Transcription of Richard Kane for the show Maine Jewish Film Festival #131
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 131, Maine Jewish Film Festival, airing for the first time on Sunday March 16th 2014. Today’s guest include Louise Rosen, Executive and Artistic Director with the Maine Jewish Film Festival. Richard Kane of Kane Lewis Productions and Filmmaker with the Maine Jewish Film Festival and Larry Rubinstein, retired rabbi and supporter of the Maine Jewish Film Festival. Now in its 17th year, the Maine Jewish Film Festival has presented over 300 domestic and foreign films. Sold over 32,000 tickets to both Jewish and non Jewish attendees. This year the Maine Jewish Film Festival will be held from March 22nd to 29th in venues around greater Portland as well as selected sites around the state.
Today we speak with film festival, Artistic and Executive Director Louise Rosen. Filmmaker Richard Kane and retired rabbi Larry Rubinstein an avid supporter of the Maine Jewish Film Festival. Thank you for joining us. I first heard of the Maine Jewish Film Festival several years ago, when one of our original sponsors for the radio show asked me if I wanted to go to a reception. I wasn’t able to make it to that reception but now I’m pretty intrigued. I’m wondering if I need to spend some time not only at the reception for the Maine Jewish Film Festival but also watching some of the films. Today we have two people who are quite involved in the Maine Jewish Film Festival here to speak with us.
We have Louise Rosen with the Executive and Artistic Director for the Maine Jewish Film Festival and Richard Kane of Kane Lewis Productions. Who has created a wonderful film on Jon Imber which will be shown at the Maine Jewish Film Festival coming up in not too long. Louise is the Executive and Artistic Director of the Maine Jewish Film Festival. She has over 25 years of experience in international television and film. In that time has worked on projects that have been Oscar, Emmy, Sundance, Pre-Italia and International Emmy winning films. I’m loving that Richard you are over there giving Louise a big hug for this because I know this is a lot of work and it’s quite something.
Richard is a filmmaker with 30 years experience working on documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery, CBS and the Natural Resources Council of Maine. To name a few, his most recent project is Maine Masters which is a New England Emmy nominated series about some Maine’s most distinguished artists. We are setting the bar pretty high today coming in to have this conversation. I really appreciate your both coming and having it with me.
Louise: Thank you, thank you for having us.
Richard: Thank you Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: It is great work that you are doing with the Maine Jewish Film Festival and I’ll start with you Louise. This is something that has been a passion of yours.
Louise: Well film has been my focus for really almost my entire professional life. In one way or another it’s been at the heart of all the work that I do. I’ve been working for the festival this will be my second festival I started in November of 2012. I’m early in my Maine Jewish Film Festival experience. Dick and I know one another from the filmmaking environment in Maine and he invited me to serve on the board of the Maine Film and Video Association. Which he is the chair of and that’s how we got to know one another and I got to know his work and he mine. It was natural at the point that he had a film in progress about a Maine artist who was also Jewish and influenced in his work by his Judaism that we would talk about it.
Dr. Lisa: None of you are originally from Maine but you call Maine home now.
Richard: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: Tel me a little bit about that transition for you Richard?
Richard: Well I say that I’m going to die here and maybe that’s in part what this story about Jon Imber is about each of our own mortality. When my friends came to visit me and my new Maine home they said, “You got to have in a little bit too soon.” I really feel that way it’s deeply my home now I wouldn’t consider living any place else.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve met Jon Imber and Jill Hoy and we have an article coming out in Maine Magazine about the two of them and their time as artists and also his journey through ALS. You are working on a film right now I’ve seen the beginnings of this film. It’s in process and that must be very interesting to be kind of going through this process with him.
Richard: It really is very difficult process to be going through with John. First of all I have to say that I’m very grateful to the Maine Jewish Film Festival, to have the confidence that this film will be worthy of being in this festival and premiered there. Louise saw an 18 minute trailer about the film and that she was taken by it. This was the first time that I have ever been committed to a festival where the film is not yet completed. I think it was important to get the film out as soon as possible so that John would be there to see it. We are not certain at this point whether John and Jill could be there because of John’s condition.
His ALS has progressed rapidly and I was just there with him yesterday and witnessed him continuing to paint. He had a feeding tube put in a week ago and he’s had a set back as a result of that surgery. He got up and with the help of two wonderful young men who are also artists just they raised him up out of his wheelchair. His arms have no strength but they put a paintbrush in his left hand and with a hook attached to his right hand that holds the paintbrush. He’s still painting and I witnessed him laughing in spite of the fact that he’s deteriorating rapidly. It’s a very difficult film for me to witness because I feel so close to him, I feel like his brother. I don’t often kiss my subjects but I kissed John. He was born in the same town that I grew up in with the same age with the same cultural heritage.
He has an older sister, I have an older sister there is just so many. His parents went to Florida in the winters; mine went to Florida in the winters. His father taught him how to play golf; my father taught me how to play golf. We have all these similarities that I really feel that he’s a member of my family. It’s very, I can’t imagine actually being a member of his family. Being his sister and being his wife and son and actually seeing how ALS being such a cruel disease, just takes all of his … how he deteriorates so rapidly. It is difficult.
Dr. Lisa: This is something that I think that the Maine Jewish Film Festival is putting out there, are these stories and a very visual and compelling way.
Louise: Well I know Richard’s work and I had a very strong sense when I looked at that sample material and from having spoken to him about Imber. I knew that he was going to make a really fine film. His personal and emotional engagement in the subject putting that to one side, Dick is also a great filmmaker. I knew that what we would get would be selfishly an opportunity for the festival to have a world premier of a film about a really important artist. A man whose stylistic interest and influences cover both abstract impressionism and portraiture. That there is just this sheer force of will that comes across. For us now that this year we are also screening films at the Portland Museum of Art. My thought was what could be better than to use one of those precious plots that we’ve got for screening there than to premier this film.
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Dr. Lisa: It is interesting that the same time we are celebrating diversity you are also celebrating connections so that people will see films that are put out as Maine Jewish Film Festival films and yet there is a universality about them. I know Richard this is something that you are very aware of because you’ve done work not only on artists. You did work with one of your pieces was called In This Times and another was called Turning Clothing into Food. Those were two short documentaries on hunger which is something that impacts all of us in one way or another.
Richard: Right. I guess I’m very interested in community and issues that impact people. It’s hard to realize that when you are living in an affluent place there are people who are falling through the cracks. We were very interested in and my partner Melody Louise Kane was very interested in the local food pantry and how can we help. We collaborated with them to create a film that is about hunger and about how food pantries can be of great help in helping those people who do fall through the cracks. People with two jobs working minimum wage can’t make it with a couple of children.
They need something like a food pantry to be of, to supplement their diet. Now the films have been showing in many of the places around many of the theatres around Maine. We had the great fortune of having Noel Paul Stookey contribute the music and the title In This Times to the film. He’s a great member of the community that I live in, in Blue Hill. That film as well as the film that we made for the Natural Resources Council of Maine I’m very interested in our environment. I think the NRCM does an amazing job to really protect the nature of Maine so I became involved in that project.
I’m also doing commercials and political as well as commercials on different products. I just like to be involved in a visual medium like film. Which is what perhaps attracted me to making films about art in Maine. That really has become my life’s work and for that I’m very grateful to have that opportunity and many of the artists happen to be Jewish. When I started this project on Jon Imber, it wasn’t about a Jewish artist and it’s knowing that the film is part of the Jewish Film Festival the Maine Jewish Film Festival. Has made me began to think about my own Judaism. John’s wife Jill Hoy, who’s a really accomplished artist herself.
Has had a long history of being in Maine, she talked about how John’s Judaism was really deeply rooted and who he is. In the film when they are looking through old family photos, they come across a photograph of John nine years old at a family Passover. Where there is Uncle Isaac and Uncle Harman and his grandmother. Michael Abby and John is like a peacock in a way. He’s hamming it up, he’s stretching out his neck to be photographed and hamming it up is who John is in part. Jill describes John and his Judaism deeply rooted and who he is. Let me just quote what she says, John asks “How so” and she says, “Well your delivery, your being, your responsibility, your search, your quest for the integrity of what you do.
I think there is a very deep root there.” It made me think about well, who am I as a Jew or both of us John and myself we always thought about ourselves as being secular Jews. Maybe we were both Bar Mitzvahed but it was almost more of a social event than it was a religious event. It’s something that the film begins to deal with. John actually has very a long history of having a very significant ancestor by the name of Naphtali Herz Imber. Who was the author of the Israeli National Anthem. He wrote a poem Hatikvah which means hope. It became the words to the Israeli National Anthem.
Dr. Lisa: I do think this is something that I find very interesting and something I think you and I talked about on the phone Louise. It’s this idea of documenting of really making sure that things are not forgotten. This is a big piece of what you are doing as you are bringing some of these films like the Jon Imber film to Maine, for the Maine Jewish Film Festival. Tell me about some of your favorite films?
Louise: Well I think it’s important to bear in mind that all of these films come from what I would refer to as independent sources. In other words these are not being made by a studio system. They represent a kind of independent spirit and from a huge range of countries. We’ve got certain Israeli films, France, Germany these countries are represented. We are really curating a collection that reflects an international sensibility. In terms of favorites it’s a tough question I mean we’ve certainly got edgy films. A film called The Gate Keepers which was nominated for an Oscar last year which is a very, very tough look at Israeli approach to dealing with terrorism.
It features the heads of the Israeli Intelligence Agency called Shin Bet. They talk about their careers as the head of that agency and reflecting back on whether their approaches ultimately made sense in terms of peace and the world peace for Israel. It’s a tough film and very similar in style to Fog of War in as much as it uses interviews combined with archive material. In relation to what you were just saying, yes that’s a document. I mean we have cultural documents of very Indie and very fun film that touches on music called Awake Zion that makes the connection between reggae and Jewish music. Explores the new reggae movement that exists in Israel where there is a very vibrant reggae scene.
Also connects with Crown Heights and of course the period of time when the Caribbean in Crown Heights and the Orthodox community clashed. Then looking at the fact that there is now this inspired fertilization between the two communities musically speaking and great film. We’ve got a German film called An Apartment in Berlin it looks at the immigration of young Israelis to Germany. Which for a lot of the older generation is really a bit of a taboo idea. Yet Israelis are drawn this 20 somethings, 30 somethings are drawn to a place like Berlin for all the reasons anyone would be. It’s a cosmopolitan city, it’s got wonderful quality of life very lively active place. Dealing with Berlin as having been the center for the extermination programs during the Holocaust, there is a big push pull there.
It’s exciting to learn about what are these young people thinking and what are their experiences being there and how are their families responding to them. We’ve got a Latina-Jewish comedy written and directed by a young woman named Nicole Gomez Fischer who is also an actress and a writer and a director. Stars Gina Rodriguez who was one of the it girls of Sundance about a year and a half ago. It’s a comedy story about a young woman coming of age and dealing with pressure from her family about, so when are you going to get married again and where is your life going. Those universal themes that I think Jewish mothers exist in almost every culture. Here we see one that part of the time is muttering under her breath in Spanish about her daughter.
Dr. Lisa: In both of your cases the image I’m getting is of someone who is curating. Is someone who is creating some sort of story in your case Richard you are obviously creating a story you and I were talking about how the Imber film is going to begin and end. It’s still playing itself out I think in your mind. Louise you are talking about creating a story around the Maine Jewish Film Festival and it’s a very, must be an interesting process to try to determine what do you bring in, what do you leave out, how do you place things?
Richard: I want to emphasis about the Imber film that it’s not simply a tragedy, a depressing story about a great artist with this terminal disease. I look at it as a black comedy, John’s humor as Jill calls it veiled humor. It’s darkly funny he’s painting a scene plain air in Stonington. He asked and Jill is helping him and he asked Jill for a little, a cloth with turpentine. She says “Oh that turp is deadly.” John says, “I don’t mind deadly I’ll do it.” All throughout the film is sprinkled with all this black humor that is just it’s totally touching. It talks a lot about John’s humanity and compassion and I think that’s what the film is more about than simply his ALS.
Louise: This whole idea that you suggest of curating experiences, I think that’s very much what a good film festival is about. When the public, when your audience develops that confidence that I’m going to go along for this ride, these aren’t films that have had big marketing budgets behind them. They may not necessarily have, not all of them can be promoted as having been Oscar nominees. When they develop that sense that the journey that you are going to take them on is going to be one that’s worthwhile wherever it goes and they trust you. They go along with you and I love that experience of sharing my enthusiasm for something with the public with the audience.
Helping them to, bringing them to what I saw in that film or in that opportunity of observation to share that with them. Then see what happens afterwards because we are lucky that we have got Dick right here in Maine. We are doing everything to bring as many filmmakers to the festival as possible so that they can participate in Q and As after the films are run. Because this is let’s face it you can sit at home and watch films on Netflix or on Cable or whatever. Coming to a theater and sharing that experience of sitting in the dark and having both a great visual and emotional and auditory experience, this is why we go to cinemas.
Then to have the filmmaker afterwards or someone connected with the film or the subject of the film in some ways afterwards, to be able to share what your reaction is, this is what people really savor. We are offering as many of those experiences as we can. We’ve got filmmakers coming from Sweden from Germany, New York, Miami.
Richard: Miami.
Louise: From Miami. It goes to the story that I told you on the phone when I relate to a friend of mine in LA that I had joined the Maine Jewish Film Festival. He took a long pause and he said, “There are Jews in Maine, in March? I said, “Yeah not everybody is a snow bird you know.” Yes we’ve got a filmmaker coming from Miami.
Richard: I just want to add that there is another reason to come to the Maine Jewish Film Festival other than the films and the talks afterwards. It’s got the greatest food any festival I’ve ever been to. It was unbelievable last year the spread that they put out I don’t know where they get that from.
Louise: Well the Jews and food you got to have good food it goes with the whole profile.
Richard: The little theme and the film about Jon Imber he’s got a bagel and lox and he just devours that thing in his hamming it up kind of way. I’d like to point out where that term hamming it up comes from.
Louise: Since ham is definitely not kosher.
Richard: Not kosher but John devours this bagel and lox with such relish. Food is a very important thing and now it’s become very sad that John can’t eat anymore because he’s on a feeding tube so he related that to me. It’s a tragic comedy and as the festival I’m sure it’s got all the emotions.
Dr. Lisa: That is something that strikes me Louise as you are talking about bringing together people who have watched the film and who have been emotionally impacted we hope by a specific film. Then people who have created the film like Richard so that you can actually have a back and forth about that. I do believe this is one of the interesting things about Netflix just today. That we are so insular in our viewing of very emotionally challenging things at times. Wouldn’t it be great to actually have the chance to have a conversation with somebody right after this has sort of opened our hearts in a way?
Louise: Well when you mentioned documenting experience earlier, the festival is also working with the Holocaust and Human Rights Center at Maine, Augusta the Michael Klahr Center. Which is a beautiful facility if people haven’t been to it, it’s a gorgeous contemporary designed building and a wonderful exhibit space and activity space. We are working with the folks at the HHRC to set up a conference on archive. Because Richard is using archive in his film it’s the personal archive the family photo album the scrap book. Many films use archive material we rely on archive in ways that we are it can be so subtle that we are not even aware of it.
We have a Swedish film coming to the festival that uses some very unique archive. It got me thinking and knowing these filmmakers in knowing these filmmakers and the work that they are doing in Malmo in the south of Sweden. I thought to myself there is something about archive and our sense of identity and where that comes from. There are some links to be made here so with the filmmakers work as part of it, we are bringing the co-founder of Northeast Historic Film Maine has here. An actual world class archive facility Northeast Historic Film in Boxford.
Who have done amazing work conserving and restoring archive footage from all around Northern New England. We have the National Center for National Jewish Film at Brandeis University in Waltham which is again a world class institution that is dedicated to preserving Jewish film. We’ve got a representative the woman who is the co-founder and the executive director Sharon Rivo is coming from National Center for Jewish Film we have the filmmakers. Then I think it looks pretty likely that we will also have a representative from the US Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington.
Whose focus is on she’s considered the chief of the research section for the International Tracing Service. Which is essentially an enormous database of German archive. Our theme running through this conference will be the role of archive in restoring and conserving identity. That can be on the small very personal individual basis having the photo of your Uncle Ira and being able to share that with your children and grandchildren and tell the story around it. Or it can be for an entire culture for the state of Maine and the archives that we have about Maine’s history.
Dr. Lisa: I know that we could keep talking about this for quite a long time there are so many different strands that I’d like to tag on a little bit and find out a little bit more about since we are limited by time. Richard how can people find out more about Kane Lewis Productions and the work that you’ve done on Maine Masters and with the National Resource Council of Maine.
Richard: Well the Maine Masters series is sponsored by the Union of Maine Visual Artists. The website for Maine Masters is mainemasters.com. You can see on the front homepage there is a story about Jon Imber and there are clips from every one of the films there are 15 films now. John’s film will be the 15th in the series and there are five or six more that are in various stages of production and fundraising and distribution. Then Kane Lewis Productions is my company that distributes the Maine Masters documentaries. Under that company name we’ve produced other films, some about the arts and some about the environment and commercials. That website is kaneLouise.com.
Dr. Lisa: Louise when is the Maine Jewish Film Festival, when does it start and how can people find out more?
Louise: Opening night is March 22nd our opening night film is the Jewish Cardinal, talk about crossover potential between the Catholic and the Jewish communities and the French speaking communities of Maine. I think we’ve got some special guests coming two Monsignors from the Catholic Church who will come to speak with Larry Rubenstein who I know you’ve spoken with after the film. Our schedule goes live on our website on Friday on Valentines Day and the website is mjff.org. Tickets are on sale through Brown Paper Tickets but also for the screenings that are taking place in Waterville at Railroad Square in Brunswick at the Frontier in the Rockland at the Strand and up in Bangor at the Bangor Opera House. Each of those organizations websites will have their tickets available.
Richard: May I say that the film on Jon Imber will be on March 23rd Sunday at 3 PM at the Portland Museum of Art.
Dr. Lisa: I suspect I will see you at the Maine Jewish Film Festival each of you I hope people are listening. We’ll also take the time to watch some of the films and interact with the two of you, the Maine Jewish Film Festival. We’ve been speaking with Louise Rosen who is the Executive and Artistic Director at the Maine Jewish Film Festival. Richard Kane from Kane Lewis Productions and a filmmaker and producer of a film at the Maine Jewish Film Festival. I appreciate all the work that you are doing to bring this media to Maine it’s wonderful.
Louise: Thanks very much.
Richard: Thank you Lisa, appreciate it.