More light-hearted fare at this year's Windsor Jewish Film Fest

It’s a decided break from the past at this year’s Windsor Jewish Film Festival, June 16-19 at The Capitol downtown. For years the fest has featured more serious and often Holocaust related films. That’s partly owing to what inventory was available and it skewed towards the reflective, historical and sad. But while obviously important there’s more to Jewish culture than that and this year’s lineup has much more variety. About half the films are comedies or dramaties led by opening night’s award-winning A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg 2024), a poignant yet mis adventurous tale of two cousins who embark on an ancestral pilgrimage to Poland.  Another is Bad Shabbos (Daniel Robbins 2024). What happens when a romantic couple of mixed religions’ parents get together for the first time at a Friday Shabbos meal?  There might be some confusion.  Matchmaking 2 (Erez Tadmor 2024) is a humorous sendup of an older devout Yeshiva student being forced into marriage. Yaniv (Amnon Carmi 2024) delves into the world of a New York Orthodox gambling den – who knew of such a thing? On the more serious side and about subjects we haven’t always seen depicted are The Blond Boy from the Casbah (Alexandre Arcady 2023), a whimsical tale of a boyhood in Algeria’s Jewish community in the early 1960s during that country’s nationalist revolution.  Pink Lady (Nir Bergman 2024) is a nuanced and reflective dive into an Orthodox couple’s relationship.   Torn (Nimrod Shapira 2024) addresses a subject very much in the news, the posting of "Kidnapped" posters following the October 2017 Hamas attacks and the reaction of those who flagrantly tore them down.  All About the Levkoviches (Ádám Breier 2024) is a story of the estrangement of a father and son, set-in present-day Budapest.  One film tangentially deals with the Holocaust but in its aftermath. Soda (Erez Tadmor 2024), is a drama set in postwar Israel where an immigrant is eyed suspiciously as a former Nazi collaborator. Finally, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire (Oren Rudavsky 2024), closing out the fest, is a documentary about the great writer and Holocaust survivor whose writings transcend Judaism as an enduring witness to injustice.