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How the Berlin Film Festival Sent a Message to Cannes, Venice on Film Parity

May 17, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The future of film is female: a photo snapped in February at the Berlinale’s climax, when the Juliette Binoche-led international jury met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, may be the most important film photo of 2019 — or even the decade. The image is a signpost of where we want to be as women in film and as a film community at large. And that it’s attainable.

As Americans become mired on how to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of #MeToo and Trump, on the way to 50/50 in 2020, the Berlinale jury showed what the future could look like with a female jury president — and a female government leader. Embrace the change — the Berlinale showed us how (and stepped ahead of rivals Cannes and Venice in so doing).

“The picture clearly captures a life-highlight moment for all of us who were there [hopefully the chancellor as well],” says Rajendra Roy, Berlin jury member and MoMA’s chief curator of film. “[But] the real significance lies in what was discussed in the nearly 90-minute meeting that followed. Mrs. Merkel had serious, and extremely poignant, questions about the state of the industry, the rise of streaming platforms [one in particular, but she wanted to understand the differences between them] and the cultural importance of the theatrical experience,” Roy says.

“To be totally honest, we were more star-struck than she was [or let on] and we came away feeling like we had engaged in a conversation that would lead to concrete regulatory and financial measures.”

Jury member and Los Angeles Times (and former Variety) film critic Justin Chang says: “It meant a great deal that Chancellor Merkel took the time to sit down with us and discuss everything from the film industry to climate change; in doing so, she asserted the importance of the arts in public life and the value that artists bring to the conversation.”

The photograph, with its female majority, men of color and LGBTQ inclusion, reflects cultural creators, curators and journalists engaged in an ongoing dialogue that’s coming to fruition.

“Despite the conservative backlash, there’s been a sea change in who gets to choose and who gets to tell their stories,” says Beth Barrett, Seattle Intl. film festival’s artistic director.

The photo validates and advances an inclusive worldview. “To see that engagement between the jury and Merkel, who is the leader of the free world … she’s not a super artistic chancellor and yet she appreciates the role of arts and culture in the world and how it betters the country and its communities,” Barrett says.

“Having Juliette Binoche as the jury chair, she’s able to lead the discussions in a way that is collaboratively combative. There’s no antagonism and yet at the same time each one of these people is going to have their opinions heard, respected and discussed. That’s huge when talking about the history of women and men of color in groups.”

These historically marginalized voices are assuming leadership roles and showing how the game can be changed, one jury at a time, one festival at a time. “To be on that Berlinale jury, on that level of international A-level festival, is a statement about how you are perceived within the industry. It’s also a responsibility: you’re able to take on that role of being able to choose: to push someone forward or push forward the status quo,” she adds.

Liliana Rodriguez, artistic director of the Palm Springs Intl. Film Festival, responded to the photograph with its composition of women at the forefront, and a sense both playful and serious that these empowered artists are forward-looking and seizing the moment: “I’m reassured and hopeful that we as a society are moving in a direction where women and people of color casually occupy these spaces that have historically been occupied by white men. I’m hopeful one day these will be the norm. For now, this feels revolutionary.

“Despite the nightly news real change is possible,” Rodriguez says, “It just takes time.”

Chang concludes, “While it would be amusing to compare the responsibilities of running a film festival jury and leading the free world, I don’t think the symbolic importance of a meeting between two brilliantly accomplished women — Chancellor Merkel and Juliette Binoche, our jury president — was lost on any of us. Maybe it was a happy coincidence; maybe it was an astonishing snapshot of what progress can look like.

“Certainly it was a reminder that the Berlinale has done as much as any major film festival to advance the cause of gender parity, as evidenced by the fact that seven of the 16 films in our competition pool were directed by women. I’m reminded that so much of the discourse on movies, especially on movies being made outside the confines of the Hollywood studios, begins at film festivals, and so it’s natural that inclusion must begin there as well — among filmmakers, decision-makers and journalists.”

As evidenced by this single photograph, the strides made by the Berlinale offer a signpost of where many in the industry want to be as women in film and as a film community at large. Not only is it attainable, it sends a message to Cannes and Venice: this is the bold collaborative future of film.

[[this article first appeared in Variety]]

Elizabeth McGovern: icon, kickass actress, producer, singer and lover of life

April 12, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

I loved talking to you too, @thelmadams https://t.co/kqBMJS7cwc

— Elizabeth McGovern (@ElizabethMcGov) April 12, 2019

How Do You Find Inspiration for Writing?

April 3, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

I find a lot of my inspiration for writing novels in the past. For my current book, Bittersweet Brooklyn, part of the inspiration came from a crime that occurred in October 1935. And that crime, the murder of “Pretty Amberg,” the aftermath pictured in the photograph above, somehow involved my Great Uncle Abraham Lorber.

His family called him Abie; his colleagues “Little Yiddle,” in part because he was all of five foot two inches. (A detail I unearthed in his draft records.)

Abie was a low-level guy in Murder, Inc., a predominantly Jewish hitman-for-hire service that peaked in the 1930s and flamed out in the 1940s in a blaze of betrayal and the sizzle of the electric chair at Sing Sing. It’s notable that, although I never met Uncle Abie, he lived to a ripe old age when so many of his compatriots didn’t.

I found information outside of family lore (“he was quick with a knife”) from Rich Cohen’s fascinating book Tough Jews. So, from the inspiration of a criminal in the past, I began plastering on facts in print. Abie was a footnote in Cohen’s book. In the discussion of Russian immigrant mobster Amberg (pictured below), Cohen notes that “He spent his nights at Yiddel Lorber’s, a hangout for Jewish gangsters near the on-ramp of the Wiliamsburg Bridge.”

Ping! Page 120, 121 and later 185. Three hits in the index at the back of the book. Like Josephine Sarah Marcus, who was a (relatively larger) footnote in the volumes on Wyatt Earp, became his constant companion and was the subject of my novel The Last Woman Standing, these small mentions, these icebergs, piqued my curiosity. And what I discovered was that Little Yiddel’s hangout on 128 Marcy Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn would become the Williamsburg Boys Club. Like John Gotti’s famous The Ravenite Social Club: John Gotti’s Bunker 247 Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy or Midnight Rose’s Candy Store on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia in East New York The Old Headquarters of Murder, Inc, these were centers of criminal activity with known street addresses.

While I now know more than the average bear about this rich vein of criminal lore, it was Abie’s little sister Thelma’s story I wanted to tell. She was my grandmother who died a year before I was born. She didn’t leave the trail of newspaper reports (stabbing, larceny, material witness, attempted assassination) or crime records that her older brother did. But, poring through the census data on Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History Records of Ancestry.com, I began to fill in the dots of her life in her brother’s shadow.

And, so, here is where the narrative pivots from its true-crime inspiration. I was curious about both the collateral damage of criminality in the family, and sculpting complex portraits of what must have been a very dysfunctional crew with roots in Drohobych, Galicia. I wanted to sing my grandmother’s story even if it was to a klezmer melody, a dance tune in a minor key with an antic clarinet where both light and dark conjoin.

People like my grandmother may live their entire lives outside of newsprint and book footnotes: I wanted to know who she was. Knowing Abie’s epic chutzpah and life force, I figured that quality may have run in the family. And, since I had been told I resembled her, I also wanted to know what it felt like to burn with intelligence, vitality and sexuality and be so limited by the time in ways to express it. I came of age in the time of women’s liberation, however flawed. What was it like to be a liberated woman before her time, a woman who, in some sense, ran with wolves.

The crime that October night in 1935 — the senseless burning of Pretty Amberg’s corpse after he’d been slit to pieces at Little Yiddel’s over bottle of vodka— was also a symbol for lives that shine bright and burn out. I wanted to understand that woman, my father’s mother, who I witnessed through the oversized character that was her son. He was a champion of the underdog — a union leader, a political activist, an involved and loving father. And it only seemed fitting to champion him by resurrecting his mother, my grandmother, in full. And, in so doing, restore a chunk of the wildness that also flowed in my veins, and a sense of how far I’ve come in our immigrant’s — and female — journey.

I find inspiration in history — and that’s only the beginning of a long and twisted journey into the understanding of the human condition that is fiction.

{This column originally appeared on Quora]

Movie Review: ‘Weiner’

May 6, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Weiner raises the train-wreck documentary to new heights. Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s all-access view of the downward spiral of Anthony Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign couldn’t be more relevant or entertaining at this moment as the Donald squares off against the Democrats, nominee TBD. (OK, stop hounding me, Hillary.) A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll revealed that the race has, according to Yahoo, become an unpopularity contest: the number one reason to vote for Trump is to block Hillary; similarly, the primary reason to vote for Hillary is to stop Trump.

In that light, despite his flaws, Weiner appears relatively likeable and benign. In found footage from Congress, Weiner’s a progressive firebrand; at home, in shorts, his skinny pale legs bare, he picks up his toddler’s blocks from the floor and stows them in their box. He’s the dutiful daddy pushing the expensive stroller beside his perfect wife, Huma Abedin, now being investigated as part of the Clinton email scandal.

There is no question that agreeing to be the subject of a documentary was ill-advised, and yet former Congressman Weiner, he of the unfortunate name and sexting habits, emerges as a full-on New Yorker in the best and worst senses. He boogies with a flag on a Labor Day float during the Caribbean Parade on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, connecting with the crowd; he gobbles a deli sandwich while talking a mile-a-minute in the back of a car as Canal Street rolls out beyond his right shoulder; in a moment of flagging spirits, he rattles off a series of corny did-you-hear-the-one-about jokes to his teary campaign manager, coaxing her to smile; he flips the relentless local press the bird through the smoked glass of his black SUV; and calls an Orthodox Jewish constituent the profane names you’d call a stranger who just insulted your spouse.

Yes: a more polished candidate would have slunk away without flipping the bird. A more put-together politico, someone with the steely nerves of Weiner’s wife Huma, who he married in 2010, would have been discreet. In every seething glare at her husband, the long-time Hillary Clinton campaign staffer makes it clear that, like her boss and mentor, Huma would never have gotten herself in this sex mess in the first place.

For anyone who didn’t read a Post headline in that era (“Weiner Rise And Fall,” “Weiner’s Second Coming,” “Weiner: I’ll Stick it Out,” “Weiner Pulls Out”), Weiner got caught with his pants down while in Congress for sexting inappropriate crotch shots. He resigned. In an unenlightened moment, he decided to run for mayor of New York. During that campaign more dirt emerged: a phone-sex relationship with a Las Vegas dealer who, cajoled by radio provocateur Howard Stern on camera, decides to turn adversity into opportunity and grab her own fifteen minutes.

The awkward, sticky truth at the core of the Kriegman-Steinberg doc is that they have captured a complicated portrait of an abrasive, charismatic and flawed man who is as much a New Yorker as the corner hot dog stand. As Weiner stumbles, a punchline and a political punching bag, the film morphs into the kind of nature documentary where a lion pounces and consumes a gazelle at the communal watering hole. And, surprisingly, sometimes we root for that gazelle, that twitchy Jewish guy with the forlorn pictures of his Johnson captured forever in their cotton-knit boxers. Or, at least, I did.

In the light of the current Trump circus, Weiner seems relatively benign. He’s never bankrupted a company. He would never call for Mexico to build a wall between our countries. He wouldn’t deport Muslims. He’s a scrappier fighter than Clinton, relishing conflict as only an unreconstructed New Yorker can. Dems and Republicans criticize Bernie for his age; Brooklyn-born Weiner is a spry 51. Sure, he had a sex scandal but so did Bill Clinton. And Weiner, unlike Clinton, never actually touched his victims – he sexted and texted naughtily, something revealed to general laughter in a scene where Bill Maher and Jane Lynch do a staged reading of one of these sex-talk sessions.

Weiner emerges as the political film for this political season, the tragicomedy we deserve. We can laugh at Weiner because Anthony is such an easy target – and nothing’s at stake. The doc arrives as an antidote to the presidential race unfurling in real time on the warped lenses of CNN and Fox News, the comic-horror dick-wagging of the Republican debates, the razor-sharp comedy of President Obama foretelling the end of the republic on C-Span. In a bitter season when just watching the relentless parade of TV talking heads can make us cry – or rise from the couch in righteous anger – Weiner lets us laugh at the follies of the men (and women) who would be kings – or at least mayors.