Join us for a vibrant program of new independent films and rare archive treasures from around the world, with visiting filmmakers and scholars. Since 1976, The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) has rescued, restored, and exhibited films that document the diversity of Jewish life.

Schedule of Events

May 7, 2023

4:00 pm:

The Light Ahead

Directed by master of film noir Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour, Black Cat) on the eve of World War II, this 1939 Yiddish classic is revered as one of the greatest shtetl films. Set in the fictional village of Glupsk, near Odessa Ukraine, David Opatoshu (Exodus, Torn Curtain) and Helen Beverley (Green Fields) are luminous as Fishke and Hodel, an impoverished young couple who dream of a future free from the shtetl's poverty, corruption, and old-world prejudices. Both a romantic tale and a social critique, the film's Expressionist set design and cinematography highlight the film's prescient awareness of the darkness soon to devour European Jewry. For contemporary audiences the film is especially resonant in its depiction of superstition over science amidst a cholera outbreak. One of the most important films in The National Center for Jewish Film's archive collection, The Light Ahead (Fishke der Krumer) has been newly restored in 4K digital from NCJF's 35mm original materials.

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer | USA | 1939 | 94m | Yiddish with English subtitles

Jewish Life in Lwow

This rare 1939 portrait of the daily lives of Jews in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), home to a thriving Jewish community before World War II, is one of a handful of surviving films from Warsaw-based filmmakers Shaul Goskind and Yitzhak Goskind. Full of images of stylish women, thriving markets, parks, and promenades, this short documentary captures a prosperous world on the precipice of obliteration by the coming Nazi invasion.

Directors: Shaul Goskind & Yitzhak Goskind | Poland | 1939 |10m | Yiddish with English subtitles

6:45 pm: March '68

In this gripping love story set against the volatile backdrop of late-1960s Communist Warsaw, Hania, a vivacious theater student, and Janek a charming student and budding photographer, fall deeply in love. As the government crackdown on protesting students escalates, Hania undergoes a political awakening which includes acknowledging that her fellow Jewish citizens are being persecuted in a series of antisemitic purges conducted in response to the hate-fueled rhetoric of Poland's leader W?adys?aw Gomu?ka. Unsure if the political winds will abate or escalate, her family weighs emigration. Hania wants to stay with Janek but things spiral out of control, leading to a powerful climax set during the infamous events of March 1968. Warsaw-born Director Krzysztof Lang, drew inspiration from his own life in making this passionate and suspenseful film that lies at the collision of history and romance.

Director: Krzysztof Lang | Poland | 2022 | 122m | Polish with English subtitles

May 8, 2023

5:00 pm:

The Levys of Monticello

Thomas Jefferson started building Monticello in 1769 on the slave plantation he inherited from his father. Upon his death in 1826, his heirs sold the property to pay his debts. This is the little-known story of U.S. Naval officer Uriah Phillips Levy, a fifth-generation American Jew born in 1782 and admirer of Jefferson's dedication to religious freedom, and his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who rescued the property from bankruptcy and carefully preserved it for posterity. The Levy family would go on to own Monticello for nearly a century – far longer than Jefferson and his descendants. That the iconic Monticello was owned by Jews did not go unnoticed. Steve Pressman's award-winning film uncovers the legacy of one of America's oldest Jewish families while confronting the racism and antisemitism that are woven into our nation's history.

The Levys of Monticello was produced under the aegis of The National Center for Jewish Film, as were Pressman's previous documentaries 50 Children and Holy Silence.

Director: Steve Pressman | USA | 2022 | USA | 71m | English

Life Is All There Is

A gem from award-winning Boston filmmaker Ron Blau (Our Time in the Garden). This sensitive, inventive film about Blau's German-Jewish father's emigration to American in 1933 and subsequent challenges in the U.S. is told entirely through 8mm home movies his father shot in the 1930s.

Director: Ron Blau | USA | 2020 | 15m | English

7:30 pm:

Open Secret

Newlyweds Paul (John Ireland, Academy Award nominee for All the King's Men) and Nancy (Jane Randolph) stop in a small town to visit Paul's army buddy, Ed Stevens. Only Ed is missing, and no one seems eager to locate him. Paul is further perplexed by the white supremacist tracts he finds hidden in his pal's apartment. An undeveloped roll of film leads to a vandalized Jewish-owned camera store and a gang of American Nazis taking over the town. A low-budget, hard-hitting cousin to Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement, which also broached the taboo subject of antisemitism by name, Open Secret is audacious for its time, depicting postwar antisemitism in a working-class setting, a Jewish character physically fighting back against his aggressors, and illustrating how prejudice can easily coalesce into an all-American strain of fascism. Vienna-born John Reinhardt (High Tide, Chicago Calling) assuredly directs this crime drama written by Henry Blankfort, a screenwriter blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and Jewish film & TV writer Max Wilk. THE PULL-NO-PUNCH DRAMA OF MEN CHAINED TOGETHER BY HATE! Special thanks to our colleagues at the UCLA Film & Television Archive for use of their archival 35mm print.

Director: John Reinhardt | USA | 1948 | 68m | English

A Night at the Garden

In 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied in New York's Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism – an event largely forgotten from American history. Marshall Curry's Academy Award nominated film — which is made entirely from archival footage filmed that night — transports audiences to this chilling gathering and shines a light on the power of demagoguery and antisemitism in the United States.

Director: Marshall Curry | USA | 2017 | 7m | English

May 9, 2023

4:00 pm: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann held in an Israeli courtroom and broadcast around the globe, was a benchmark event in the historiography of the Holocaust, especially in Israel where the trial proved a watershed experience for survivors and citizens of the new Jewish state. Employing new video and broadcast technologies, the trial was also a milestone in media and journalism coverage. From the producers of Being Jewish in France and Einsatzgruppen, this absorbing, comprehensive documentary features detailed accounts of Eichmann's capture, the drama in the courtroom and behind the scenes, and reactions to the trial from around the world.

Director: Michaël Prazan | France | 2011 | 90m | English narration, Hebrew, German & French with English subtitles

7:00 pm: June Zero

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the mass murder of the Jews during World War II, is revisited in a gripping and surprising new vision from American filmmaker Jake Paltrow (De Palma, The Good Night). This Hebrew-language fiction drama tells its story from the intertwined perspectives of three largely unrelated figures connected to the trial: Eichmann's Jewish Moroccan personal prison guard; a 13-year-old Jewish Libyan immigrant tapped for a top-secret assignment; and an Israeli police officer and Holocaust survivor working for Bureau 06, the special unit formed to investigate Eichmann. The latter character is based on Michael Goldman-Gilad, personal aid to Gideon Hausner, head of the prosecution. Shot largely on 16mm film, which gives the film an authentic early 1960s feel, Paltrow's moving and vividly textured work uses these disparate but cohesive points of view to explore anew one of the benchmark events in Jewish and Israeli history. Winner of the best film jury prize at the 2023 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.

Director: Jake Paltrow | Israel/USA | 2022 | 105m | Hebrew with English subtitles

May 10, 2023

4:30 pm: Hollywood & WWII

During WWII, the U.S. government enlisted Hollywood's best talent to rally the troops, galvanize the public, and thwart Hitler's sophisticated propaganda machine. This fascinating new documentary focuses on the wartime films of five acclaimed Hollywood directors, three of whom were Jewish émigrés. William Wyler (Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives), Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, It's a Wonderful Life), George Stevens (A Place in the Sun, Giant), and Anatole Litvak (Confessions of Nazi Spy) understood the power of cinema and its capacity to effectively reach the masses. Working for the US Office of War Information, Capra and Litvak created the influential film series Why We Fight, others documented the ground war and aerial battles from the front lines in Germany and Italy, and later, the liberation of the concentration camps. Jascha Hannover's meticulously crafted film is chock full of rare film clips and interviews with an a-list cast of discussants, including Brandeis University film historian Tom Doherty.

Director: Jascha Hannover | Germany | 2019 | 90m | English

7:15 pm: SHTTL

One of the most spellbinding films of the year, Shttl beautifully captures the expansive, multi-character lives and loves of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish village in the Ukraine on the Polish border. Mendele, who has been living a secular life in Kiev, finds himself back in the familiar and comforting world of his shtetl, a vibrant place, brimming with the romance, politics, and intrigue of everyday life, and simmering tensions between tradition and modernity. Set a day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, this is a world on the precipice of disaster, and the film unspools with our knowledge of the looming terror and does not flinch in depicting the destruction and loss. Writer-director Ady Walter's debut masterpiece (filmed outside of Kyiv before the present war in Ukraine) was audaciously captured in one single take. The remarkable cast is led by Moshe Lobel (Broadway's Yiddish revival of Fiddler on the Roof) and consummate character actor Saul Rubinek (Hunters, Unforgiven) who is himself fluent in Yiddish and the son of holocaust survivors (See So Many Miracles distributed by NCJF).

Director: Ady Walter | Ukraine/France | 2022 | 114m | Yiddish and Ukrainian with English subtitles

May 14, 2023

4:00 pm: 1341 Frames of Love and War

Acclaimed Israeli photojournalist Micha Bar-Am, who was also the New York Times Middle East photographer from 1968-1992, allowed filmmaker Ran Tal rare and total access to his vast archive of a half million photos and negatives. The images, many of which are deeply etched in Israeli collective memory, cover the years of Israeli statehood, in its most beautiful and bleakest moments. Composed entirely of Bar-Am's images, along with audio commentary from the artist and his family, 1341 Frames provides an intimate portrait of an artist, as well as a meditation on memory, violence, beauty, and the price of documenting atrocities and war.

Ran Tal (Children of the Sun and The Museum, both presented by NCJF) is one of the world's leading documentarians. So stunning was his innovative and rigorous embrace of Bar-Am's photos, that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, mounted the film as a multi-channel video installation. 1341 Frames premiered at the Berlinale and Telluride film festivals and won directing and editing awards at DocAviv.

Director: Ran Tal | Israel | 2022 | 90m | Hebrew with English subtitles

6:30 pm: Where Life Begins

In this beautifully rendered and calibrated romantic drama, Esther Zelnik (Lou de Laâge, The Innocents) arrives with her ultra-orthodox French family from Aix-les-Bains for their annual stay at an idyllic seaside Calabrian farm at the toe of Italy's boot, to help with the harvest of the etrogim (kosher lemons) used for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. But while everyone carries on with their routines, Esther is in inner turmoil, questioning her faith, chafing at the bonds of her religious upbringing, and resentful of her imminent arranged marriage. When she feels a growing attraction for the farm's owner, Elio De Angelis (played by Italian heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio), an artist recently returned from Rome after his father's death, she dares to imagine a different, potentially happier path for herself. In subtle but profound ways, the two form a bond that may alter their futures. The directorial debut of veteran French actor Stéphane Freiss (Call My Agent!).

Director: Stéphane Freiss | France/Italy | 2022 | 100m | Italian and French with English subtitles

May 21, 2023

11:00 am: Schächten-A Retribution

In Vienna in the 1960s, Victor (Jeff Wilbusch) a young Jewish businessman bears witness to an unthinkable miscarriage of justice: the acquittal of the Nazi concentration camp commandant who murdered his mother, sister, and grandparents when he was a child. Reeling from the legal system's failure to mete out punishment and acknowledge historical facts, and less sanguine about the corrosive antisemitism and historical whitewashing of his Austrian countrymen, Victor resolves to take the law into his own hands. This dynamic, lavishly mounted historical drama about the scars of war and the road to revenge includes the rare depiction of the lives of Austrian Jews in the years following World War II.

Director: Thomas Roth | Austria | 2022 | 110m | German with English subtitles

May 23, 2023

7:00 pm: A Pocketful of Miracles

Beloved (Berlin-born) filmmaker Aviva Kempner, director of Rosenwald, Yoo-hoo Mrs. Goldberg, and The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, turns her storytelling chops towards her own family's story of survival, resilience and creativity. Kempner's mother Hanka (Helen) and her uncle Dudek (David) Ciesla enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Sosnowiec, Poland, until the Nazi invasion and their separation. This moving documentary tells of their harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, their against-the-odds reunion, and their recommitment to life and to each other in the DP camps. Howard Kempner, a Lithuanian-born Jewish émigré turned US Army journalist, makes a dramatic post-war entry in the narrative, and the romance between Howard and Helen unfolds like a Hollywood love story set against the rubble of 1945 Berlin. Ten months later, our future documentarian Aviva was born and declared the “first Jewish-American born in Berlin.” After immigrating to the US, Helen and David remained close, and both elected never to tell their children or spouses about their wartime experiences. Only now are their stories being told.

Director: Aviva Kempner | USA | 2023 | 106m | English

Date: May 7-23, 2023

Location:
Coolidge Corner Theatre,
290 Harvard Street,
Brookline, MA 02446.

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