Beaufort and A Love to Hide

There’s a scene in Beaufort of a soldier talking to his friend. “You know what my biggest fear is?” he asks. “That I’ll be discharged and no one will notice.” Beaufort is Joseph Cedar’s multi-award-winning film following one Israeli army unit during the country’s contentious withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. As the 18–year conflict winds down, the men begin to ask themselves hard questions about the reality — and futility — of war.

In 2005’s A Love to Hide, Sara, a young Jewish girl lost and orphaned in the Holocaust, is sheltered by Jean, a gentile friend who tries to pass her off as a Gallic employee of his family’s laundry business. But when the Gestapo starts hounding Jean and his companion, Philippe, Sara, along with the audience, comes face-to-face with another Holocaust, the Third Reich’s systematic persecution of homosexuals. (Approximately 100,000 homosexuals were rounded up from 1939 to 1945.) While Schindler’s List broke down barriers for films depicting the Nazis’ genocidal actions against Jews, only a few movies have ventured into the emotionally unsettling and historically underexplored territory of the other victims of Hitler’s Germany. A Love to Hide, by French director Christian Faure, is one of the few.

Catch both films today as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s leg of the Jewish Community Center’s Jewish Film Festival. Beaufort screens at 3 p.m. and A Love to Hide at 7:30 p.m. Both films also screen Saturday, Beaufort at 7:30 p.m. and A Love to Hide at 9:30 p.m. 1001 Bissonnet. For tickets and information, call 713–639–7515 or visit www.mfah.org. $8 per film.
Sat., March 22, 7 p.m.; Sun., March 23, 3 p.m., 2008