JEWISHFILM.2006 featured 8 Boston-area premieres, 1 American premiere, 1 World premiere and a special screening (for the first time in the U.S.) of excerpts of award-winning German filmmaker Michael Verhoeven’s controversial new documentary film, The Unknown Soldier.

Our heartfelt thanks to JEWISHFILM.2006 visiting filmmakers:

* Jorge Gurvich: Next Year in Argentina
* Judy Gelles & Marianne Bernstein: From Philadelphia to the Front
* Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren: The World Was Ours: The Jewish Legacy of Vilna
* Alan Rosenthal: Stalin's Last Purge

Thanks also to our discussants:

* Alberto Limonic: Next Year in Argentina
* Joshua Rubenstein: Stalin's Last Purge
* Hannah Naveh: You're in the Army Now and Close to Home
* Sylvia Barak Fishman, Lisa Fishbayne, Rachel Gober, & Sigal Landesberg:
Sentenced to Marriage
* Jerzy Mazur & Garai Gabor, Honorary Consul of Hungary to Boston: Rosehill

This year’s sidebar – a retrospective of the film’s of Michael Verhoeven, with whom the National Center for Jewish Film has worked and represented for many years – was a special pleasure. We are very grateful to our friend Michael Verhoeven also to Sabine von Mering and our colleagues at the Goethe Institut and Harvard Film Archive.

Download a PDF of the press release here

The Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University is proud to present its first Conscience and Courage Award to German filmmaker Michael Verhoeven, on Sunday, April 30, 2006 at 4:00 pm.

After training as a physician and working as an actor, Michael Verhoeven established his own film production company in 1965. The director of a host of commercial film and television projects, Verhoeven has received wide acclaim for the groundbreaking feature films he has written, produced, and directed, particularly those which grapple directly and unwaveringly with questions of German conduct during WWII and the Holocaust. Despite pressure from the West German government, Verhoeven consistently challenged the culture of silence, indifference, and denial that characterized much of Germany in the first decades after WWII. In The White Rose (1982), The Nasty Girl (1989), and My Mother's Courage (1995), he gives us courageous and outspoken women, whose stands against injustice put them at great personal risk. Verhoeven continues to ask the most difficult questions in The Unknown Soldier (2005), a documentary that wrestles with evidence of Germany army participation in Nazi crimes.

This retrospective is co-presented by the National Center for Jewish Film, the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University, the Goethe-Institut, Boston, and the Harvard Film Archive.

NCJF would like to thank JEWISHFILM.2006 sponsors for their generous support, particularly Brandeis University, The Consulate General of Israel to New England, the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University and the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.

Presented by
The National Center for Jewish Film
and
Brandeis University’s
Center for German & European Studies
Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry
Hadassah-Brandeis Institute
Edie and Lew Wasserman Fund
Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies
Jacob & Libby Goodman Institute for the Study of Zionism & Israel
Hebrew & Arabic Languages Program
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (BOLLI)
Bernard & Rhoda Sarnat Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness
Student Holocaust Remembrance Committee
SunDeis Film Festival

In cooperation with
The Consulate General of Israel to New England

With additional support from:
Newton-Marriott Hotel
Massachusetts Cultural Council
National Endowment for the Arts
Action for Post-Soviet Jewry
American Jewish Committee Greater Boston Chapter
Anti-Defamation League New England Region
Argentinean Jewish Relief Committee
Boston Center for Jewish Heritage at The Vilna Shul
Boston Latino International Film Festival
Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston
Goethe-Institut Boston
New Israel Fund, New England
The Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation
Richard and Beth Blankstein
Beverly and Sidney Boorstein
Alan and Niki Friedberg
Seth and Beth Klarman
Mavis and Hans Lopater
Jack and Ziva Paley
The Pritzker Pucker Family Fund
Bernie and Sue Pucker
Eveline and Guy Weyl
Rule Broadcast Systems

National Center for Jewish Film Board of Directors:
A. Alan Friedberg, Chair
Bonnie Edwards Arkush
Herb Bloom
Beverly Boorstein
Edith Everett
Ruth B. Fein
Robin Frank
Miriam Saul Krant
Raquel H. Newman
David Picker
Eric Pleskow
Sharon Pucker Rivo
Evelyn Simha

National Center for Jewish Film Staff:
Sharon Pucker Rivo, Executive Director
Miriam Saul Krant, Associate Director
Richard Pontius, Technical Director
John Quackenbush, Project Manager
David Ortega, Program Associate
Juliet Burch, Project Associate
Sylvia Fuks Fried, Educational Consultant
Ezra Brooks and Michael Firemen, Student Interns
Harry Finkle, Volunteer