Jewish Film Festival July 22, 2018

306 Hollywood

The picture in the program intrigued me and the description of it being magical realist. I'm also a fan of documentaries. The topic was excavating their grandmother's home after she passes. The interesting title is the address of the house. The granddaughter and grandson don't put the house on sale until they can document and like archaeologists dig through the decades exploring their grandma's life. They had also been documenting the grandmother for years on film and audio. This blended in with an exact miniature of the house, seen in the picture above makes a rich story. Although long at parts and maybe a little too long in general. It was unique though, I've never seen anything like it.


Program description:

WEST COAST PREMIERE

In her lifetime, Annette Ontell was hardly a household name. For the handful of family and friends who knew her, she was the wise and ferociously funny Jewish matriarch who spent much of her life creating designer dresses for the Park Avenue set. A decade before she passed away at the age of 93, her two grandchildren, filmmakers Elan and Jonathan Bogarin, recorded a series of video interviews with the charismatic Ontell in the modest New Jersey home where she lived for 67 years. Rather than sell the house after her death, Elan and Jonathan decided instead to methodically sift through decades of accumulated clutter from stacks of check stubs and tax forms, unsent Christmas cards and even a stray recording of a family argument.

This highly cinematic archeological dig through the life of their grandmother illuminates her universe in imaginative ways (the Bogarins even have actors lip sync the argument). Throughout their reverie, the Bogarins’ change the focus from Roman libraries to the Rockefellers, providing a meditation on the very notion of archiving itself. Subsumed in a Wes Anderson–esque glow, the talented Bogarins have crafted a wondrous memorial to their grandmother, rescuing her from the undertow of anonymity while probing the dense topography of the 20th century. —Thomas Logoreci

Interview with the directors: 

Click here for interview

Another interview - shorter

Trailer of movie