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Five from The Tribe

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The drinks are stiff and the rock ’n’ roll loud inside Mike’s Place where the rowdy boys banter and attractive girls wobble on high stools, calling out flirty affirmations to the surprisingly shy bartender. “Joshua, I love you!” one says with all grade-school sincerity.

It’s a scene that could be a slice of nightlife in New York City, Miami, New Orleans, anywhere. At least, until the bomb goes off.

New York filmmakers Jack Baxter and Joshua Faudem’s cameras were rolling on their documentary about Tel Aviv nightlife in the Spring of 2006 when a suicide bomber chose the bar they were standing in as a target. Mike’s Place had been a popular beachside haven for Israelis and European and American tourists to groove to the blues. Now, in an instant, the bar was marred by a horrific blast, then silence, then smoke and screams.

Baxter was just one of the bomb’s victims. “I saw a few friends dead on the floor,” says one Mike’s Place patron sitting in an ambulance next to a crying woman. Many died that night, but Baxter survived and was brought to a nearby hospital.

“When I woke up in the hospital, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened,” he says. “I had vague memories, but I didn’t even remember that I was in Israel and that I was doing a documentary about a bar.”

His wife, Fran, was in Tel Aviv with him, and she arrived at the hospital to find her husband severely burned, with both eardrums blown out, and partially paralyzed on his left side from an injury to the right half of his brain. Later operations removed imbedded shrapnel from his leg and repaired his eardrums. He still depends on a cane for mobility.

Faudem’s video camera caught the ensuing chaos on tape as the suicide bomber’s attack and Baxter’s recovery became a focal point of the documentary.

“People were killed and people suffered devastating injuries—a lot worse than what happened to me,” Baxter says. “This film shows how Mike’s Place got through it, and the insights into the character of Israelis.”

Baxter’s film, Blues by the Beach, will screen Jan. 19 at the Manship Theatre as part of this year’s Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival. Now in its second year, the 2008 version of the festival features a mix of documentaries and dramas celebrating the triumphs of art and music as well as spotlighting the hardships of the Jewish experience in the 20th and 21st centuries, from Nazi persecution to modern suicide bombings.

The festival runs Jan. 17-20. Visit brjff.com or manshiptheatre.org for tickets and more details.

THE LINE UP

The Rape of Europa

Jan. 17 at 7 p.m., Manship Theatre

For more than a decade, the Third Reich pillaged and plundered the art treasures of the entire continent through systematic theft, looting and outright destruction. This documentary tells the story of the Nazi assault on European culture and art and the miraculous survival of a number of masterpieces due to the ingenuity and heroism of ordinary people. Narrated by Joan Allen. Directed by Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen. (117 minutes).

Blues by the Beach (with The Tribe)

Jan. 19 at 7 p.m., Manship Theatre

When a documentary crew sets out to explore Israeli nightlife they get more than they bargained for. Bronx-based producer Jack Baxter and director Joshua Faudem discovered Mike’s Place, a cosmopolitan blues bar on the beach in Tel Aviv, and thought they had found the perfect social environment to study. But a suicide bomber changes the focus of their film and Baxter’s life forever. (75 minutes).

The iconic American doll Barbie was invented, The Tribe tells us, by Ruth Handler, a businesswoman of Jewish descent. By studying the history of Barbie in pop culture, this short film starts a unique dialogue about what it means to be an American Jew in the 21st century. Narrated by Peter Coyote. Directed by Tiffany Shlain. (15 minutes).

A Jumpin’ Night in the Garden of Eden

Jan. 20 at 2 p.m., Manship Theatre

This documentary was the first to examine the revival of traditional Jewish klezmer music in the 1980s. And if you think the lively, Yiddish sounds of these orthodox tunes is the most minor of genres, consider this: The clarinet sounds in the work of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Benny Goodman were all influenced to certain degrees by the traditional klezmer music these master composers heard in their youth. Directed by Michael Goldman. (75 minutes).

Varian’s War

Jan. 20 at 7 p.m., Manship Theatre

Varian Fry has been labeled the “American Oskar Schindler” for his covert establishment of an underground railroad to help rescue many prominent European artists from Nazi persecution. Among the 2,000 people he aided were renowned painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst and surrealist Marcel Duchamp. This 2001 thriller details his daring efforts as France crumbles under Hitler’s regime. Starring William Hurt, Julia Ormand, Lynn Redgrave and Alan Arkin. Directed by Lionel Chetwynd. (121 minutes).