Category Archives: Film

Coming to NYC’s JCC Manhattan tonight, Tuesday, February 18 and to theatres this Friday, February 21:
VIRAL: ANTISEMITISM IN FOUR MUTATIONS

Director:
Andrew Goldberg

World Premiere:
Theatrical release (February 2020)

About:
An investigation of the growth of antisemitism around the world.

As signaled by the awkward title of director Andrew Goldberg’s film, his premise is that antisemitism is ever-evolving, taking on different forms and appealing to different groups for various reasons, and, to borrow the social media-related meaning, spreading like wildfire. To that end, Goldberg explores the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in four different countries and among different populations: the far right in the US, the far left in the UK, Islamic radicals in France, and nationalists in Hungary. For all this, however, the talking heads and narration-heavy doc doesn’t really demonstrate the supposed mutability of antisemitism – the arguments, stereotypes, and blatant lies used by its proponents in these and other places have been used for generations against the Jewish people, and are not particularly differentiated in any major way. Goldberg covers large issues in a cursory manner, moving from an older would-be politician in NC who espouses long-debunked antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, to Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, who, using a very similar playbook, scapegoats George Soros as a manipulative Jewish bogeyman. In France, the disturbing number of hate crimes against Jewish people are perhaps too easily placed within the context of a population of disenfranchised and radicalized Islamic immigrants, while in the UK, attention is paid to ongoing charges of antisemitism in the Labour Party, where a disturbing general conflation of antisemitism with criticizing Israeli government policies ought to be more fully parsed, among other more overt issues. While the film is decidedly imperfect, it does serve the purpose of alerting viewers to the dangerous rise of nationalism, scapegoating, and attacks against Jewish people and other “others.”

Coming to The WORLD Channel’s AfroPoP tonight, Monday, February 17:
GILDA BRASILEIRO: AGAINST OBLIVION

Directors:
Roberto Manhães Reis and Viola Scheuerer

World Premiere:
São Paulo 2018

Select Festivals:
Rio, Los Angeles Pan African, Smithsonian African American, Johannesburg

About:
A woman unearths proof of an illegal slave trade in 19th century Brazil.

After Gilda Brasileiro moves to a small community in the Brazilian rainforest, she is confronted by a willful amnesia about the location’s involvement in an underground slave route of the early 19th century, when Africans were forced to work the coffee plantations of the region. Of Afro-Brazilian background herself, Brasileiro begins digging for evidence, and uncovers indisputable proof that not only had slaves been used on the plantations, but the practice continued for a half century after Brazil was said to have left the transatlantic slave trade. Supplementing Brasileiro’s story, the filmmakers gather their own visual record of slavery in the region, conducting close readings of historical posed photographs of slaves by Marc Ferrez. While these images are haunting, the film does not properly contextualize the filmmakers’ backgrounds, making the personal reflections conducted here awkward and somewhat at cross purposes with Brasileiro’s mission. As a result, while there’s intriguing hidden history explored, the doc is on the whole too clunky in its presentation.