Poignant documentary relates the harrowing story of the Roma, focusing on their genocide during the Holocaust
A PEOPLE UNCOUNTED: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE ROMA (Aaron Yeger, 2012)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
May 16-23
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.apeopleuncounted.com
“Of course, when we talk about the suffering of the Roma at this place, this is not to blame anybody, or to tell that some nations are bad or others are better,” journalist Marcus Pape says as he walks through a forest at the beginning of A People Uncounted: The Untold Story of the Roma. “The point is that we want to tell a story that might tell us something about ourselves.” And what Aaron Yeger’s surprising and harrowing documentary tells us is not very pleasant. In his feature-length debut, Yeger travels to Slovakia, Germany, Hungary, Romania, America, and other countries, documenting the continuing plight of the Roma, more popularly known by the offensive term “Gypsies,” Europe’s largest minority. Interviewing activists, government officials, and Roma Holocaust survivors, Yeger reveals the intense prejudice against the Roma, who came from Northern India, and the Sinti, Romani people from in and around Germany, going back centuries, through the genocide of the Holocaust to today. He shows how misunderstood their culture is, as depicted in Hollywood movies and songs by Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”) and Shakira (“Gypsy”), and how Roma men, women, and children are still discriminated against, pointing out that the previous mayor of Milan led a movement in 2010 to rid his city of all Roma. Incorporating archival footage with staggering facts and Robi Botos’s mournful score, A People Uncounted: The Untold Story of the Roma is a poignant and painful examination of man’s seemingly unending inhumanity to man. The film, which has won numerous awards at festivals around the world, is playing May 16-22 at the Quad, with Yeger participating in Q&As following the 9:00 show on Friday and the 4:45 and 9:00 shows on Saturday.
During Yom Kippur and the Passover seder, Jews around the world proclaim that “next year, may we be in Jerusalem.” In David Gaynes’s charming documentary, Next Year Jerusalem, this dream comes true for eight men and women at the Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield, Connecticut. In 2011, JHE president and CEO Andrew Banoff and Rabbi Stephen Shulman arranged for eight of their residents to make a once-in-a-lifetime ten-day trip to Israel; what made this journey different, and very special, is that the group had an average age of ninety-one, ranging from Sandy Levin, eighty-two, to Bill Wein, ninety-seven. With all their infirmities and medications, canes and wheelchairs, they prepare for a great adventure, with Gaynes behind the camera himself as they share stories about their lives, contemplate their deaths, and express their sheer joy as their anticipation grows. Shortly before they leave, Rabbi Shulman has to explain that they have to be ready not only for someone to not be able to make it to Israel but, more critical, one of them not being able to come home, given their ages and health situations. But that isn’t going to stop any of them, especially not ninety-three-year-old Selma Rosenblatt, who isn’t about to let her twisted body get in the way. Meanwhile, eighty-seven-year-old Regine Arouette, who isn’t Jewish, looks forward to visiting several Christian landmarks. (The others on the trip are Helen Downs, ninety-one; Leslie Novis, ninety; Harry Shell, ninety-two; and Bill’s wife, Juna Wein, eighty-nine.) When they all head off to Israel, accompanied by such lovingly involved caretakers as Donnette Banton, thirty-six-year-old Gaynes (Saving Hubble, Keeper of the Kohn) keeps his camera focused on the senior citizens as they visit historic sites, placing their fabulous experience front and center. Next Year Jerusalem is a charming and delightful celebration of life at the end of life, a spirit-lifting film that shows that you’re never too old to say no. “Where are the Israels for which we personally have yet to travel?” Gaynes, who also served as editor and producer, asks in his director’s statement. Next Year Jerusalem opens May 16 at the Quad, with all weekend screenings followed by a Q&A with Gaynes. 
In 1965, French Nouvelle Vague auteur Agnès Varda said about her third film, Le Bonheur, which translates as Happiness: “Happiness is mistaken sadness, and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside. Happiness adds up; torment does too.” That is all true nearly fifty years later, as the film still invites divided reaction from critics. “Miss Varda’s dissection of amour, as French as any of Collette’s works, is strikingly adult and unembarrassed in its depiction of the variety of love, but it is as illogical as a child’s dream,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times in May 1966. “Her ‘Happiness,’ a seeming idyll sheathed in irony, is obvious and tender, irresponsible and shocking and continuously provocative.” All these decades later, the brief eighty-minute film is all that and more, save for the claim that it is illogical. In a patriarchal society, it actually makes perfect, though infuriating, sense.
Kôbô Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara collaborated on five films together, including the marvelously existential Woman of the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another two years later. In The Face of Another, Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Condition, Kill!) stars as Okuyama, a man whose face has virtually disintegrated in a laboratory accident. He spends the first part of the film with his head wrapped in bandages, a la the Invisible Man, as he talks about identity, self-worth, and monsters with his wife (Machiko Kyo), who seems to be growing more and more disinterested in him. Then Okuyama visits a psychiatrist (Mikijirô Hira) who is able to create a new face for him, one that would allow him to go out in public and just become part of the madding crowd again. But his doctor begins to wonder, as does Okuyama, whether the mask has actually taken control of his life, making him as helpless as he was before. Abe’s remarkable novel is one long letter from Okuyama to his wife, filled with utterly brilliant, spectacularly detailed examinations of what defines a person and his or her value in society. Abe wrote the film’s screenplay, which tinkers with the time line and creates more situations in which Okuyama interacts with people; although that makes sense cinematically, much of Okuyama’s interior narrative, the building turmoil inside him, gets lost. Teshigahara once again uses black and white, incorporating odd cuts, zooms, and freeze frames, amid some truly groovy sets, particularly the doctor’s trippy office, and Tōru Takemitsu’s score is ominously groovy as well. As a counterpart to Okuyama, the film also follows a young woman (Miki Irie) with one side of her face severely scarred; she covers it with her hair and is not afraid to be seen in public, while Okuyama must hide behind a mask. But as Abe points out in both the book and the film, everyone hides behind a mask of one kind or another. The Face of Another is having a special screening May 17 at 3:00 at the Museum of the Moving Image and will be followed by a conversation between Nakadai and Terrence Rafferty; advance tickets are available now.