So, what’s not to like?
The opening night screening on Wednesday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre is “Kaddish for a Friend,’’ one of several films in the festival that explore father-son relationships. “Kaddish for a Friend,’’ the feature debut by Moscow-born German filmmaker Leo Khasin, who will attend, considers this male dynamic within a wider story about contentious relations between Jews and Arabs. The film is a drama about 14-year-old Ali Messalam (Neil Belakhdar) whose Muslim family flees Lebanon for Germany. They move into a high-rise building and quickly discover that their upstairs neighbor is a cranky, elderly Jewish man, Alexander Zamskoy (Ryszard Ronczewski). Ali falls in with the local Arab gang in Berlin’s Kreuzberg area and they vandalize Zamskoy’s apartment for kicks, but Ali is the only one who’s caught. His anti-Semitism “isn’t personal,’’ he tells the old man, nor is it informed - he spray paints “Jew Nazi’’ on the apartment wall. Ali is charged with a crime and his mother fears deportation. Behind her husband’s back, she convinces her son to help repair the damage to Zamskoy’s apartment. After initial sparring and suspicion, a friendship gradually develops between Zamskoy, a former boxer and Israeli soldier, and Ali, a boy in need of a father figure, making “Kaddish for a Friend’’ a genuine and moving coming-of-age story. “Kaddish for a Friend’’ screens again on Nov. 6 at the MFA.
