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Sunshine is a movie and its star, Ralph Fiennes, producer Robert Lantos and director Istvan Szabo pulled up at the Loews Theatre in a stretch- stretch white limo and joined a crowd of 200 at a benefit cocktail for the film festival. The film is set in Hungary and there was Hungarian wine for all.
After a sell-out crowd of 600 had filled the theatre, Lantos, who was born in Hungary but grew up in Montreal, said a few heart-warming words. Then, the lights dimmed and the audience settled in for the three-hour epic, the saga of many generations of a Jewish family's life in 20th-century Hungary.
Fiennes had swooped into Montreal that very morning, and after a full day of press conferences and interviews, he looked a little blitzed in the crush of guests.
''I've seen nothing of Montreal and I'm leaving tonight for New York,'' said the star of Schindler's List who, I am sorry to say, was wearing a cranberry corduroy suit.
His next project is a holiday and he's spending New Year's in South Africa. In January, Fiennes and Lantos will attend the movie's Hungarian premiere.
Among the guests were the evening's sponsors Jane and Herschel Segal, and many members of the Zunenshine clan, (the family featured in the movie is called Sonnenshein), including Leslie, Rachel, Howard, and Linda. Also there were Cecil Rabinovitch, chairman of the festival, and her husband Robert, president of the CBC, Israeli consul- general Shlomo Avital, Michael Goldbloom, publisher of The Gazette, and Fiona Macleod, Guy Fournier, Robert Daudelin of Cinematheque Quebecoise, Guy Gagnon of Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, Jonathan Deitcher, Thomas Vamos, Kris Michaels, Csaba Kertesz, event chairman Angela Lipper, and honorary board members Mel Hoppenheim, Linda and Ian Greenberg and daughter Amanda (visiting from Budapest), Hy Bloom, and Lou Stroller, and committee members Lisa Kaufman, Nettie Harris, Lillian Mauer, Karys Marcus, Suanne Ray, Sara Riesman, Gillian Yanow, Iris Wagner, Alice Lehrer, Liane Taran, Evie Stroller, and festival director Susan Alper.
The Montreal Jewish Film Festival is an international showcase of Jewish
culture around the world. The evening raised nearly $30,000 for the fifth
festival, May 11-18, 2000. In the past,the festival has attracted a total of
10,000 people to more than 80 films, including the Oscar-winning Italian film
Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni and The Harmonists, by Joseph Vilsmaier
of
Germany. It also has children's animation workshops and young adults'
programming.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 7, 2000
EL STEPHO