The 33rd edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival comprises the usual enticing mix of features, shorts and documentaries for its annual two-week stay at Lincoln Center. This time around, I saw only documentaries, starting with the fest’s bittersweet closing night film, Ron Frank’s Remembering Gene Wilder, a lovely and ineffably sad valentine to the beloved actor, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2016. Letting Wilder himself narrate his own life story (thanks to an audiobook he’d recorded years earlier), Frank adroitly mixes film clips, vintage interviews and on-set tomfoolery as well as poignant talking-head reminiscences from many people including Wilder’s widow, Karen; Richard Pryor’s daughter, Rain; writer Alan Zweibel; and—of course—Mel Brooks.

 

 

Laura Bialis’ Vishniac (opens Jan. 19) chronicles the rich and complicated life of Roman Vishniac, a Russian-born photographer known for his historic images of 1930s Jewish communities that became important documents after so many of them were destroyed by the Nazis, through the nuanced testimony of his daughter Mara (who died in 2018). Although Bialis relies rather too heavily on reenactments—they’re usually a distraction in any documentary—she has put together a worthy tribute to a man who will be remembered for his photographic and scientific work long after his occasional tall tales about himself will be forgotten.

 

 

In Adam Low’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest book by a 20th century author in English takes center stage; in a fleet 90 minutes, Low provides an illuminating look at the genesis of Joyce’s  massive novel, which spends one day (June 16, 1904) in Dublin with protagonist Leopold Bloom as he interacts with others in a parody of the classic Greek myth. Along with informative commentary by a variety of Joycean experts, Low does misstep by showing sequences from Joseph Strick’s rather wan 1967 film adaptation to illustrate various moments from the book. Otherwise, anyone interested in Joyce or the back story to his greatest creation will find much to ponder.

 

 

 

What makes Claude Bredenbrock and Jascha Hannover’s The Books He Didn’t Burn so disturbing is not that it takes on the difficult task of exploring what literature Adolf Hitler loved, had in his library and drew his fascist and murderous influences from but that there’s an unspoken undercurrent that there’s a distinct possibility that it can happen again, a lot closer in time or place than we might think. 

 

 

 

Isabelle Cottenceau’s engaging Looking for Chloé brings back to life a nearly forgotten trailblazer, Gaby Aghion, a Jewish woman from Egypt who founded the Parisian fashion house Chloé and who is credited with inventing the concept of pret-a-porter. Cottenceau not only shows rare archival footage of Aghion and the fashion industry milieu but also cannily recreates an interview with her that demonstrates how she overcame prejudices to make her mark and flourish artistically.

 

 

 

In Matthew Mishory’s incisive Fioretta, Randy Schoenberg, a genealogist and attorney who specializes in recovering artworks stolen by the Nazis, takes a journey with Joey, his reticent teenage son, to discover Fioretta, their long-lost European ancestor. Mishory follows Randy and Joey (who have a very famous ancestor, composer Arnold Schoenberg, Randy’s grandfather) to the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, as they discover nearly half a millennium’s worth of family history.

 

 

 

Lastly, there’s Heather Dune Macadam’s piercing 999—The Forgotten Girls, which revisits the harrowing memories of several survivors of the cruel 1942 Nazi roundup of nearly 1000 young Jewish women in Czechoslovakia who were sent to Auschwitz. Macadam hears stories from the anguished women’s remembrances, 80 years later, about how their friends and family members died in such squalid conditions, but much of her powerful film records the incredible resilience that allowed them to survive for nearly three years.