speak to the school children of Whitwell. David Smith, assistant principal of Whitwell Middle School, will be in attendance to speak about the film.

This is a special screening for area schools, but Paper Clips also is available at Blockbuster and through Netflix.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005)

Thursday, Jan. 25

7 p.m. $8.50

Manship Theatre

(225) 344-0334

Resistance to the brutal regime of dictator Adolf Hitler began, as many resistance movements do, on the university campuses. This

Academy Award-nominated German film utilizes recently unearthed interrogation records and extensive interviews with witnesses to depict the last six days of the life of Sophie Scholl, a member of an underground University of Munich group called the White Rose, who was arrested and executed for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda.

Set in 1943, this intense portrait begins with young Sophie and her collaborators preparing to distribute leaflets and ends with a

remarkable showing of her courage and faith in the face of intimidation and certain death. Director Marc Rothemund utilizes only

slight touches from the period in order to focus the action on Scholl’s interrogation by the Gestapo and the heart-wrenching

decisions anyone past, present or future would face under such harsh conditions.

All I’ve Got (2002) with West Bank Story (2005)

Saturday, Jan. 27

7:30 p.m. $8.50

Manship Theatre

(225) 344-0334

Everyone has multiple lives. The life she lives—and all the ones that she might have had—had circumstances changed, tragedy passed or struck, or any number of different decisions been made.

All I’ve Got explores this central question of existence: “What if?” Tamara, a recently deceased 72-year-old grandmother, is faced with this question during her trip to the afterlife. She is given a choice—to continue on her journey to paradise and wait for her husband and children to meet her there, or she can be reunited in life with her first love who died in an auto accident and has been waiting for her, frozen in time at age 22, for 50 years. The catch is that if she chooses her first love, all memories of life with her husband and children will be erased forever.

Director Keren Margalit describes the movie as an expression of nostalgia for people whom she has loved and lost, and a way to

present the afterlife as a genuine option of reassurance and acceptance.

West Bank Story is a short musical comedy—part West Side Story, part geopolitical sketch comedy—about two competing hummus stands and an Israeli soldier and Palestinian woman who fall in love despite their differences. The 22-minute film utilizes a Middle Eastern cast, features original music by composer Yuval Ron and keen writing by director Ari Sandel.

Strange Fruit (2002) with The House I Live In (1945)

Sunday, Jan. 28

3 p.m. and 7 p.m. $8.50

Manship Theatre

(225) 344-0334

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” Thus goes 1930s song “Strange Fruit,” a protest piece calling out and denouncing homicidal racism at perhaps the height of that activity both here at home and in war-ravaged Europe. Most know the tune as made popular by the sultry jazz vocals of Billie Holiday, but “Strange Fruit” was actually written by a humble Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx named Abel Meeropol (though he published under the pseudonym “Lewis Allen”). Through in-depth interviews and revealing photographs and film, this documentary reveals the story behind a song that was instantly controversial, the impact “Strange Fruit” had on everyone from folk legend Pete Seeger to activist T. Vivian, and the enduring legacy of the alliance between American Jews and African Americans in their parallel struggle for civil rights.

Director Joel Katz will be in attendance to speak about the documentary.

The House I Live In features an early and often remarkable acting and singing performance from Frank Sinatra. The legend portrays himself as he encounters a group of kids bullying another because he is Jewish. Running just 11 minutes long, this film avoids all flag-waving clichés as Sinatra speaks honestly to the young boys about America’s deepest values of acceptance and charity, and of course delivers a knockout rendition of the title song, also written by Abel Meeropol.