Program Calendar | Tickets | Venues | Past Festivals
Selection subject to change.
| Festival
Selection Please see calendar for dates, times, venues and special screening information. |
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The
First Basket Sponsor: Athletics Department Did you know that Ossie Schectman, a Jewish kid from Queens, scored the NBA’s very first basket? For Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century, sports played an essential part in becoming “American,” a way of disproving stereotypes of Jews as bookish and weak. Basketball—which doesn’t require open fields or expensive equipment—proved a perfect fit for urban Jewish kids, and by the 1920s, nearly every Jewish urban neighborhood, school, and institution had a basketball team. When these teams evolved into professional leagues by the late 1940s, Jewish players and coaches led the way. www.thefirstbasket.com |
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My
Mexican Shivah Sponsor: American Jewish Committee Greater Boston Chapter, Levine Chapels Brookline According to Jewish folklore, from his or her birth a Jew is accompanied by the angels of light and darkness. When Moishe Tartakovsky dies, these divine accountants calculate his soul’s direction into the afterlife by eavesdropping on the mourners gathered in an apartment in Mexico city. Moishe’s eternal rest might be in jeopardy as his shiva guests include a roomful of plotting friends, his vain daughter, bankrupt son, newly-Orthodox ex-con grandson, and Catholic ex-lover. All the while, a man from the sacred funeral society is charging for kosher food and shiva goods and a troupe of mariachi musicians waits to play. This wry comedy drama—based on a story by Ilan Stavans and produced by John Sayles—features an original score performed by The Klezmatics. |
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The
Living Orphan Sponsor: National Yiddish Book Center A stage couple—played by Polish Yiddish stars and real-life couple Gustav Berger & Fania Rubina—finds their marriage strained by life in the theater. The husband insists his wife forgo acting to stay home with their son; she, meanwhile, must face the consequences of choosing her career over family obligations. Photographed in New York in the 1930's, Living Orphan contains some marvelous street shots of the Lower East Side. Adapted from a popular play by Sholom Secunda, the film is a wonderful example of the sentimental domestic melodramas produced prior to World War II for immigrant audiences. |
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Samuel
Bak: Painter of Questions Sponsor: Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Women’s American ORT In 2001, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibit of his work, painter Samuel Bak returned to his hometown of Vilna, Lithuania, where he was born in 1933. There, he walked the streets of the Vilna ghetto where he was interned with his parents during the Holocaust and visited the Ponari forest where his father and grandparents were murdered. Lauded as a child prodigy, young Samuel’s happy childhood came to an end the day his family was marched into the Jewish Ghetto, changing his life and his artistic vision forever. Saved from the death camps by his father before his capture, the miracle of his survival became a recurring theme in the unique and powerful visual vocabulary of his art.
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Jewish
Life in Vilna Sponsor: Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Women’s American ORT This rare film document captures the vibrant spirit of Jewish life in pre-World War II Vilna, whose people and institutions were all but completely obliterated by the Holocaust. |
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Dear
Mr. Waldman Co-presented by: Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Sponsor: Student Holocaust Remembrance Committee, Hans and Mavis Lopater, CAMERA In Tel Aviv in the 1960s 10-year-old Hilik knows his goal in life–to make his parents happy and compensate for the grief they both suffered in the Holocaust. The fragile equilibrium of Rivka and Moishe’s new, Post war life begins to waver when Moishe convinces himself that Yankele, his son from his first marriage, didn't actually die in Auschwitz, but rather survived to become the “Jack Waldman” he sees pictured in a newspaper. When a deluded Moishe writes a letter to Waldman, Hilik takes matters into his own hands. A coming-of-age story written and directed by the son of survivors, Dear Mr. Waldman beautifully captures the milieu of mid-century Israel and the peculiarities of growing up amid the emotional wreckage of the Holocaust. www.dearmrwaldman.com |
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Secret
Courage: Sponsor: Facing History and Ourselves, Boston Center for Jewish Heritage at the Vilna Shul Like other Jews who were forced to work in concert with the Nazis, Walter Suskind was considered a collaborator by many of his Jewish brethren. What no one knew, however, until after his death, was that Suskind used his position as head of Jewish deportations in Holland to save an estimated 1000 Jewish children from death camps. Suskind—working with a group of Dutch resistance workers—orchestrated an elaborate and risky escape route for Jewish children. Secret Courage tells, for the first time, the story of these rescuers, and it resurrects the reputation of a man long considered a traitor. www.morsephotography.com/suskindfilm |
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or 3 Things I Know About Him Co-presented by: Goethe-Institut Boston, Center for German and European Studies, Sarnat Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness Directed by the son of a prominent Nazi executed for war crimes in 1947, Malte Ludin’s astonishing documentary is an intimate domestic drama about how his family denies and represses the history of their family and of Germany more generally. “[Ludin] courageously probes the effect of this legacy, and the revelations are shocking…. The filmmaker doesn’t shrink from debating heatedly with his sisters onscreen or exposing them to their children as liars.” - Richard Brody, New Yorker “This film may be the start of a new chapter in the history of film and fascism.” - Georg Seeßlen, EPD-Film “If it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, “a typical German story,” the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.” - A. O. Scott, New York Times “This exceptional documentary…is an illumination of convenient rationalization and denial on a grand scale….A must-see.” – D. Toumarkine, Film Journal illumination of convenient rationalization and denial on a grand scale….A must-see.” – D. Toumarkine, Film Journal www.2oder3dinge.de |
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Three
Mothers Co-presented
by: Hadassah-Brandeis Institute A drama of loyalty, love, and deceit spanning 3 generations and 3 languages. The Hakim triplets were born to a wealthy Egyptian-Jewish family in 1942. Sixty years later—after husbands and children, careers and love affairs—the sisters are living together again, in Israel. Moving between present and past, a suspenseful and poignant tale reveals the sisters’ unshakable bond—and a long-hidden secret. Rose gets it right when she confesses: we were better sisters than we were mothers. Winner:
Best Cinematography & Costumes, Israeli Academy Awards www.3mothers.co.il |
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Fence,
Wall, Border Co-presented by: Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Jacob and Libby Goodman Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel It’s not the longest, nor the most lethal, but it’s certainly the most debated fence in the world today. The barrier being built between Israel and Palestine: will it create better neighbors or a wound that won't heal? This remarkable three-part film—screening here for the first time outside of Israel—follows the construction of the fence over a three year perod. Award-winning director Eli Cohen investigates the political, ecological, human rights, and technological aspects of the fence, as well as the role of the media, the propaganda war, and the march of follies on both sides. |
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Yippee:
A Journey to Jewish Joy Sponsors: Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Brandeis University National Women’s Committee Filmmaker Paul Mazursky (Next Stop Greenwich Village, An Unmarried Woman) chronicles his whirlwind journey to Uman, a small Ukrainian town that is the site of a unique, annual gathering of Jewish men making pilgrimages to the burial place of Rabbi Nachman (1772-1810). Yippee! is an infectious road movie filled with electricity and awe and Mazursky is a splendid guide, funny, curious, and generous. “Brilliant documentary, beautifully told—and funny.” - Larry King “Paul Mazursky delivers an enchanting world, funny, fascinating and surprisingly touching.” - Mel Brooks “A deeply moving film-powerful-and wonderfully funny. Yippee!” – Kirk Douglas |
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A
Cantor on Trial Sponsors: Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Brandeis University National Women’s Committee Cantor Leibele Waldman plays multiple roles in this spoof of a synagogue committee in search of a chazan (cantor) for the High Holiday services. |
| National
Center For Jewish Film,
Brandeis University, Lown 102,
MS053, Waltham MA 02454 |
