OPENING NIGHT FILM

Wednesday, April 7
7:00 pm

@ Brandeis University

BERLIN '36

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST
Susan Bachrach, Curator, “Nazi Olympics, Berlin 1936,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum

INTRODUCTION
Detlef Gericke-Schoenhagen, Director, Goethe-Institut Boston

A feature film inspired by the true story of Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann, a gold medal contender at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Deflecting threats of international boycott due to Germany’s treatment of Jewish athletes, the Nazis bring Bergmann back from exile and force her to train. To keep her off the medal podium, the Reich conspires to replace the Jewish jumper with “Marie Ketteler,” an unknown athlete with a deep secret. Let the games begin!

Germany/UK | 2009 | 97 min | 35mm | German w/ English subtitles | Director: Kaspar Heidelbach

USHMM Nazi Olympics online exhibition
Watch Trailer (in German; Film screening with English subtitles)
Interview with Susan Bachrach

CO-PRESENTED BY Goethe-Institut Boston; Center for German and European Studies; Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry
SPONSOR Student Holocaust Remembrance Committee

Back to Top

Thursday, April 8
7:00 pm

@ Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston

THE WEDDING SONG
Le Chant des Mariées

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

A bold and beautiful drama set in 1942 Nazi-occupied Tunisia. Follow the fates of inseparable 16-year old best friends, Jewish Myriam and Muslim Nour, who find themselves on different sides of the Reich. Writer director Albou (Le Petite Jerusalem, Cannes winner), who also co-stars as Myriam’s mother, mines her family's own North African Sephardic roots in this taboo-breaking and visually stunning film that maps the intersection of Jewish and Arab cultures and the power and fragility of female sexuality.

A New York Times Critics Pick:
“A seductively fluid and tactile drama…filmed with subtle eroticism and dreamy intimacy. Ms. Albou creates a marvelously fleshy, female world…But from henna-stained fingertips to a blood-spotted wedding sheet, the film’s images remind us that here, female flesh is always the property of men.”

“Confirms Albou as a new and original voice.” – Variety

France | 2008 | 84 min | 35mm | French, Arabic, German w/ English Subtitles | Director/Writer: Karin Albou

New York Times Review with Trailer

CO-PRESENTED BY Service culturel et universitaire, Consulat Général de France à Boston; Department of Romance Languages; Eveline & Guy Weyl

Back to Top

Saturday, April 10
7:10 pm

@ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN
Sheva Dakot Be Gan Eden

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST
Nadav Tamir, Consul General of Israel to New England

A brilliantly-crafted psychological thriller with deep emotional undercurrents, SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN concerns a young Jerusalem woman struggling to reclaim her memory after a horrific bus bombing left her clinically dead for seven minutes. One year after the attack, Galia (Reymonde Amsellem) is ambivalent about the physical and psychological scars that remain. When a necklace arrives in an unmarked package and a handsome stranger enters her life, Galia begins to unlock the mystery. What follows is a maze of investigations, culminating in a startling revelation.

Winner- Best Film, Haifa International Film Festival.

“Reymonde Amsellem gives an outstanding performance. What begins as a conventional love story takes a metaphysical turn.” – New York Times

Israel/France/Hungary | 2008 | 94 min | 35mm | Hebrew w/ English Subtitles | Director/Writer: Omri Givon

Trailer
Website
Film Review in Variety

CO-PRESENTED BY Schusterman Center for Israel Studies
SPONSORS Boston Birthright Israel NEXT; Hebrew Language Program; Ziva & Jack Paley

Back to Top

YOM HASHOAH EVENT

Sunday, April 11
12:00 pm

@ Brandeis University

EINSATZGRUPPEN:
THE DEATH BRIGADES
Les Commandos de la Mort

PREMIERE: 2ND USA SCREENING

In June 1941, Nazi mobile killing squads led by highly educated officers known as the Einsatzgruppen were dispatched throughout Eastern Europe. By the spring of 1943, the 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen—aided by local collaborators in each country—had systematically murdered 1.5 million Jews, Roma, handicapped, partisans and Soviets. Prazan’s definitive masterwork is one of the essential films documenting the Holocaust and features a powerful array of never-seen-before film and photographs, along with interviews with Holocaust survivors, perpetrators and historians. Part I: Mass Graves (1941-42); Part II: Funeral Pyres (1942-45). One intermission.

France | 2009 | 180 min | DigiBeta | English narration, French, German w/ English subtitles | Director: Michaël Prazan

USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia entry on the Einsatzgruppen

CO-PRESENTED BY Center for German & European Studies; Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry; Goethe-Institut Boston
SPONSORS Student Holocaust Remembrance Committee; Facing History and Ourselves

Back to Top

Sunday, April 11
4:15pm

@ Brandeis University

GEVALD! with

THE RABBI'S DAUGHTER AND THE MIDWIFE

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST
Ilan Troen, Brandeis University

HAREDIM | Two Documentaries by Ron Ofer and Yohai Hakak
700,000 Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) live in Israel. Often hostile to the “outside” world, they rarely participate in mainstream media. Filmmakers Ofer and Hakak provide a rare journey into Israel’s Haredi community with portraits of four key figures.

GEVALD! A riveting juxtaposition of two prominent ultra-Orthodox leaders in the run up to the 2006 elections: Shmuel Chaim Pappenheim, a radical anti-Zionist activist who organizes mass protests against the secular state, and the late Avraham Ravitz, a longtime Knesset member who worked within the system to advance his constituency’s religious agenda.

Watch Trailer

THE RABBI'S DAUGHTER AND THE MIDWIFE Adina Bar-Shalom, daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, was denied permission to study. Forty years later she established the first university program for ultra-orthodox women. Midwife Rachel “Bambi” Chalkowski has delivered 30,000 babies, many into impoverished families with 10 or more children whom she aids via a charitable fund and through informal reproductive counseling.

Watch Trailer

Israel | 2009 | 50 min/each film | DigiBeta | Hebrew w/ English subtitles | Directors: Ron Ofer & Yohai Hakak

CO-PRESENTED BY Schusterman Center for Israel Studies
SPONSORS Boston Birthright Israel NEXT; New Israel Fund

Back to Top

Sunday, April 11
7:15pm

@ Brandeis University

THE WEDDING SONG
Le Chant des Mariées

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

A bold and beautiful drama set in 1942 Nazi-occupied Tunisia. Follow the fates of inseparable 16-year old best friends, Jewish Myriam and Muslim Nour, who find themselves on different sides of the Reich. Writer director Albou (Le Petite Jerusalem, Cannes winner), who also co-stars as Myriam’s mother, mines her family's own North African Sephardic roots in this taboo-breaking and visually stunning film that maps the intersection of Jewish and Arab cultures and the power and fragility of female sexuality.

A New York Times Critics Pick:
“A seductively fluid and tactile drama…filmed with subtle eroticism and dreamy intimacy. Ms. Albou creates a marvelously fleshy, female world…But from henna-stained fingertips to a blood-spotted wedding sheet, the film’s images remind us that here, female flesh is always the property of men.”

“Confirms Albou as a new and original voice.” – Variety

France | 2008 | 84 min | 35mm | French, Arabic, German w/ English Subtitles | Director/Writer: Karin Albou

New York Times Review with Trailer

CO-PRESENTED BY Service culturel et universitaire, Consulat Général de France à Boston; Department of Romance Languages; Eveline & Guy Weyl

Back to Top

Tuesday, April 13
4:30 pm

@ Brandeis University

MY 100 CHILDREN
Me'ah Yeladim Sheli

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST
Joanna Michlic, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

When Lena Küchlar discovered dozens of orphaned Jewish children in Krakow after WW II, she employed the progressive psychiatric methods of Janusz Korczak and slowly brought these damaged kids back to life. Antisemitic attacks in 1949 forced her to smuggle the children to France and later to Israel. Based on Küchlar’s best-selling autobiography, the film includes moving interviews with her “children.”

Winner-Best Documentary, Israeli Film Academy & Best Documentary, Jewish Experience, Jerusalem Int’l Film Festival.

Israel | 2003 | 68 min | DigiBeta | English, Hebrew & Polish w/ English subtitles | Directors: Amalia Margolin & Oshra Schwartz

MY 100 CHILDREN is screening as part of HBI Conference: Rising from the Ashes: Jewish Families and Children during and After the War, April, 11-13, 2010

Conference Website
Conference brochure (PDF)

This conference explores the changing patterns of Jewish families and Jewish childhood in Europe during and after the Holocaust, and the impact of the war on Jewish women, men, and children.

CO-PRESENTED BY HBI Project on Families, Children & the Holocaust; Schusterman Center for Israel Studies
SPONSORS Department of Psychology; Center for German and European Studies; Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry; Boston Birthright Israel NEXT

Back to Top

Wednesday, April 14
4:45 pm

@ Brandeis University

THE PERETZNIKS
Perecowicze

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST
Filmmakers Slawomir Grünberg and Katka Reszke & “Peretznik” Lilka Elbaum

Alumni of the Jewish Peretz School recall their adolescence in Lodz before the 1968 antisemitic campaign scattered Polish Jewry. For “The Peretzniks,” children of holocaust survivors who remained in post-war Communist Poland, their school and classmates constituted an entire world. Today, Peretzniks from around the world (including architect Daniel Libeskind) discuss Poland in the 1950s and 60s and the complexity of Polish and Jewish identity.

Poland/US | 2009 | 92 min | English, Polish & Hebrew w/ English subtitles | Director: Slawomir Grünberg

SPONSORS Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry; Center for German & European Studies; American Association for Polish Jewish Studies

Back to Top

Wednesday, April 14
7:30 pm

@ Brandeis University

SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN
Sheva Dakot Be Gan Eden

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

A brilliantly-crafted psychological thriller with deep emotional undercurrents, SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN concerns a young Jerusalem woman struggling to reclaim her memory after a horrific bus bombing left her clinically dead for seven minutes. One year after the attack, Galia (Reymonde Amsellem) is ambivalent about the physical and psychological scars that remain. When a necklace arrives in an unmarked package and a handsome stranger enters her life, Galia begins to unlock the mystery. What follows is a maze of investigations, culminating in a startling revelation.

Winner- Best Film, Haifa International Film Festival.

“Reymonde Amsellem gives an outstanding performance. What begins as a conventional love story takes a metaphysical turn.” – New York Times

Israel/France/Hungary | 2008 | 94 min | 35mm | Hebrew w/ English Subtitles | Director/Writer: Omri Givon

Watch Trailer
Website
Film Review in Variety

CO-PRESENTED BY Schusterman Center for Israel Studies
SPONSOR Boston Birthright Israel NEXT; Hebrew Language Program; Ziva & Jack Paley

Back to Top

Friday, April 16
7:00 pm

@ Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston

EYES WIDE OPEN
Eynayim Pekuhot

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

In Haim Tabakman’s breathtaking debut, Aaron (Zohar Strauss), a Haredi butcher with a wife (Tinkerbell) and four children, is drawn to the sensitive young man he has taken under his wing as an apprentice (Ran Danker). Starring three of Israel’s most popular actors, this Cannes Film Festival selection, has won a host of awards, including Best First Film at the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival.

A New York Times Critics Pick:
"The quiet and confident feature explores the conflict between sexual desire and religious obligation. Set in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, the film gives nearly equal weight to both sides in that struggle. Its scrupulous, humane sympathy gives this small, sorrowful film a glow of insight and a pulse of genuine, openhearted curiosity. It moves slowly and patiently through the ordeal of a single soul, illuminating in the process a cosmos of intense and hidden feeling."

Israel/France/Germany | 2009 | 91 min | 35mm | Hebrew w/ English Subtitles | Director: Haim Tabakman

New York Times Review with Trailer
Interview with director Haim Tabakman (PDF)

CO-PRESENTED BY Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Boston LGBT Film Festival
SPONSORS GBLT Team of CJP; Boston Birthright Israel NEXT; Keshet

Back to Top

Saturday, April 17
8:30 pm

@ Brandeis University

EYES WIDE OPEN
Eynayim Pekuhot

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST
Rony Yedidia, Deputy Consul General of Israel to New England

See above for description.

Back to Top

Celebrate JEWISHFILM's "Bar Mitzvah Year" with the Premiere of NCJF's Newest Restoration

Sunday, April 18
11:15 am

@ Brandeis University

BAR MITZVAH

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUESTS
Sharon Pucker Rivo & Musician Hankus Netsky

Starring the legendary Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance!
USA Premiere sold out twice at Lincoln Center.

Believing his wife lost at sea, Israel remarries a scheming gold-digger. Shock, tears and laughs abound when his beloved wife returns on the eve of her son’s bar mitzvah after a ten year absence.

"This schmaltzy…[musical] melodrama…pays tribute to religious and theatrical traditions while surprisingly bursting their bonds in moments of modernist cinematic inspiration. As the plot lurches and twists...lightning bolts of cinematic revelation suggest the pliable, accessible modernism of the cinema in even the most constraining of circumstances." – The New Yorker (Dec. 2009)

USA | 1935 | 90 min | DigiBeta | Yiddish w/ NEW English subtitles | Director: Henry Lynn
New Restoration & Subtitles: The National Center for Jewish Film

Website
Review in The New Yorker

SPONSOR Yiddish Book Center

Back to Top

Sunday, April 18
1:45 pm

@ Brandeis University

WHERE I STAND:
THE HANK GREENSPUN STORY

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

SPECIAL GUEST Scott Goldstein, Director

Anthony Hopkins narrates the story of Hank Greenspun, a real life Zelig whose colorful life as the “give ’em hell” owner of the Las Vegas Sun would be unbelievable if fiction. A working class kid from New Haven, Greenspun was a NYC defense attorney and WWII GI before heading to Las Vegas where he started out as Bugsy Seigel’s PR man and ended up a Vegas titan, owner of casinos, real estate and a media empire. Greenspun ran guns for the Haganah and was a target of both Joseph McCarthy and the Watergate burglars. Behind the scenes, he pushed Howard Hughes to buy out the Vegas mob. Out front, he campaigned against segregation on the Strip, the IRS and nuclear waste dumping.

Winner- Best Film at the Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Diego & Denver Jewish Film Festivals.

USA | 2008 | 98 min | DigiBeta | Director: Scott Goldstein

Interview with Director Scott Goldstein

SPONSOR Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies; Ort America; Brandeis National Committee, Greater Boston Chapter

Back to Top

Sunday, April 18
4:30 pm

@ Brandeis University

CAMERA OBSCURA
La Cámara Oscura

SPECIAL GUEST
Marjorie Agosin, Wellesley College

At the end of the 19th century, Gertrudis, a shy, introspective "ugly duckling” in a colony of immigrant Argentinean Jews, grows into her role as a mother and wife of a charismatic Yidishe Gaucho—until she meets a nomadic photographer whose uncompromising vision allows her to see herself for the first time. This lyrical, inventive feature film from award-winning Argentinean director María Victoria Menis weaves together live action, animation and still photography in a unique tribute to the power of art and imagination.

Film Festival Favorite & Nominee for 8 Argentinean Film Critics Awards.

Argentina | 2008 | 86 min | DigiBeta | Spanish & Yiddish w/ English subtitles | Director: Maria Victoria Menis

Webpage
Watch Trailer

SPONSOR Argentinean Jewish Relief Committee

Back to Top

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

Sunday, April 18
7:00 pm

@ Brandeis University

IN SEARCH OF MEMORY:
THE NEUROSCIENTIST ERIC KANDEL

SNEAK PREVIEW

Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his research into the brain's role in preserving memory, leaps off the screen with an exuberant curiosity and lust for life. With humor and charm, Kandel, age 79, ties the events of his childhood—his family immigrated to the US from Vienna to escape Nazi persecution—and the influence of Judaism to his quest to understand the inner workings of memory, "the glue that binds our mental life together."

"A passionate exploration of the life and work of Eric Kandel, the brilliant and irrepressible neurobiologist. Like Eric, Seeger's film resonates in all directions, illuminating not only the trajectory of psychology and neuroscience in the last century, but the nature of art and science, history and remembrance, work and love, inspiration and achievement. It is an unforgettable journey." — Oliver Sacks

USA/Germany | 2008 | 95 min | DigiBeta | English & German w/ English subtitles | Director: Petra Seeger

Watch Trailer
New York Times Review

SPONSOR Hans & Mavis Lopater

Back to Top