It is clear that the slogan ‘Never Again’ – meaning that never again will humanity repeat the events that led to the Holocaust and the Holocaust that ensued – has failed. Colleyville is another one of those “never again” events that has slipped under the radar of most people.

The again viciously took place on October 7, 2023 when Jews were slaughtered wholesale in Israel.

The attacks on Jews in the United States and elsewhere occur way too often as if they are acceptable, normalized, a routine.

I did not remember the Colleyville hostage case. I therefore sat at the movie theater expecting a fiction story film. But no, “Colleyville,” by Award-Winning filmmaker Dani Mankin of Hey Jude Productions, (https://www.heyjudeproductions.com/), is an exceptional non-fiction, documentary reality check, that relives the January 15, 2022 hostage situation.

The “Colleyville” intense drama, premiered in North America by the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF), Hilary Helstein, Executive Director, took place at Congregation Beth Israel synagogue, in Colleyville, a small town near the Dallas-Fort-Worth metropolitan area. It tells the horror story of a small Jewish congregation’s hours-long hostage ordeal.

The main hostages “characters” are Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, Jeffrey R Cohen, Shane Woodward and Larry Schwartz.

The hostages’ situation maker is Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British-Pakistani, armed with a pistol who threatened to have two bombs ready to blow up. He took the four men hostage inside the synagogue to where they arrived that morning for the Shabbat Morning Prayer.

These four innocent men of faith went through hours of traumatic and of unpredictable outcome event; they were held hostage for 11-hour inside their house of faith in an intense standoff, and the film “Colleyville” is highlighting well their resilience and composed courage demeanor.

“Colleyville,” featuring never-before-seen footage, is giving the viewer an unprecedented detailing look at this gripping real-life drama that captivated the attention of the White House, the Prime Minister of Israel office and the world at large.

Too Many Reminders

After the October 7, 2023 gruesome Hamas terrorist attack on innocent Israelis “Colleyville,” has a much deeper and wider meaning that is calling on the world to focus on and pay attention to.

The Colleyville hostage ordeal which took place in 2022 has wider implications. In a small way it is now mirroring not only the horrors of October 7 in Israel but also the June 23, 2023 pogrom that took place in Los Angeles. In this also hours-long hate-filled event against Jews, Hamas-supporters appeared in the Pico Jewish neighborhood and ambushed the entrance to Adas Torah synagogues where they applied violence against Jews who wanted to enter their house of prayer.

Though the Colleyville terror saga had a better ending, with the terrorist dead and the four hostages rescued unharmed, this is not the way other such events may end.

Composed, Loving Characters

The composed and loving nature of the characters, even adding some humor while fearing for their life, which they interjected during hard times, acted well in their favor.

“I love death more than you love life” the perpetrator Malik Faisal Akram kept on shouting throughout his hostage-taking act. This is a slogan often heard from terrorists, mainly Muslims, who are after Jewish blood.

Former Israel Prime Minister late Golda Meir once said: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

For Jews life is very sacred. For Jews life and saving life is a higher power command. When Jew-haters, the likes of Malik Faisal Akram, will love life more than they hate Jews, this equation will hopefully tilt towards a positive change.

Colleyville Release is Timely

With the rise of antisemitism and hatred directed at Jews the movie “Colleyville” is timely, its story that really happened must be re-told.

The documentary “Colleyville” is its director Dani Mankin’s important and impactful work. As a viewer, I am feel it is also both impactful and enjoyable for the audience, reflecting past, present and future other such event possibilities.

Be Alert, Be Ready, Be Active

At the premier showcasing of “Colleyville” Jeffrey Abrams, Director of ADL’s (Anti-Defamation League International Jewish non-governmental organization) Los Angeles Regional Office addressed the audience with one message: be alert, be ready and be active. Sitting on the sofa will not make you safer.

The testament is that Jews are being targeted.

There is no “post Never Again”; it is here again. It is now almost standard to threaten and attack Jews, take Jews hostage and go as far as to kill Jews.

After 2022 Colleyville, Texas, after October 7, 2023 in Israel after June 2024 in Los Angeles, California, where are the Jewish communities, where is America heading?

The poisonous epithets and slogans yelled on US streets, campuses and elsewhere will not remain just words. They will morph into actions the likes of what took place in the Colleyville synagogue and worse.

The world must now take Never Again to a significantly higher level.

The weather was a pleasure. While much of the rest of the country roasted, San Francisco last weekend appeared a beatific city lorded over by mild yet sunny cerulean skies and ideally chilly nights.

Civic Center and the adjacent Hayes Valley neighborhood offered their own musical gratifications. June is a special month for the San Francisco Symphony, whose music director is allowed to indulge his passions. San Francisco Opera boasts a June festival of three operas, and the incomparable Kronos Quartet mounts its own festival.

Symphony, opera and Kronos were all marvelous. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted an exalted performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony in Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, the orchestra brass as golden as a certain nearby bridge. Next door at the War Memorial Opera House, a gripping performance introduced America to Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence,” a shocking drama of gun violence. A couple of blocks away at SF Jazz, Kronos celebrated its 50th anniversary, reminding us that this ensemble has changed music like no other.

All venues were full. All audiences I joined were infectiously rapt. All three institutions, it might be added, still provided large glossy program books with extensive notes, something nearly extinct in the rest of the country.

Yet everywhere I went there was an inescapable feeling of doom, of disquieting calm before the storm. Lovely days now, but summer forebodes fires. Apparent urban bliss camouflages San Francisco’s seemingly insoluble urban ills.

As I headed into Davies Hall for the Sunday matinee, I was greeted by a longtime member of the orchestra handing out yellow fliers on which was a message from the musicians to patrons. “The board is trying to turn us into a regional orchestra,” the bass player angrily announced.

The symphony is indeed in a state of turmoil that feels existential. Four years ago, Salonen became music director with the mandate to foster innovation, following what he had accomplished in his 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Unfortunately, the city and its orchestra were hard hit by the pandemic. Rather than give Salonen the support to realize his bold vision, the San Francisco Symphony, which sits on a $345-million endowment (the second largest of any American orchestra), slashed, slashed and slashed some more. Management insists the institution will otherwise run out of cash. Dire financial projections have become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Salonen has refused to renew his contract (which runs for one more season) after the board scaled back a European tour, new commissions, innovative programming and staged productions with Peter Sellars, its much-heralded digital media, its “Concerts for Kids” series and the far-reaching creative partners from various walks of music and technology Salonen appointed. A black-box series, SoundBox, a hit with young audiences, has been downgraded as well. Frank Gehry’s proposals for inexpensive experimental new halls made by refashioning warehouses on Treasure Island should be a no-brainer, but for this board they are a nonstarter. A musicians strike looks likely in the fall.

Still, one ironic outcome from these troubles is an orchestra hell-bent on proving its worth. There was in its performance Sunday — which opened with a wondrous performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto and soloist Yefim Bronfman — unrelenting intensity. Meanwhile, Bruckner’s brazen rhythmic patterns in his “Romantic” symphony sounded like bodacious calls for change and expletives against the board. In the composer’s grand lyrical phrases, the orchestra seemed to say, with profound expression, Read our collective hearts.

The atmosphere at San Francisco Opera feels to an outsider more accepting than bellicose. But it, too, has instituted large cutbacks. Facing rising costs in producing opera, it will reduce the number of operas performed from eight to six next season. That’s a third the number the company once presented. The big difference between this company and the orchestra, however, is that the will to continue its mission appears unchanged, and new ways are being explored to pay for it.

I met with Matthew Shilvock, the company’s general director and a trained musicologist. He says costs are rising so rapidly that every year an additional $2 million to $3 million is needed for even this modest number of productions.

Shilvock’s strategy is to productively tap into the kind of crisis intensity felt by his neighboring symphony. Every production, every performance needs to matter. That includes continuing to present new and challenging work.

“Innocence,” which has been a hit, gives him confidence that this is the right approach. The opera, which had its premiere in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2021, was the last for Saariaho, who died a year ago. It is also a change of direction from her earlier profoundly philosophical and poetic pieces, all done in collaboration with Sellars.

There is little of that poetry or profundity here; “Innocence” is more akin to a Netflix drama. Ten years after a school shooting in which 10 students and their teacher were killed, the mother of one of the victims and the young shooter confront each other at a party. The students are ghosts, actors with speaking roles. There are strange and startling twists of plot keeping the audience in suspense.

The issue of gun violence was presented with complexity. The fashionable production by Simon Stone is cleverly devised on a revolving stage. The large cast of singing actors proved uniformly excellent Friday night, the last of the six performances. The enthusiastic conductor, Clément Mao-Takacs, could be overly flashy, but the real glory in the opera, its saving grace in many ways, was the exceptional beauty and expression of Saariaho’s orchestral writing, and this came through spectacularly well.

Under a surface of undulating sonic beauty, the roots of the shattering elements in “Innocence” can be found in Saariaho’s 1987 “Nymphéa” for string quartet and electronics. That happens to be one of more than 1,000 string quartets Kronos has commissioned over the last half century. Thanks to Kronos, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and many of the great names of the 20th and 21st centuries — along with composers in rock, jazz, country, folk, raga, Chinese pipa music and other global traditions from every continent — turned to this unlikely medium.

The Kronos Quartet performs with the San Francisco Girls Chorus at SF Jazz on Saturday night in San Francisco.

(Lenny Gonzalez / Kronos Quartet)

No ensemble in the history of music has come close to doing so much, and a four-night festival can’t come close to exhibiting it. So with but a little looking back, Kronos did what it always does: look ahead, performing new music.

Saturday night, the first of the two programs I heard, was the premiere of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s spiritually spellbound “The Space Between.” There was a movement from Riley’s new, otherworldly “This Assortment of Atoms — One Time Only!” This is one of the Kronos Quartet’s “50 for the Future” commissions from composers, Glass and Laurie Anderson among them, producing works suitable for young string quartets. All the scores are made available for free on the Kronos website, and more than 38,000 scores have been downloaded in 108 countries and territories.

The concert also included two feisty new works by teenage composers Hannah Wolkowitz and Ilaria Hawley. The San Francisco Girls Chorus joined Kronos for works by the likes of Yoko Ono, Pete Seeger and Mali singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté. At the end, the guest was Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat.

The festival ended Sunday with Sam Green’s live Kronos documentary film “A Thousand Thoughts,” which includes live performances by the Kronos. This was the 46th and last time the film will be shown. Two key members of the quartet from the last four-plus decades, violinist John Sherba and Hank Dutt, are retiring. It was a bittersweet, deeply moving and loving finale.

What will happen next to the Kronos? The ensemble also is losing its first and only manager, Janet Cowperthwaite, who behind the scenes made the commissions and all else possible. First violinist David Harrington, the quartet’s visionary founder, will soldier on with cellist Paul Wiancko and two new young players, violinist Gabriela Díaz and violist Ayane Kozasa.

An era has ended. But Harrington is the most optimistic musician I know. His record of accomplishing the unthinkable has made him an unerring San Francisco symbol for the future.

It would be a poor investment not to bet on Kronos. Harrington has made the impossible happen not by cutting back but by tirelessly seeking more. He has gained international support by not letting anything stop him.

The San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera could do the same by believing in the future, beginning with digging into the damn endowments. The city, too, could (and typically does) do worse than following Kronos’ extraordinary belief in the possible. We all could. The model exists.

‘Kalki 2898AD’ has a simple story at heart, a tale from the future about the arrival of the tenth avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. But it is decked up in a herculean, futuristic setting for three hours that partly thrills, confuses and also exhausts the audience. An immersive experience in terms of its scale, the dystopian, mythological science fiction also has a flood of characters and cameos whose arrival and relevance are tough to keep track of.
‘Kalki’ is set more than 800 years into the future in 2898 AD. In Kasi, which is the last city on a severely resource-drained Earth, Supreme Yaskin (Kamal Hassan) rules humanity from a structure called ‘Complex’. His people seize fertile girls and SUM80 (Deepika Padukone) is one among them.

Meanwhile, the mythological Ashwathama (Amitabh Bachchan) is waiting for someone’s arrival for his redemption after ages. Another group of people, in the city of Shambhala, are also planning an assault. An unbeatable bounty hunter named Bhairava (Prabhas) is a curious character entangled in this web.
For those who love complex world-building, retelling of mythological stories on vast canvases and apocalyptic tales, director Nag Ashwin’s film can be quite a spectacle. The exceptional production standards are also breathtaking. Amitabh Bachchan has brought his A game and is the one who steals the show. Deepika’s central role is de-glam throughout, but she lends SUM80 a suiting personality. Kamal Haasan, Dulquer Salmaan, Anna Ben, Shobhana, Vijay Deverakonda, Mrunal Thakur, Rajamouli, Ram Gopal Varma… the cameo list is humongous though not with a quality follow-through for all of them.
The fight sequences between Ashwathama and Bhairava are fun, though Big B’s antics are more impressive than the rebel star’s. It’s Amitabh Bachchan who towers in this Prabhas film, more than the Telugu actor. The humour in the film falls flat almost all the time, especially in Prabhas’ sequences. The creative liberties taken by the writers are interesting, but it’s hard to feel emotionally invested or connected to any party in the story. The end credits provide hope to the franchise-hungry audience. And if you want to offer the ‘Kalki’ cinematic universe a chance, give the film a try. You might not care about the cliffhanger climax now, but what if you do when a stronger second part with a richer universe comes to life?