Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Holocaust Film Series (Sun., April 10-Wed., April 13, $5-7, Gershman Y, Broad and Pine sts.) This may not seem like the best week to throw another film festival, but this four-day event, assembled by the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Association, might be worth poking holes in your PFF schedule. A number of films are repeat screenings, like the documentary Paper Clips and the Italian melodrama Facing Windows, as well as Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse, although the latter's focus on "good Germans" who protested the Third Reich was controversial enough to make its inclusion in a film series focused on the Holocaust noteworthy in itself.

Most of the Philadelphia premieres are documentaries, like Watermarks, the story of the members of a champion Viennese swimming club who were chased from the country by the Nazis and who 65 years later stage a tearful return. Hiding and Seeking, from Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, focuses on Daum's relationship with his ultra-Orthodox sons, whom he worries have becomes so absorbed in their Talmudic studies that they've grown hostile to Gentile world. Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, just aired on AMC, examines the failure of Hollywood moguls, many of whom were Jewish, to indict or address the rise of Nazism. As Ronald Brownstein points out in his book The Power and the Glitter, recent immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Adolph Zukor were loath to risk their standing by allying themselves with the "foreign" cause of anti-fascism, a fear that laid the ground for the blacklist.

Of special note: Monday's screening of The Pawnbroker. Sidney Lumet's 1964 drama stars Rod Steiger as a camp survivor in one of the first Hollywood movies to address the Holocaust. The available DVD is reportedly a disaster, so the chance to catch the movie Lumet made between Long Day's Journey Into Night and Fail-Safe is a valuable one. Info at www.cjhsa.org.

Michael Moore Hates America (Mon., April 11, 7 p.m., County Theater, 20 E. State St. Doylestown; Thu., April 14, 7 p.m., Ambler Theater, 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler) Ain't equal time a bitch? The County and Ambler theaters took the unusual step of providing links to anti-Fahrenheit 9/11 Web sites when they showed the movie last year, and now they've booked Michael Wilson's anti-Moore screed. Wilson's use of Moore's own tactics pays off when Moore shouts him down at a public event with hauteur that would make Roger Smith flinch. But Wilson doesn't seem to understand that the foundation of Moore's success is humor (although the psychiatrist who claims that Moore's primary motivation is insecurity is pretty damn funny). Then again, Moore seems to have forgotten the same thing.