With Its Silver Jubilee, Atlanta Jewish Film Festival Includes Olympic History and International Treats

The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival's 2025 edition is underway. 

Celebrating 25 years, AJFF presents 50 films including 28 narrative works and 22 documentaries. 

"This year's lineup not only highlights stories that resonate deeply with Jewish life but also redefines what it means to be a 'Jewish' film," said AJFF Executive and Artistic Director Kenny Blank in the festival's announcement press release. "It's all about the intersection of Jewish experiences with the broader world, creating space for meaningful dialogue and connection between communities."

A small army of AJFF Evaluation Committee volunteers screened hundreds of submissions (600+) to create this year's schedule of competing and special screening films. 

I was inspired to volunteer with AJFF many years ago after the organization hosted multiple five-ringed titles including "Berlin 36" during the 2011 festival, the same year as the 30th anniversary screening of "Chariots of Fire" which enabled a sit-down interview with director Hugh Hudson. 

Here's what caught my eye as "must experience" titles and subjects for AJFF 2025 (with venues and dates/times in parenthesis for ticketing -- the titles are hyperlinked to available trailers):

"Riefenstahl" (Springs Cinema & Taphouse on 23 Feb.) joins the cannon of documentary films on the famed German actor-turned-director Leni R, whose propaganda epic "Olympia" -- capturing the first torch relay and most of the 1936 Berlin venues and athletes -- premiered on Hitler's 49th birthday and set the gold standard for Games-related filmmaking. 

But for the first time, director Andres Veiel enjoyed access to the entire Riefenstahl archive, including an array of Leni-censored footage she hid while spending decades trying to build her own legacy while attempting to distance herself from obvious Nazi sympathies of her early career. 

This new doc presents original and outstanding visuals, such as first-to-my-eyes use of R's original reels, to present that archive while exposing new info enabling all to edit their own Leni POV.

"Come Closer" (Springs Cinema & Taphouse on 22 Feb.) is among the best films I've seen since the Covid pandemic. 

At its core is Eden, a troubled/co-dependent Tel Aviv twentysomething grieving the sudden loss of her closest confidant/brother. When his unmentioned girlfriend Maya attends the funeral, both young women embark on a journey of remembrance and love, heartbreak and healing. 

Their eventual beach getaway filled me with wanderlust for eventually visiting the sea-meets-mountains Israeli coast, which closely resembles a previously visited Mediterranean favorite, Antalya, Turkey. Bring tissues to view this film which earned 12 Israeli Academy Award nominations, winning best director (Tom Nesher, who will attend the AJFF event) and best picture. 

"Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause" (Tara Theatre on 2 March) details the comedian-actor's filmography while spotlighting his run as CNBC talk show host who championed an array of important causes. I loved this film for its mix of laughs and touching, new-to-me notes from Grodin's storied career (his bit for "The Woman In Red" still cracks me up). 

Other films I have yet to see but piqued my interest for a media ticket (thanks, AJFF Media Relations team) include:

"Diane Warren: Relentless" (Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center on 2 March) regarding the Grammy, Emmy, Golden Globe and special Academy Award winning songwriter hits including "Because You Loved Me" with Celine Dion and David Foster from "Up Close and Personal" and Starship's "Mannequin" hit "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." 

The trailer includes everyone from Cher and Aerosmith to Common, Leann Rimes and Gloria Estefan, with whom she wrote the Atlanta Olympic anthem "Reach."

• "Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse" (Plaza Theatre on 22 Feb.)
• "Tatami" (Plaza Theatre on 23 Feb.)
• "ADA - My Mother the Architect" (Springs Cinema & Taphouse on 23 Feb.)
• "Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief" (Tara Theatre on 4 March)
• "The Spoils" (Springs Cinema & Taphouse on 24 Feb.)
• "Full Support (Springs Cinema & Taphouse on 23 Feb.)

For those outside Atlanta, AJFF offers streaming ticket options for most titles on March 7-16. Check out AJFF.org for rates, dates and other details. 

Image credits: AJFF, Lothar Ruebelt/Getty Images, United King Films, Orion Pictures, Drexler Films

Hampered by Prolonged Rollout, 'September 5' Presents Riveting Drama of Munich '72 Attack

Critics wrote heaps of praise for Tim Fehlbaum's film "September 5."

For this viewer -- a 1973-born "Munich Olympic Baby" who's been studying the city's 1972 massacre as a journalism undergrad and Games historian during 30 years since college -- the film proved excellent, on par with its predecessors "Munich" by Stephen Spielberg and Kevin Macdonald's outstanding documentary "One Day In September" (on their own merits all three works are "must see"). 

A major asset is Fehlbaum's new perspective on the terrorist attack portrayed through the ABC Sports control room operated adjacent to the scene of the crime: 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village, an apartment built above the road and esplanade named for the first modern Olympic champion. 

Another strength: Whether the hostages' fate is already known, or moviegoers are naive to Jim McKay's unscripted punctuation on the Olympic Family's saddest day ("They're all gone"), all "September 5" viewers seemed captivated by the gripping drama in real life story that takes little time to build tension. 

Before sunrise on Day 11 of Heitere Spiele ("The Cheerful Games"), TV producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) arrives to prepare for another long shift of sports coverage. After viewers learn the studio layout and a few of its players -- such as legend-in-the-making Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and composite characters like a German-English-Hebrew interpreter Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) -- a pin drop could be heard once gunfire emerges from the neighboring Olympic Village. What follows is a mostly accurate though condensed unfurling of Mason & Company navigating what became the world's first live broadcast of a terrorist attack. 

"September 5" succeeds in sticking to the true story, with minimal detours of creative license. It's forgivable, for instance, that in a lighter moment the control room tracks their disguised-as-Olympian colleague talking his way into the athlete village as seen from their Volkswagen Beetle-sized camera atop Munich's Olympic Tower (about a half mile away). 

More preposterous but laughable: guns drawn Munich polizei storming the broadcast center, prompting Arledge to exclaim "Get the fuck out of my studio!" 

The only other noticeable fiction involved the screenwriter paraphrasing IOC President Avery Brundage with his statement "the Games must go on" a day early (in real life, this quote was delivered the next day at the Munich Olympic Stadium memorial service for the lost Team Israel members). 

Viewers will appreciate the authentic Munich posters, accreditation mockups, team uniforms and other tuned-to-detail touches thanks to the methodical work of costume and set designers who also used actual equipment of 1972 -- from rotary phones and Rolodexes to vintage TV studio monitors and cameras -- to painstakingly create the broadcast set and Arledge's temporary offices. 

The soundtrack gives a nod to previous Munich-centric films with Apollo 100's "Jesu Joy" setting the early-70's tone just like in Macdonald's documentary. There's lots to love about German composer Lorenz Dangel's techno-centered score, with the strings of "Helicopters" played as Howard Cosell defines "shalom" for nearly a billion TV viewers, each note foreshadowing Team Israel's fate at Furstenfeldbruck. 

Another favorite line quipped in response to Mason's team instructions: "You got it, Kubrick!" 

The best unexpected surprise of "September 5" is that, unlike Spielberg and Macdonald, Fehlbaum does not cut off McKay after famously uttering "they're all gone." For the first time in over 30 years of studying this global event, we learn what else McKay had to say after "our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized."

"They're all gone. It's all over. The Israeli Olympic Team is destroyed, much of it. But what will happen to the Games of the XXth Olympiad? None of us know what will happen ... to the course of world history."

For all the film's strengths, Paramount's promotion and release plan proved to be a disappointing head-scratcher. 

After securing distribution last fall and setting limited release in New York and LA during November, according to industry reports, the studio pushed back wider release to December then January, then again when the locked-in mid-January date finally arrived. 

Frustrated by a lack of answers from Paramount's unresponsive national media relations team and vague responses from more local reps when asked "where is this film actually screening?" (as it was nowhere near Atlanta), I reached out to two New York Times reporters who replied with related insights.

Lead critic Manohla Dargis, who scribed The Times' Critics Pick praise of the film, stated distribution wasn't her bag while offering the Oscar factor was likely in play.

"Once the nominations are announced [viewers] should have some clarity on the release," she said. "I hope that you can see it in a theater."

Fortunately, by that time, I had seen it at a special preview screening, but friends in places low and high were still asking "where is September 5?"

Dargis' West coast colleague Brooks Barnes, for which film distribution is his bag/beat, seconded the Oscar timing theory while adding that some recent flubs and failures of other Paramount releases, combined with an array of recent or upcoming corporate changes, may have been in play, or they just didn't know what to do with the topics the film presents. At least my misery was in good company for lack of response from Paramount PR.

"I sent a query, and if I get an answer, I'll let you know," wrote Barnes. 

Not surprisingly, that was the end of that. 

Even with an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay, within a week of its very limited nationwide release, Paramount perplexingly pulled the critically acclaimed film out of the few U.S. theaters that had it, later rushing it to streaming by early February. 

Paramount's team apparently was so unsure what to do with "September 5" they didn't even add it to their own Paramount + service. 

My grade of their distribution plan: D minus. 

And the question emerges: To what extent was this wutend oder enttauscht for Fehlbaum?

"September 5" is worth the search and price to view it where it is available -- as of this mid-February post, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Plex, Prime Video and Row8 have the film streaming in the $9.99 to $19.99 range. Watch it. 

And if you're lucky enough to find it on the big screen, take it from Dargis' advice and get thee to the cinema. 

Images via Paramount's "September 5" press materials

Giants and Georgia O'Keeffe Elevate Atlanta's High

My Paris summer was a lot of things, from amazing in terms of five-ringed and French encounters to profound for life experiences while restoring faith in many aspects of the Olympic Family, a welcome change after Rio challenges and Tokyo's pandemic left me dismayed. 

 

With an abundance of stories to share, including two drafted but unpublished posts from the final days of the torch relay and the dazzling albeit drizzly opening ceremony (and hundreds of photos and Paris 2024 micro-moment impressions to share), I've struggled to decide how to get back to blogging, procrastinating around real-life and client work since August. 

That stops now with notes on two fresh fine art exhibitions underway at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, which kindly hosted me for media previews for both options.

The must-see, worth airfare and a sleepover show "Georgia O'Keeffe: 'My New Yorks'" (through Feb. 16) gave me goosebumps. 

First arranged and unveiled at the Chicago Art Institute, the exhibition features around 100 works, including several longtime favorites by the Wisconsin-born multimedia artist as well as several "new to my eyes" works from private collections or remote museums not yet experienced. 

"This exhibition offers the wonderful opportunity to highlight this important but perhaps unrecognized period of O'Keeffe's artistic life and demonstrate how [works] exemplify her innovation as a Modernist," said High Director Rand Suffolk. 

Showstopping works include:

• Taos Pueblo, which vividly captures the New Mexico destination circa 1929, on loan from the Eiteljorg Museum of Indianapolis

• Radiator Building-Night, New York, with all its radiant shades of blue, first experienced in its home gallery Crystal Bridges of Bentonville, Ark.
  

• A Celebration, at right, featuring all the clouds about which Jonie Mitchell sang, from Seattle Art Museum

• The Shelton With Sunspots, inserted atop this blog post, featuring O'Keeffe's home and studio address atop Manhattan from which many other urban works originated, here from Chicago Art Institute

• Abstract nature scenes via From The Lake No. 1 and From The Lake No. 3 from the Des Moines Art Center and Philadelphia Museum of Art, respectively

• The massive (seven feet tall) canvas Manhattan with a Rockefeller Center-like ivory tower affixed with pink, red and lilac roses in town from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington (don't miss the delicate pencil and ink artist sketch also on view nearby)

The exhibition's rich catalog from Yale University Press, edited by Chicago Arts Institute colleagues Sarah Kelly Ohler and Annelise K. Madsen, includes essays that detail O'Keeffe's daily life in Manhattan with a skyscraper vantage point. 

Trust me, you'll thank yourself for making time to view this exhibition. 

Meanwhile, also on view through Jan. 19 the High presents "Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys." 

Like the O'Keeffe gathering, this private collection presentation -- on its only Southeast stop after debuting at the Brooklyn Museum -- features about 100 works. 

Standout works include Kehinde Wiley's floor-to-ceiling portraits of the collection's namesake owners, coastal views by Barkley L Hendricks, an untitled work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and several photos by Gordon Parks, including multiple portraits of Muhammad Ali only a few years after his Olympic feats at Rome 196o. 

Another set of monumental canvases titled "A Puzzled Revolution" by Titus Kaphar blends likenesses of Ali's knockout of Sonny Liston with riffs from other icons like the nautical crew in "Watson and the Shark." 

Across the room, be sure to spend time with "You Shouldn't Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas" featuring a quilt-like assemblage of used jail uniforms arranged by Hank Willis Thomas. 

And around another corner, there's a small batch of BMX bikes (a reminder of their recent addition to the Paris Olympic cycling competition) and music studio production equipment. Word!

The final gallery also features four large portraits of dancers or gymnasts resembling Simone Biles, with the exhibit bookended by another giant -- the collection's largest -- Wiley canvas. 

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver