Boston Jewish Film Festival To Open At Coolidge Corner Theatre

BROOKLINE, MA — This year on its 30th birthday the Boston Jewish Film Festival take films from around the world in an effort to celebrate the Jewish experience through film. It also comes just weeks after a gunman walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 people, in what was the largest attack against Jewish people in U.S. history.

"Unfortunately, I think in a way many of the films about Jewish history or contemporary life across the world will resonate with what's just happened in Pittsburgh," said the festival's artistic director Ariana Cohen-Halberstam. "It's obviously just a shame to see history playing out in this way."

But said Cohen-Halberstam, the festival becomes a space for reflection and a space to come together and be together in scarey times.

"Hopefully people will find that they can find community reflection and hopefully some solace," she said.

More than 20 filmmakers from across the world are coming to be featured at this year's festival, she said. "Identity is complex," she said. "These films are for everyone, but they happen to look at life through a Jewish lens."

The festival got its start in 1988 when Michal Goldman screened two classic Yiddish films during a weekend at Boston University. That spurred an annual event showcasing Jewish culture through film for a week from Newton to Boston. Other programs and events have grown out of the festival.

This year's festival covers global themes across topics from music to women in film to intimate first-person narratives and explorations of cross-cultural identities.

One of the films playing in Brookline Cohen-Halberstam is most excited about is a 1924 film that was lost for decades, rediscovered in a Paris flea market in 2015 and restored.

"We don't know much about it, but we do know that someone who joined the Nazi party did murder the writer, supposedly after seeing the film," she said.

The entire festival has more than 60 screenings across 12 venues and special events like the annual FRESHFLIX Short Film Competition and a TV Binge Day, which will be held at the Brattle Theatre and feature a three episode "binge" of Israeli TV shows. Those shows are often considered the precursor to action shows in the US, she said.

Here's a list of the films set to play in Brookline:

Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me

Wednesday, Nov 7

7 p.m.

Throughout his legendary career, Sammy Davis, Jr. strove for the American Dream despite the odds of racial prejudice. When Davis converted to Judaism, he yoked his identity to yet another persecuted minority. Electrifying performance excerpts, never-before-seen photographs, and interviews with renowned performers paint a vivid picture of this extraordinary artist’s life in this award-winning documentary.

Sponsored by the Northeastern University College of Social Sciences and Humanities Jewish Studies Program and Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design Department of Music, Media and Screen Studies Program

The screening will be followed by a conversation with director Samuel D. Pollard and preceded by a live performance by Cara Campanelli and Alex Olsen.

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

Working Woman

Thursday, Nov. 8,

6:30 p.m.

Orna loves her new real estate job and quickly gets promoted. But work becomes unbearable as her boss (Menashe Noy, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem) begins to make inappropriate advances. With her husband struggling to keep his new restaurant afloat, Orna is the main breadwinner for their three children, and must now choose between her job and her sense of self-worth. Director Michal Aviad’s (Dimona Twist, BJFF 2017) beautifully shot film tells a poignant story that echoes loudly in the era of #MeToo.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with attorney Michal Gera Margaliot and Judith Rosenbaum, Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

Echo

Thursday, Nov. 8,

9 p.m.

After seeing a photo of his wife, Ella, with another man, Avner begins to suspect she is having an affair. He becomes a spy in his own home, secretly recording her telephone conversations and listening to them over and over. But while searching for one thing, he discovers another— the woman in the recordings is a stranger to him, and the more he tries to get to know his wife by listening to the tapes, the less he understands.

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

In Our Son’s Name

Friday, Nov. 9,

12 p.m.

When Phyllis (née Schafer) and Orlando Rodríguez’s son, Greg, was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, their world was shattered. But instead of seeking revenge, the couple began a journey of reconciliation that transformed their lives — beginning with Phyllis forming a deep friendship with the mother of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. From speaking out against war, to publicly opposing the death penalty for Moussaoui, to meeting with inmates at Sing Sing, Phyllis and Orlando seek a path that speaks to values they shared with Greg, getting to know their son, and each other, in new ways.

Followed by a conversation with Phyllis (née Schafer) Rodríguez, Orlando Rodríguez, and Julia Rodríguez moderated by Rabbi Barbara Penzner

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

Who Will Write Our History

Sunday, Nov. 11,

7 p.m.

In 1940, days after the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of community leaders called the Oyneg Shabes decided to collect pictures and testimonies, burying them before their deportations. This film, created by Roberta Grossman and Nancy Spielberg (the team behind Above and Beyond, BJFF 2014) brings the Oyneg Shabes archive to life, through interviews and rarely seen footage.

Screening followed by a conversation with director Roberta Grossman

Screening as part of the Cummings Social Justice Film Series

Sponsored by Marquis Jewelers, The Vilna Shul Boston's Center for Jewish Culture, and Yiddish Book Center

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

93 Queen

Monday, Nov. 12,

6:30 p.m.

Within the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Brooklyn, Rachel “Ruchie” Freier, a lawyer and mother of six, is revolutionizing the role of women in daily life by training them to work as EMTs—an alternative to Hatzolah, the all-male Jewish volunteer ambulance corps. Ruchie’s belief that Orthodox women deserve female EMTs drives her to overcome her community’s objections and to bring her vision to reality.

November 12 screening introduced by Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, Director, Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and Law, The Shulamit Reinharz Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and followed by a conversation with director Paula Eiselt

Sponsored by Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Co-presented by The Boston Women's Film Festival

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

Budapest Noir

Tuesday, Nov. 13, 8:45 p.m.

Thursday, Nov. 15, 1 p.m.

1936. Budapest. Zsigmond Gordon is a crime reporter cut from classic film noir cloth. Looking for answers after a recent murder, Gordon dives deep into the city’s dark underbelly—a shady world of pornographers, fixers, brothels, and powerful crime syndicates—and is led back to the highest echelons of power, where influencers are beginning to align themselves with Hitler. A politically charged tale of corruption and betrayal, this richly atmospheric murder mystery leaves us guessing until its surprising climax.

The November 15 screening is sponsored by Center Communities of Brookline and both screenings will be followed by a conversation with director Éva Gárdos.

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

The City Without Jews

Wednesday, Nov. 14,

6:30 p.m.

With live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis.

Jeff Rapsis is a composer and performer of live musical scores for silent film screenings.

Assumed to be lost for decades, this 1924 film was rediscovered in a Paris flea market in 2015. Eerily prescient about the Holocaust, the film was adapted from a satirical novel and begins with the election of an anti-Semitic chancellor who exiles all his city’s Jews. While the chancellor’s daughter is devastated to see her Jewish boyfriend go, most of the city enthusiastically supports the new law. But, with the Jews gone, the city’s economy declines, inflation becomes rampant, and cultural life disappears. The government must decide—save the city or stand by its anti-Semitic legislation?

Introduced by Dr. Marty Norman, The Sounds of Silents

Followed by a skype conversation with Dr. Lisa Silverman

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

The Hero

Wednesday, Nov. 14,

1 p.m.

Sara Silverstein just moved her family back to the Netherlands to spend time with her aging parents. But soon after their arrival, her family is targeted with strange, violent anti-Semitic incidents. Who is attacking them and why? Soon dark secrets from her father’s past and the horrors of WWII come to the surface. A chilling, original thriller based on a bestselling book and directed by the co-screenwriter of The Color Purple and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Screening as part of the Cummings Social Justice Film Series

Sponsored by Orchard Cove

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

In Her Footsteps

Tuesday, Nov. 13,

6:15 p.m.

After fleeing their Bedouin village, Rana’s parents moved just three miles away, to the bourgeois Jewish town of Omer. Now, Rana’s mother, facing terminal breast cancer, is determined to be buried in the town where she made her life and raised her children. The documentary follows her family as they try to fulfill their mother’s dying wish. Rana’s parents’ Arab traditions clash with their children’s Israeli upbringing, providing Rana with a lens through which she examines complications of identity and what it means to call a place home.

Followed by a conversation with director Rana Abu Fraiha, moderated by Lisa M. Lynch, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Brandeis University

Sponsored by the New Israel Fund

Co-presented by The Boston Women's Film Festival

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

To Dust

Thursday, Nov. 15,

9:30 p.m.

Shmuel (Geza Rohrig, Son of Saul, BJFF 2015), a Hasidic cantor in upstate New York, is struggling to make peace with the loss of his wife. After a series of disturbing dreams, he grows obsessed with how her body will decay and decides he must understand the decomposition process. He calls upon Albert (Matthew Broderick), a community college biology professor, to help him, and the two embark on a darkly comic, macabre misadventure. As their unlikely friendship grows ever more peculiar, this “odd couple” will stop at nothing to satiate their curiosity and, ultimately, to find Shmuel the peace he seeks.

November 13 screening followed by a conversation with Director Shawn Snyder

Co-presented by Independent Film Festival Boston

Click here for tickets, trailer and more info.

For full schedule, film and special event information visit www.bostonjfilm.org