New York Jewish Film Festival

With the recent renaissance in Israeli filmmaking, this year's New York Jewish Film Festival has the luxury of enthusiasm from recent films such as Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi and Late Marriage. Having won 11 Israeli Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, Nina's Tragedies bears a similarly impressive pedigree, but one not entirely earned. Savi Gabizon's film can never quite muster an appropriate tone for its tale of a year in the life of an Israeli thirtysomething. Is it tragedy, comedy, romance or farce? Unfortunately, the film cannot answer this basic question, and a solid leading performance by Ayelet Zorer as Nina is swamped amid the muddy plot and characterization.

Making a better impression and a solid attempt at soldering Bend It Like Beckham's sporty allure together with a heartfelt look at growing up Jewish in postwar London, is Wondrous Oblivion. Young David, son of European Jewish refugees, is cricket-mad, spending hours moving his beloved cricket cards around in fantasy matches, but as a player he's a walking disaster. Dennis, his newly arrived next-door neighbor (Delroy Lindo), agrees to take David on as a student, and with his tutoring, David becomes a school star at cricket. Heartfelt without being sappy, Wondrous Oblivion has the makings of a real crowd-pleaser.

Among the documentaries, two in particular are best in show, and both wrestle with the Holocaust as their subject. Before anyone runs screaming for the exits, let me say in their defense that each approaches its subject with appropriate gravity but avoids becoming excessively maudlin. Yaron Zilberman's Watermarks, due for a theatrical run after the festival, takes the members of a Viennese Jewish swim team, frequent champions before Hitler and the Anschluss, and brings them back to the city of their birth to swim once more. Watermarks is both a reminder of the impressive history of Jewish athletics in prewar Europe and an emotionally wrenching study of displacement. Even today, some 60-plus years later, many of the women of the Hakoah swim team still find a part of themselves reliving the traumas of 1938.

Imaginary Witness, directed by Daniel Anker, follows the ebb and flow of Hollywood representations of the Holocaust, from 1939's Confessions of a Nazi Spy to Schindler's List. Intelligent and impassioned, with a bevy of well-chosen clips, Imaginary Witness wonders just how film, always so dependent on a literal vocabulary, can take on the Holocaust, whose horrors are simply too enormous for realism. The festival will also be showing some of the films featured in Imaginary Witness, including The Pawnbroker and The Mortal Storm, a forthrightly anti-Nazi picture from 1940 with an excellent performance from James Stewart as a good German who goes to extreme lengths to protect a non-Aryan family from Nazi vengeance. The studios, and their Jewish moguls, were always careful not to go too far, though; watch the film, and you'll notice one word never makes an appearance-"Jew."

Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, 165 W. 65th St. (betw. B'way & Amsterdam Ave.), 212-875-5601; call for times, $10, $7 st.