Almost half the players on the Israeli National Soccer Team are Muslim, including the captain. The team’s diverse group of players causes controversy, especially during an important European tournament, most of it provoked by racist fans and the media. The players have their loyalty questioned by all sides while trying to guide Israel’s national team through the year’s biggest international challenge.
Aharon has devoted his life to raising his son Uri. They live together in a gentle routine, away from the real world. But Uri is autistic, and now as a young adult it might be time for him to live in a specialized home. While on their way to the institution, Aharon decides to run away with his son and hits the road, knowing that Uri is not ready for this separation. Or is it, in fact, his father who is not ready?
In 1996, NASA astronaut Dr. Jeff Hoffman brought a small Torah scroll on board Space Shuttle Columbia. On Shabbat, while orbiting Earth, he read from the book of Genesis, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth.” This is a story about inspiration, communities, and a man’s journey. A story of how family, educators, scientific and religious communities achieve great things and bring our identity to new realms.
At the beginning of the 20th century, an epidemic decimated the dwellers of a small Jewish village. Their healer, Absalom, cannot do anything about it, science is at a cul-de-sac. When the half-orphaned Rifka also catches the disease, the villagers suddenly feel they have to do something for the child and for themselves. They turn towards faith and God for help. Can faith help? Is it possible to deviate from dogmas, and bargain with the Creator, and is the Creator willing to bargain with them? Brief nudity.
Length: 17 minutes
Cast: Dorka Merenyi, Mari Nagy, György Gazsó, Péter Scherer, Gábor Krausz, Kata Kuna
The year 5781 is off to a rough start for Xander Hazlewood, as his mother and the family Rabbi have some news that won’t make Xander’s Shabbat challah go down very well.
A picture taken in 1919 shows the family of Kopel Gringras. He was a renowned photographer from Kielce. He operated the ”Foto Moderne” atelier, in which he took pictures of people from the area unMl the beginning of the Second World War. Kopel Gringras did not survive the Holocaust. He perished in Treblinka, along with his wife and nearly all of his children. The surviving copy of the Gringras family portrait is blurry, damaged, and out of focus. Roman Gringras, Kopel’s grandson, now living in Paris, enlists the help of his sister from Warsaw and cousin from Israel to find the original photograph in order to get to see the faces of his ancestors clearly.
We meet Ed Stein, an American Jewish man on a traumatic day in his life. He has received a letter from a tormentor from his past, a neo-Nazi bully named John Bauer who made his life hell when he was a teenager. Mr. Bauer is looking to make amends with his past. Ed Stein has never properly dealt with these issues and though long buried, still haunt him to this day.
Adult language.
Length: 12 minutes
Cast: Mark Schrier, Rodrigo Ternevoy, Joel Farrell
‘I want to make a film about women’ is a speculative documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women. The new Soviet Union of the 1920s championed equality for women and great innovation in the creative arts. Until it didn”t. Looking back at that time, history remembers the men who were celebrated and then shut down. But women were there, too, and they were influential, powerful and brilliant. ‘I want to make a film about women’ gazes in to a creative communal kitchen and watches these women transform it into a workshop, then a stage set, then a film, all the while juggling noisy men and the wolves of history. It imagines what the revolutionary women artists of the 1920s said, what they did, and what they might have created had it not been for Stalin”s suppression.
Length: 12 minutes
Cast: Victoria Haralabidou, Liliya May, Inga Romantsova, Violette Ayad, Ever Sliter, Nadia Zwecker, Tug Dumbly and Richard James Allen
July 2014. Israel is at war in Gaza. Uri, an Israeli soldier, is shot and wounded. At the hospital, he is welcomed as a hero. Between treatments and visits from high-profile generals and celebrities, Uri and his family reckon with his new status. An insider’s look at how war as a state-of-mind is shaping Israeli society.
Ladino, the old Sephardic Jewish language, is in great danger of being extinct. In Serbia, there are only two surviving native speakers: two old ladies. They fight to save their language.
