A Jewish Film Festival in Moscow
By
Barbara Shulgasser
(cont'd from page 1)
Kaufman founded the festival in Berkeley in 1981 to give “unaffiliated
Jews,” as she called them, a cultural rallying point.
“I was alienated from my own heritage,” said Kaufman of her Zionist
upbringing. “I couldn’t relate to the things that were important to
my parents in the same way that they did. I don’t believe that all Jews
should emigrate to Israel. Or that all Jews are inherently outsiders.
I relate to secular Jewish culture, Jewish art, Jewish humor, Jewish
psychology. And I don’t relate to Jews who identify themselves as victims.”
Co-director Janis Plotkin describes the Festival as an expression of
“social justice” concerns from the 1960s rather than of religious faith.
A “Jewish film” is defined by subject, Plotkin explains, “films about
Jewish culture, history, identity. The idea is to show a broad range
of images of Jews from around the world. We’re trying to provide positive
images that you don’t see in the commercial media.”
Only in the atmosphere of a perestroika-induced experimentation could
they present such an event in the Soviet Union, a country with a history
of disorganization and intolerance so widespread that anti-Semitism
would be the least of the Festival’s battles. Red tape and the Soviet
penchant for saying a thing cannot be done just because it’s never been
done before would prove far more troublesome.
Ted Greenberg, a volunteer who was in charge of guiding the films and
other festival materials through customs, said he spent four hours one
day at the airport trying to locate and retrieve a film he knew had
arrived, Holland’s ANGRY HARVEST.
“It was back and forth from one desk to another,” he says, and that
was after he’d offered a bribe. In Moscow bribery is customary, if not
absolutely necessary, for facilitating all interactions from hailing
a cab (wave a pack of Marlboros) to obtaining the key to your hotel
room from your “key lady.” The key lady is the woman who sits at a desk
on each hotel floor monitoring the activities of the guests. A Hershey
bar, a lipstick or a couple of dollars are required every day or so
to keep her happy.
Greenberg offered those coveted commodities to a woman who worked in
shipping at the airport. “She wouldn’t take them, but she bought them,”
Greenberg reported. “There had been a thousand festival posters missing.
All of a sudden they appeared.”
Kaufman and Plotkin had traveled to Moscow the prior autumn for negotiations
with government officials. They compiled a list of films. They raised
$225,000 bit by bit from individual donors. Then came the big headache:
ten days before the festival was to begin, the Moscow City Council threatened
to postpone or possibly cancel the festival. According to Philip Brown,
spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, local officials were claiming
there had been too many Jewish events recently. Brown, who had served
in that city for three years, could not name any of them. Then Senators
Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson, Congressman Ron Dellums and Ambassador
to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock intervened. The State Department sent
instructions to Brown. Frantic negotiations began.
“It’s been intense,” said a beaming Kaufman when she greeted the Festival
contingent at Moscow airport. She described heated arguments with Russian
functionaries. “We’re ready for the diplomatic corps,” she said.
Old Russian hands speculated on how much of the resistance was due to
anti-Semitism and how much was simple bureaucratic envy. The Festival’s
Soviet sponsor, American-Soviet Kino Initiative (ASK), was then a new
wing of the country’s Cinematographers Union. ASK had been founded to
organize joint ventures with American filmmakers. They had sponsored
a highly popular Soviet tour of films the summer before called “Sex
in American Cinema.”
ASK’s upstartish posture may have been one of the reasons the festival
was threatened. “ASK is sort of a loose cannon,” said an American experienced
in dealing with Soviets over the last twenty years. “They didn’t ask
anyone’s permission to do this festival and they tried to ignore the
red tape. They’re under criticism by the Cinematographers Union. It’s
conceivable that someone is trying to undercut ASK. The Union is probably
asking, ‘What are we getting out of this?”
“ASK wants to get into the film exchange business,” he went on. “And
some individuals will profit personally. The head of ASK, Rustam Imbramim-bekov
(also a member of the Congress of the People’s Deputies, a body that
elects the Supreme Soviet), spends three months every year in Los Angeles.
He’s personally benefited. ASK gets him visas and airline tickets. There’s
jealousy. The picture is a lot more complicated than a simple case of
anti-Semitism.”
Yet Russian anti-Semitism has deep roots. Martin Wenick, an American
who lived in Moscow when he worked with the U.S. embassy, was in town
during the Festival for a National Conference on Soviet Jewry meeting.
“The bureaucrats here have been schooled for 70 years in anti-Semitic
propaganda, “ he explained. “It’s a reflex action.”
Wenick says the government finally gave the Festival the OK out of “a
guilty conscience for effectively destroying Jewish life over here.
What you have here is two-and-a-half million Jews and only 110 synagogues
and maybe three rabbis with any qualifications. Half a million are in
possession of documentation to prepare to leave. An estimated 300,000
have left in the last eighteen years. I think finally the leadership
decided they couldn’t afford to have this flop for PR reasons.”
Unofficial estimates of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1990 range from
three to seven million. Jews routinely hide their religion, according
to Roman Spektor, vice president of Moscow’s Jewish Cultural Association.
Spektor is one of the Jews who intends to stay and fight for his rights
as a Soviet citizen - for the time being, anyway.
“I don’t see a long term future for Jewish life here,” he confided.
“Here is the last page of the Diaspora. The long-term reality is to
work to make it possible to stay here in the meantime.”
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A
Jewish Film Festival in Moscow
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Articles:
Introduction
Producing Your Own Film Festival
Independent Jewish Film in America
Sephardic Cinema
Israeli Cinema
Film & The Holocaust
The SFJFF In Moscow
