Rosalie Abella’s big-screen treatment The first Jewish woman—and first refugee—to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada has entered the cinematic spotlight in Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella . The film follows some of the seminal social-justice court rulings she partici- pated in from 2004 until her retirement in 2021—from same-sex marriage to workplace rights, from job opportunities for minorities to ensuring the right to strike—while diving into her fiercework ethic and her courage to take unpopular positions on public policy. We also see her private side, including a home and office where every surface is covered in colourful folk art, collectibles and figurines. While she initially didn’t want any role in a film about her life, Rosalie’s husband Irving Abella, who died in 2022, encouraged her to work with director Barry Avrich. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor attended the premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto on May 1, and Abella took a few jabs at the politics of the ruling colleagues south of the border.
Holocaust poems score Juno Award
Lenka Lichtenberg didn’t learn she was Jewish until age nine, around the time she became an actor in Prague. Most of her mother’s Czech family was murdered in the Holocaust, and she took a particular interest in survivor stories after moving to Canada to pursue ethnomusicology studies and continue a performing career. Later, she encountered 65 poems written by her grandmother, who was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. While it was strictly forbidden to write anything down, Anna Hana Friesová managed to preserve the poetry in notebooks discovered by Lichtenberg in her late mother’s apart- ment. Setting those verses to music led to producing Thieves of Dreams , which won the 2023 Juno for Global Music Album.
Two comedy legends come alive again Wayne & Shuster reluctantly moved their comedy act from radio to television in 1954— then they became fixtures of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the next 36 years. Frank Shuster hosted retrospectives after Johnny Wayne died in 1990, until Shuster himself died in 2002. But you can’t officially access their video catalogue today. The lack of permission for the music and background performers has kept that material locked in the CBC
vault. Instead, the children of the duo—Michael and Brian Wayne, and Rosie Shuster—have exercised the rights to earlier scripts: Wayne & Shuster Live debuted onstage at the Univer- sity of Toronto’s Hart House in May, featuring a cast of young local comics. The most famous W&S sketch of all, “Rinse the Blood off My Toga,” inspired by William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was originally on radio.
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