Suite Relief

Highlights from the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival.

by Shaun Brady

festival

Music is a healing art, many argue, and this weekend the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival will present a trio of documentaries that make that claim from a variety of standpoints.

Healing schism is the idea behind Knowledge Is the Beginning, spotlighting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is composed of young Jewish and Arab musicians and was founded by conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. The expectation for a film about this sort of metaphorical bringing together of opposites is a lot of inspirational claims and back-patting. But Barenboim is too hardheaded and plainspoken a leader for that, and director Paul Smaczny can't help but inherit some of the maestro's aversion to bullshit. Beginning in 1999 with the orchestra's first incarnation in Weimar, the film follows the effort as it relocates to Seville three years later, and climaxes with a hard-earned concert in Ramallah in 2005. But even at this moment of triumph, the impossibility of idealism is exposed, as the Israeli and Arab musicians have to travel different routes to reach their shared goal. The obstacles to communication are evident even within the orchestra itself, one interview ending abruptly when a Lebanese musician storms out of the room as soon as his Israeli counterpart brings up the concept of peace.

Two Hands, Philly-based filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn's Academy Award-nominated short documentary about concert pianist Leon Fleisher, is not about healing by music so much as healing for music. In 1964, Fleisher suddenly found two fingers of his right hand curling up, rendering him unable to play with his right hand. At 17 minutes, Kahn's portrait is intriguing but flits through Fleisher's life hurriedly, leaving questions and feeling like an appetizer for a heartier film to come.

Larry Weinstein's Beethoven's Hair unfolds as a pair of parallel mysteries: one involving the picaresque travels of a lock of the composer's wild mane from his deathbed to a 1994 auction, and the other involving the use of the hair to reveal the secret of his lifelong illness and death. Weinstein spins out the fascinating story in freewheeling but informative fashion, hitting pay dirt with the colorful characters who have been drawn into the story over nearly two centuries. That the purchasers of the hair — an obsessive collector named Ira Brilliant and a urologist named Che Guevara (I kid you not) — not only clear up some questions but end up helping an Australian man suffering many of the same symptoms is wild but, by the time you've heard the rest of the tale, hardly surprising.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

PJFF Music Weekend

Sat.-Mon., Jan. 19-21, $10-$12, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3021, pjff.org