In Jerusalem's orthodox neighborhoods, it's Succoth, seven days celebrating life's essentials in a sukkot, a temporary shack of both deprivation and hospitality. A devout couple, Moshe and Mali, married nearly five years and childless, are broke and praying for a miracle. Suddenly, miracles abound: a friend finds Moshe a sukkot he says is abandoned, Moshe is the beneficiary of local charitable fundraising, and two escaped convicts arrive on Moshe and Mali's doorstep in time to be their ushpizin - their guests. The miracles then become trials. Rabbinical advice, absolution, an effort to avoid anger, and a 1000-shekel citron figure in Moshe's dark night of the soul.
Sun Jul 11 00:00:00 UTC+0300 2004Yael Hersonski's powerful documentary achieves a remarkable feat through its penetrating look at another film-the now-infamous Nazi-produced film about the Warsaw Ghetto. Discovered after the war, the unfinished work, with no soundtrack, quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record, despite its elaborate propagandistic construction. The later discovery of a long-missing reel complicated earlier readings, showing the manipulations of camera crews in these "everyday" scenes. Well-heeled Jews attending elegant dinners and theatricals (while callously stepping over the dead bodies of compatriots) now appeared as unwilling, but complicit, actors, alternately fearful and in denial of their looming fate.
Sat Jul 24 00:00:00 UTC+0300 2010In Buenos Aires, the twenty and something year old Jewish-Argentinean Ariel Makaroff has left the University of Architecture and spends his time wandering through the downtown gallery where his mother has a lingerie shop and his brother runs an importation business, trying to get his Polish passport and move to Europe. Ariel has never understood why his father left him when he was a baby to fight in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. When his father returns to Buenos Aires, Ariel discovers the reason why his father left his family.
Mon Feb 9 00:00:00 UTC+0200 2004The title characters are children in the exuberant and colorful Ekdahl household in a Swedish town early in the twentieth century. Their parents, Oscar and Emilie, are the director and the leading lady of the local theatre company. Oscar's mother and brother are its chief patrons. After Oscar's early death, his widow marries the bishop and moves with her children to his austere and forbidding chancery. The children are immediately miserable. The film dramatizes and resolves those conflicts. A sub-plot features Isak, a local Jewish merchant who is the grandmother's lover and whose odd household becomes the children's refuge.
Fri Dec 17 00:00:00 UTC+0200 1982Nina's Journey is a feature film, but with an authentic narrator. We follow Nina and her family during six dramatic years, half of them spent in the Warsaw ghetto. The film tells the story of a young girl coming of age under extreme circumstances: Nina falls in love, goes to parties, and graduates high school - all in the Warsaw ghetto. One could say that, in these horrid times, she is almost living the life of a normal teenager. If it wasn't for the fact that all those around her are vanishing, one by one. Nina's Journey is shot in Warsaw, with Polish actors. But it is narrated by the elderly Nina Einhorn herself.
Fri Nov 4 00:00:00 UTC+0200 2005IN DARKNESS tells the true story of Leopold Soha who risks his own life to save a dozen people from certain death. Initially only interested in his own good, the thief and burglar hides Jewish refugees for 14 months in the sewers of the Nazi-occupied town of Lvov (former Poland).
Fri Sep 2 00:00:00 UTC+0300 2011
