Holocaust-lite in Uwe Janson's entertaining melodrama of cabaret and disarray, TO LIFE!

Here comes yet another movie that uses the Holocaust as a backdrop for a modern-day tale -- this one spanning generations, eras, and illnesses, one psychological, the other quite physical.

TO LIFE! (Auf das Leben!) -- with an exclamation point, and not to be confused with the French film bearing a similar title (without exclamation), À la vie, which opened recently in theaters --  is the work of German filmmaker Uwe Janson (below), who directed, and the writer Thorsten Wettcke and re-writer Volker Kellner, both of whom worked from an original story by Stephen Glantz.

Their little melodrama almost immediately begins flashing back and forth between several eras: that of the Holocaust when our heroine was but a child, to post-war when she became a successful adult cabaret performer, to now when she is a senior citizen about to be moved from her long-time lodgings into newer, more modern, but unwelcome quarters.

A new home (and not a bad one, at that) should hardly drive a person to suicide, and this is the first of several melodramatic turns taken by this new movie. But never fear: Our heroine -- played as a senior quite well by the famous German actress Hannelore Elsner (above, left, of the wonderful Doris Dörrie film, Cherry Blossoms) -- is saved by the uber-handsome young man who happens to have been recently hired as a mover and manages to get our gal to the hospital just in time.

That young man is played by one of Germany's leading actors, and certainly one of its most beautiful, Max Riemelt (above and below), whom TrustMovies has seen often and always enjoyed (We Are the Night, The Wave, Free Fall, and most recently in the Netflix series Sense8). Mr. Riemelt's combo of talent and looks is usually reason enough to view anything in which he appears, and here again, the actor comes through just fine, playing a young man named Jonas, whose physical problems outweigh just about everything else, including a girlfriend he has left in the lurch, not wanting to inflict his sickness and its responsibility upon her. (Riemelt also plays a double role here, as the filmmaker who comes into the life of our heroine in her "middle period.")

Back and forth in time we go, until a good deal of the past is explained -- but generally too quickly and shallowly to give much depth, so that we "experience" things on pretty much a skin-deep level. This enables us to follow the story and appreciate the performances, but it does not offer us much genuine involvement in what we see.

The film is full of "event" -- everything from Nazi death and destruction to various cabaret performances (by the actress who plays the adult Ruth, Sharon Brauner, shown above and below), an after-the-fact stabbing of a very bad ex-doctor -- and yet by the finale, we're not much more involved than we were at the film's beginning. We've understood what's gone on without becoming moved or deepened by anything we've seen or heard.

Some of that hearing involves old songs that folk imbued in Jewish culture will probably appreciate. This may add a reason to venture out to the theatre for a look/hear. Otherwise, this perfectly entertaining, lets-help-each-other-through-life, Holocaust melodrama will look just fine as seen eventually on home video.

From Menemsha Films and running a relatively short 91 minutes, To Life! opens tomorrow here in South Florida in Broward County at The Last Picture Show in Tamarac, and in Palm Beach County at the Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth. Elsewhere? We shall see. As of now, these are the only playdates that appears on the Menemsha theatrical release schedule. But the film will certainly be available at some point on either-or-both DVD and streaming. 

History, tradition and kindness spring from Michael Levine's long-gestating documentary, STREIT'S: MATZO AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

What a windfall of archival info and photos, Jewish tradition, and that most humble of foods -- the dry, unleavened matzo bread -- is this new documentary about the first family of Matzo and its century-old business. All of the above would be enough to make any current doc perfectly acceptable fodder for today's moviegoer, but this one -- from filmmaker Michael Levine (shown below) -- turns out to have even more reason to exist. It documents, and rather well, too, a family business that seems to TrustMovies to be a model of how Capitalism can work when, as it should be, it is overseen by a Socialist hand. Or at least by overseers who actually care about their employees.

STREIT'S: MATZO AND THE AMERICAN DREAM should have plenty of appeal -- and not just for Jews but for any of us who've been invited by friends or relatives to a Passover Seder, where matzo, of course, is a "must." Turns out there's a good reason for the kind of weird and very old-fashioned look of the Streit's matzo package (shown at bottom) and for the never-changing appearance and taste of the enormous-but-go-ahead-and-break-off-a-piece slab of dried bread itself. It's all about tradition that works. (And you don't mess with a Rabbi-approved recipe made almost entirely of water and flour.)

Mr. Levine lets us meet that family via several generations, some of which are captured in those archival photos and film, and at least two of which we see via present-day representatives. We learn how they think and act, especially towards their employees, most of whom are long-time workers who care about their company and its famous product.

These include a fellow who was a professional boxer for the Soviets back in the 1960s, a former lawyer from Honduras and Jewish immigrants from Uzbekistan who used to make matzo secretly in their former home but who now have the freedom to do it with pride (and get paid for it, too).

Most important (because we see and hear from him more than from any other employee) is the fellow the company hired right off the streets of Manhattan's lower east side some thirty years ago. He's been with Streit's ever since, and he seems to worry almost constantly about where the company is headed and why.

With good reason, it turns out. What happens to the firm over the course of the several years that Levine spent filming is sad and somewhat predictable but it also underscores the reliability of change (not to mention gentrification) -- even to an industry that's seen as little change as has this one. Yes, the mighty matzo is not immune to cheap, foreign rip-offs.

Still, hope remains, and Streit's seems determined to make the most of it. The documentary reminded me of one of last year's best -- Akiva Kempner's Rosenwald -- that showed us what philanthropy and big business were like, back in the day. This one does something similar, on a smaller scale, regarding tradition and a family business.

Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream, from Menemsha Films and running just 80 minutes, gets its world theatrical premiere this Wednesday, April 20, at Film Forum in New York and in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Music Hall 3 and Town Center 5. Elsewhere? I certainly hope so. Particularly down here in South Florida, where a movie like this will be a shoo-in. But will we get it in time for this year's Passover?

The photo of Michael Levine, second from top, 

is by Andrew Kelly and comes courtesy 

of The Wall Street Journal.

Lilly Rivlin's ESTHER BRONER celebrates the gal who gave us the first feminist seder

TrustMovies knew nothing about Esther Broner (1927-2011) when he sat down to watch the new documentary ESTHER BRONER: A WEAVE OF WOMEN. But he did know something about the filmmaker, Lilly Rivlin, for he had seen her earlier and excellent documentary, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, when it played the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival back in 2010. Rivlin's new film on Broner plays this year's SFJFF, which begins on Thursday, July 25. That her film on Paley has still not opened theatrically here in New York (or even been seen on our PBS station) where the famous author lived, worked and protested, borders on the criminal -- culture-wise, at least.

If Esther Broner: AWOW proves perhaps a tad less interesting than the Paley film, that may be due to the fact many of us will know much less about Broner or her work that we do about the late Ms Paley and hers. This has an upside, however; by the time we've finished watching Esther in thought and action, we're certain to have learned a lot. Director/producer Rivlin, shown at right (the film's co-producer is Margaret Murphy, shown below), was present at the creation (or near to it), so to speak, when Esther came up with her idea for the very first feminist Seder, during the time when (to my mind, anyway) feminism was on the rise and approaching its peak.

While I actually wish this were not so, as feminism still has a long way to go, I suppose that we must be patient and wait for that pendulum to finally swing back, allowing the rights of women to be taken more seriously again.

So, what's the reason behind -- and the need for -- a feminist Seder? (That's an early version, shown below.) As one of the women here explains it, "Those of us who gathered for that first feminist Seder understood that the equality we were fighting for in society had to extend to the traditions of Judaism." Notes another, dryly: "The original exodus didn't even mention women." Or, as Gloria Steinem, one of the attendees, explains it, "That first Seder really felt like rebellion."

Throughout this documentary, which jumps back and forth in time, we get a pretty good history of Esther, as well as her husband, Robert, who became a well-known American artist. We learn that Esther traveled to and lived for awhile in America's south, where she broke the front door of her home so that all visitors -- not just "coloreds," as was the custom then -- had to use the back door.

Late in life, after the financial meltdown, Broner had this to say: "I thought we'd have Socialism by now, at the least. I never thought that the rich would grow richer and the poor poorer. That's not what we were studying for." Regarding the feminist Seder, with growth and popularity came problems -- mostly about whom to invite. "And Esther just wouldn't fight about this," notes one of the women interviewed here.

Considering the documentary's short length (just 62 minutes, including credits), we get a fairly rounded view of this unique woman. A novelist, playwright, ritualist and feminist writer, Broner was very much into "magic" and witch-like rituals. But, as writer Vivian Gornick, who was not into this sort of thing, explains: "It was her genuineness. She came through for people in ways that were just right for them. And just at the moment they needed it."

One of the most interesting sections of the film involves Broner's father, after the death of whom, Esther searched for an orthodox synagogue in which she would be allowed to recite the prayer for the dead. It wasn't easy to find a synagogue that would allow this; when she finally did, she still had to recite behind a curtain.

As the movie points out, in Jewish tradition, male lineage dominates identity, from son to son to son. Yet you can't even be a Jew unless the woman who gave birth to you was, too. What's with that? Just more patriarchal hypocrisy I suppose. Whatever, it took 17 years of pushing before Esther finally was able to see her Women's Haggadah published in 1994.

Stay through the end credits, please, or you'll miss a wonderful moment, as Michele Landsberg talks about Esther's unique laugh -- and then gives us a pretty wonderful imitation of it.

Esther Broner: A Weave of Women plays at the SFJFF at the California Theater on Thursday, August 8, 2013 at 1:50 pm. Let's hope it makes its way here to New York, and elsewhere. (And that Rivlin's terrific Grace Paley movie finally does, too.)

Photo credits: 

just above, courtesy of Wayne State University; 
the penultimate shot, by Bob Vigelletti;  

three photos above, by Willy Clay; 
six photos above, by Joan Roth.