Virtual screening

”Can we leave past sins behind? Our sages say we can.” Such are the opening lines that introduce this moving story about the relationship between a dedicated yeshiva student, Yochai, and terminally-ill 18-year-old Ayelet. When Ayelet is diagnosed with advanced bone cancer, she stubbornly refuses treatment. Her desperate father asks Yochai to become her spiritual mentor with the hope that he can persuade her to seek medical help. Ayelet is amused by what she perceives as Yochai”s awkward innocence but fascinated by his attempts to forge a deep relationship with God. Yochai, for his part, is mesmerized by Ayelet”s beauty and grace and is totally overwhelmed by being in such close proximity to a woman for the first time in his life. Finding himself deeply attracted to Ayelet, Yochai faces the most difficult decision of his life–whether to leave the yeshiva or abandon his newfound love.

Film: 62 minutes

Director: Amichai Greenberg

Production country: Israel

Year: 2015

In this gentle, beautifully rendered historical family drama, a German- Jewish girl takes her first steps into adulthood, as world events intrude on her happy, carefree existence. Nine-year-old Anna is too busy with schoolwork and friends to notice Hitler’s face glaring from posters plastered all over 1933 Berlin. But when her father suddenly vanishes, and the family is secretly hurried out of Germany, Anna begins to understand life will never be the same. What follows is a courageous adventure full of fear and uncertainty, as Anna and her family navigate unfamiliar lands and cope with the challenges of being refugees. Oscar-winning filmmaker Caroline Link directs this adaptation of Judith Kerr’s semiautobiographical bestselling children’s novel.
FAMILY FRIENDLY

Film: 119 minutes

Director: Caroline Link

Production countries: Germany, Switzerland

Year: 2019

Martin Goldsmith never knew what happened to his parents before they escaped from Germany in 1941. Over a weekend, he confronts his father, and we are brought back to the complex and confusing 1930s. His parents, talented musicians, are only able to perform as members of the Jewish Cultural Federation, an extraordinary artistic organization fully controlled by the Reich Chamber of Culture. Featuring Bruno Ganz as Goldsmith’s father in his final performance, this film to all intents and purposes seems like a documentary but is in fact a masterful recreation of Goldsmith’s book ”The Inextinguishable Symphony.”
MATURE LANGUAGE

Orna is the mother of three young children with a husband struggling to start his own restaurant. To help support her family, Orna returns to the workplace, landing a job with a former army superior, Benny, who is now a successful real estate developer. While Orna embraces her new position and tries to balance its demands with her home life, she begins to experience escalating sexual harassment from her boss. Her rapid rise through the ranks and her increasing financial success seem to parallel a pattern of predatory behavior which brings her career and marital relationship to the brink.
MATURE THEMES, NUDITY, GRAPHIC VIOLENCE

Film: 93 minutes

Director: Michal Aviad

Production country: Israel

Year: 2018

PORTRAYAL follows Roman Lapshin across three continents and five nations as he puts together the pieces of a mysterious puzzle and comes to terms with a family legacy and his own personal journey of restoration, growth and healing.

Since he was a child, Roman has been haunted by a secret that his late grandfather revealed to him when he was only 12 years old. A personal disclosure regarding the mysterious and troubling origins of thousands of pieces of missing artwork his grandfather had painted over his lifetime. Roman is convinced that he alone must investigate and expose the murky fate of this art to redeem his grandfather’s name and artistic legacy. But finding the paintings will mean going against the wishes of his entire family—who have been guarding the secret all along. It also means confronting the notorious and powerful man at the center of the mystery, whom Roman believes exploited his grandfather when he was a desperate, recent immigrant to a new country.
MATURE LANGUAGE, SOME INTENSE IMAGES

Film: 96 minutes

Director: Billie Mintz

Production country: Canada

Year: 2020

A drama that explores the religious-secular divide in a family trying to mend broken relationships.”
Anat Abadi, a bright and intense young woman, long part of Tel Aviv’s wild club scene, has found God. Renouncing promiscuity, pork, and smartphones for a life of solemn devotion, she moves to Jerusalem, enrolls in an ultra-orthodox seminary, and gets engaged to a charismatic musician who’s also recently found religion. Complications arise when Abadi’s family tries to lure their willful daughter away from Orthodox Judaism and schemes to foil her upcoming nuptials. Amid rising tensions and shifting alliances, no one has a monopoly on virtue, as multi-layered plots converge with unexpected consequences. Sensitively exploring the religious-secular divide, this universal tale of broken relationships and forgiveness masterfully weaves its many threads with poignant, gently humorous performances by a stellar cast.
MATURE LANGUAGE

Film: 112 minutes

Director: Avi Nesher

Production country: Israel

Year: 2018

The rags-to-riches story of Sophie Tucker, an iconic superstar who ruled the worlds of vaudeville, Broadway, radio, television, and Hollywood throughout the 20th century.
Before Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Bette Midler, Marilyn Monroe, and Mae West, Sophie Tucker was the first woman to infatuate her audiences with a bold, bawdy, and brassy style unlike any other. Using all of ”The Last of the Red Hot Mamas” 400-plus recently rediscovered personal scrapbooks, authors Susan and Lloyd Ecker take you on their seven-year journey retracing Tucker”s sixty-year career in show business.

Film: 96 minutes

Director: William Gazecki

Production country: USA

Year: 2015

Pirate Captain Toledano interrogates a stowaway, a refugee from the Spanish Inquisition. The lad wants to become a pirate to plunder Spanish ships. The Captain must decide whether to make the stowaway a pirate, or to make him walk the plank.

Film: 10 minutes

Director: Arnon Z. Shorr

Production country: USA

Year: 2017

Based on the Philip Roth novel. A famous American writer accepts a quest from a Czech emigrant to bring him back unique Yiddish manuscripts from communist Czechoslovakia. The writer accepts not only a dangerous journey to Prague, where he is watched at every step by communist secret police, but he also needs to face the emigrant’s flamboyant and wild wife. She is in possession of the manuscripts and very angry at her husband, as he left with his mistress for the US. The wife will not surrender the manuscripts easily.
MATURE THEMES, MATURE LANGUAGE, NUDITY, STRONG SEXUAL CONTENT

Film: 112 minutes

Director: Irena Pavlásková

Production countries: Czech Republic, Slovakia

Year: 2019

Ibrahim Yassin was born in a small village in Lebanon and was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps as a farmer and shepherd, but fate had something else in store. As the course of his life turns against him, death becomes his only wish. But just when it seems as if the story’s over, a new one begins that sounds like a work of suspense fiction, placing Yassin at the heart of some of the most daring, dangerous, and secret operations Israel attempted in Lebanon in the 1980s and ’90s.
GRAPHIC VIOLENCE

Film: 64 minutes

Director: Itamar Chen

Production country: Israel

Year: 2019