Film
Hebrew Center Film
At Home in Utopia, a documentary by Michal Goldman., screens Sunday, June 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hebrew Center in Vineyard Haven.
As the Filmmakers Collaborative tells it, this film set in the mid-1920s tells of the thousands of Jewish immigrant garment factory workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx.
The latest film from Julie Taymor, Across the Universe, screens tonight at 8 p.m. at Outerland at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, continuing the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society’s dinner and a movie series at the club.
Paul Bunyan the lumberjack. John Henry the steel-driver. Giacomo Casanova the womanizer. And Zeb Tilton the schooner captain.
That last name may not be as well recognized as the others, but for many who have heard the stories of the famed mariner, Capt. Zebulon Tilton is the Vineyard’s own folk hero. He was very much real, as was his vessel the Alice S. Wentworth. But in the first half of the 20th century, accounts from newspapers all along the Northeast coast made him out to be larger than life.
The Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center Summer Institute opens its summer season of films and lectures on Sunday, when noted film critic Miguel Valente will introduce the first film, a heart-felt story about political events as felt in Brazil in 1970. The film is called The Year My Parents Went on Vacation.
Filmed in Brazil and directed by Cao Hamburger, it is subtitled.
Surfwise is only a surfing film in the same way that its central character Dorian (Doc) Paskowitz is, as he puts it, a “Jewish surfer.”
In fact Mr. Paskowitz is a Stanford-educated doctor who refused to send any of his nine children to school; an individualist who led his children each morning in a rendition of Chairman Mao’s March of the Volunteers; and a professed good husband and good father, who pursued his own dream with his family in tow. He also happens to surf.
Film Wins Award
Crawford, a documentary film by Chilmark summer resident David Modigliani, won the audience award for best documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival last Sunday night. The film, about the changes Crawford, Texas, goes through when George W. Bush moves to town, has screened at festivals nationwide and was called “a must-see of this year’s docs” by writer-director Richard Linklater. For details online, or to watch the movie trailer, go to crawfordmovie.com.