Aviva Kempner has no need to impress.
Everyone else will do that for her.
As the founding director of the 22-year-old Washington Jewish Film Festival, she's done enough to enable and catalyze random and decisive acts of filmmaking in the D.C. area at every turn.
As if further evidence of due adulation were necessary, Kempner was awarded the WJFF Visionary Award for her demonstrable "courage, creativity and insight" in representing the "diversity of the Jewish experience" in film. Then, she was made to exhaust her arsenal of work in retrospective form during this past Saturday's festivities--a night with her name written all over it.
Though well-deserved, such revelry on Kempner's behalf suggests a final act that this filmmaker is clearly far from directing.
That's how we arrive at Sunday.
On Sunday, the Aaron and Cecile Goldman Theatre is packed once again, and Kempner opens her current work-in-progress with the air of a seasoned professional--but one that's totally unaware of the giant shadow lurking just beyond her.
This most recent film is a near biopic about Julius Rosenwald, a not-too-well-known philanthropist whose heyday was spent between the 19th and early 20th centuries building a legacy he couldn't entirely leave his contemporaries to nourish due to anti-Semitism.
Booker T. Washington approached the Sears Roebuck partner about putting money into his personal education project which would ultimately realize the development of over 5,000 schools for African-American children at the height of Jim Crow. [Jaw drops here.]
The impossible creation of the Rosenwald Schools are a major draw of the film--and major oversight of popular history--but the story of Rosenwald's philanthropy and for-profit efforts go on to create opportunity for schoolchildren and many amazons within the annals of African American history that clearly require retelling.
Following the rough cut, Kempner along with author, Stephanie Deutsch, of You Need A Schoolhouse, and Smithsonian head of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, Kinshasa Holman Conwill, furthered the discussion of this unlikely raison d'etre.
Attendees contributed to the conversation, and Kempner, the ironic giant, listened. Penning new ideas that folks present will likely see worked into the final cut.
Washington Jewish Film Festival will be back for a 23rd year. Until then, the impatient can see the film through to its finish. To learn more about the film, the filmmaker, or to make a contribution, visit http://www.rosenwaldschoolsfilm.org.
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