ReFILM festival in Jerusalem to showcase gems of film in new line-up

A high-school misfit with telekinetic abilities who takes revenge, an adman falsely accused of a murder who goes on the run, a soldier in a doomed war who disguises himself as a Buddhist monk, and a cynical war veteran who devotes his life to rescuing his captive niece – these are just a few of the stories told in the restored movie classics that will be shown as part of the latest ReFILM: Restoration Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque.

This year’s ReFILM will take place from October 27-November 2. The Jerusalem Cinematheque has been presenting restored films for years, as well as digitally restoring Israeli films through its Israel Film Archive, which can be accessed at https://jfc.org.il.

Most of the archive is available for free, although some of the feature films require a small payment. During the Sukkot holiday, many beloved Israeli films are free on the site, among them Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit, Menahem Golan’s 1973 musical Kazablan starring Yehoram Gaon, and Dover Kosashvili’s Late Marriage, with Ronit Elkabetz and Lior Ashkenazi.

This year’s ReFILM features a mix of movies from around the world, with quite a few from Hollywood.

If you’ve only seen Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest on television or a computer screen, you haven’t really seen it. The 1959 movie features at least three of the master director’s most iconic scenes, and that’s saying something.

Cary Grant plays an advertising executive who is mistakenly targeted by a group of vicious foreign spies who have infiltrated the US, and he is set up and accused of a crime. Forced to go on the lam, he is helped by a mysterious blonde (Eva Marie Saint) he meets along the way.

The whole movie plays like a crazy nightmare, and Grant gives one of his best performances as an innocent man with nowhere to turn. Two great chase scenes anchor the movie, one in a deserted cornfield and another on Mount Rushmore. 

Unlike today’s so-called thrillers, many of which play as if they were created by AI (and not the expensive kind of AI), North by Northwest will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Grant is also the star of George Stevens’s 1942 The Talk of the Town, in which he plays another innocent man accused of a killing and takes refuge in a lady friend’s apartment, where a law professor happens to be working on a book. 

It’s an unusual combination of a thriller and a rom-com. Jean Arthur, known for her unforgettable husky voice, plays the friend, and Ronald Colman is the professor.

John Wayne plays a larger-than-life hero in John Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), about a weary Civil War veteran who comes home and finds that his whole family has been slaughtered by what were then called Indians, except for his niece. 

She has been taken captive, and he devotes his life to finding her. This is another film that should be seen on the big screen.

Brian De Palma’s Carrie is a stylized adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a high-school girl (Sissy Spacek) shunned by her peers who uses superpowers to gain acceptance and, eventually, revenge. 

In one of his early film roles, John Travolta plays a thug who helps torment her. It was Spacek’s breakout role, and others in its young cast also went on to stardom, among them Amy Irving (who became Steven Spielberg’s first wife) and Nancy Allen.

Milos Forman’s Amadeus, the story of the rivalry between Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Even if you’re not a classical music aficionado, it’s an entertaining story, based on the popular Peter Shaffer play, and if you do love music, there is a great soundtrack.

If you’re interested in a beautifully made movie that will give you nightmares, you can see Tod Browning’s Freaks, about sideshow performers who seek revenge when one of their own is wronged.

A rarely seen film to be showcased

One rarely seen film on the program is Natan Gross’s 1946 Yiddish film, Unzere Kinder, also known in English as It Will Never Happen Again. 

It tells a fact-based story of a comedy duo who entertain child survivors of a Jewish ghetto, who take them to task for not presenting the history of the Holocaust accurately.

ReFILM also features five short movies from the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, which is the world’s largest collection of Jewish documentary film footage, with more than 20,000 titles available on film and video. It was founded by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry in 1972 and is also run by the World Zionist Organization. 

Films highlighting diversity 

The films showing in ReFILM are about such diverse aspects of Jewish life as the Israeli fishing industry in the 1950s, the urban development of Beersheba, and a Polish immigrant family’s integration into Israeli society.

Other movies come from around the world. Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 The Burmese Harp is about a World War II-era Japanese soldier who poses as a monk to try to convince people to surrender toward the end of the war, then becomes caught up in his peaceful disguise.

Another movie set in World War II is Claude Chabrol’s 1966 Line of Demarcation, about a French officer who must decide whether to join the Resistance or collaborate with the Nazis.

Other films in this varied festival come from Hungary, Mali, Italy, and Czechoslovakia.

For the full program, go to: https://jer-cin.org.il/en/lobby/refilm-restoration-film-festival-1