By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO –While I love the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, I have chosen not to favor one film over another by reviewing it here. My hesitance to do so testifies to both the quality and quantity of the motion pictures being screened. The SDJFF is simply a celluloid smorgasbord loaded with reel delights to please any cinematic palate. It runs through February 17th so you can still catch one or more of them in the coming days.
In between attending the Festival, you might want to watch the Oscar Nominated Short Documentaries opening February 15th at the Landmark’s Ken Cinema. Although these films tackle depressing topics like coping with aging, cancer, homelessness, heart disease, and poverty, they artfully endow their subjects with dignity and mine gold out of dross of the human condition. Impressed by all of them, I want to focus on the two that have explicit or implicit Jewish content.
Redemption directed by Jon Alpert and Mathew O’Neill personalizes the phantoms we avert our eyes from when we see them scavenging through dumpsters and garbage cans to collect cans and bottles and redeem them for cash. They painstakingly rummage through the waste discarded in bags and bins that line the streets of New York to retrieve aluminum, glass, and plastic bounty. They haul their trove away on their backs and bicycles, and in shopping carts and wagons to the grocery stores and recycling facilities which pay five cents for each container. Walter, an amiable former cook who fought in Vietnam, converts the prices for various items into redemption currency to provide perspective on how little he receives for so much effort. For example, a tall plain coffee at Starbucks costs fifty cans.
Following the “canners” on their daily rounds and hearing them tell their stories, the demeaning stereotypes of them as alcoholic, indigent, or insane are shattered. What they have in common is that they are currently impoverished or unemployed, but how each of them ended up in that situation varies greatly. Some had been factory workers before they were laid off in the recession. Another worked as a computer programmer in the World Trade Center until his company closed after its offices were destroyed. A mother raising 2 children drops her daughter off at school and sorts through refuse with her younger son to pay the rent and buy food. A Guatemalan peasant cans half of the year in New York and returns to his homeland for the rest of the year to grow and harvest his crops.
And then there is Susan. Susan is an older Jewish woman who excelled in her sales job for IBM. After she retired, she could not support herself with just her social security income. Consequently, she turned to canning, or as she euphemistically puts it, “helping to keep the city clean.” A Chinese woman callously poaches from Susan’s collection sites and stash because Susan is more vulnerable than the other glass and plastic gleaners. Cuban Joe comes to Susan’s defense, but he wonders “what a nice Jewish girl” like her is doing on the streets. Susan responds, “You do what you have to do to survive.” This is just one instance in the film showing canners assisting and comforting each other despite their daily grind to eke out an existence.
Sari Gilman’s Kings Point deals with retirees from New York who fled the city to reside in a senior citizens’ community in Florida as her grandmother did in the late 1970s. Although the movie never mentions it, it is apparent from the mannerisms and names of the interviewees that the many of them are Jewish. What looked like a paradise when they initially arrived gradually became a geriatric ghetto. Spouses and close friends died, and visits from relatives diminished in frequency and length. With widowed women outnumbering single men, the competition for companionship is fierce. Some find a partner to share the cooking and time, but few want to remarry.
Although the community sponsors many activities, most residents become less able to participate in them as they grow older. When they are healthy, they attract acquaintances with whom they play cards, see movies, shop at malls, and dine at restaurants for the early bird specials (though this latter custom, which my mother always indulged in, is not introduced by Gilman). When their health deteriorates, fewer people socialize with them. We live in a society where life expectancy has gone up. Being elderly often means being isolated. Kings Point opens up debate on an important subject;―namely whether segregating senior citizens in retirement communities away from their families and lifelong friends will afford them the social support they will need when they become less vibrant and more dependent on others.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com