Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

In the thriller Inside, an art thief named Nemo (Willem Dafoe) breaks into the New York penthouse of a renowned architect and collector. Once there he is all business, liaising with an unseen collaborator via walkie-talkie rather than stopping to admire the art.  It is no accident that the paintings he is there to steal, by the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, depict tortured souls, with emaciated frames and paper-thin skin. By the end of the movie Nemo will be a physical manifestation of Schiele’s works: a man living in wretched limbo, psychologically tortured and physically deplete.  Directed by Greek filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis, Inside is a reworking of the one-man survival drama, at once euphoric and painful to watch.

Fiddler on the Roof is a study of Eastern European Jewry: it is based on Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s short stories and is set in a Yiddish-speaking village in early twentieth-century Imperial Russia. Yet, in the hit musical, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics only feature a handful of Yiddish words. Harnick later confessed that the creators downplayed the Jewishness of the story — something they thought might be too sticky; too specific — in order not to put off American audiences. As scriptwriter Joseph Stein said: “These were stories about characters who just happened to be Jewish.