Virtual screening

A Latvian tragicomedy about a young artist who bears witness to the dramatic political upheavals of the Word War II era. As brutal regimes come and go, his country, his village, his people, and even his heart are swept up in the inexorable currents of history. The film shows the ultimate triumph of the human spirit in the face of systematic, institutional inhumanity. It tells the story through the eyes of a somewhat naive, yet inherently wise soul—a lowly sign-painter/artist. The sweeping backdrop of the complex history of serial totalitarian occupation makes the story topical today.
MATURE THEMES, NUDITY

Film: 114 minutes

Director: Viesturs Kairišs

Production countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic

Year: 2020

Marvell Ginsburg’s renowned children’s book has been educating young children about the Holocaust for generations, telling the true story of the rescue and restoration of a small Torah from Czechoslovakia. This is now an animated film, narrated by Ed Asner, that brings illustrator Martin Lemel- man’s rich artwork to life and allows this story of redemption to reach a much broader audience.

Film: 21 minutes

Director: Marc Bennett

Production countries: USA

Year: 2019

APFF@AJFF:
In the autumn of 1943, a young Jew named Emanuel Blatt, a refugee from a nearby ghetto, appears at a Polish monastery asking for help. Nazis are punishing Poles with death for hiding Jews. An SS squadron-leader in charge of a death squad comes to the monastery. The Day of Wrath is a full-of-tension blend of war thriller and morality play. Written by Polish writer of Jewish origin, Roman Brandstatter, the Holocaust and hope for survival are the main themes of this movie.
MATURE LANGUAGE

Film: 84 minutes

Director: Jacek Raginis-Królikiewicz

Production country: Poland

Year: 2019

Community partner:

Three children from the West Bank are smuggled into Israel, arriving at the doorstep of George and Rita’s house in Jaffa. Their mother is dead, and their father has been sentenced to life imprisonment. As Israeli Palestinians, George is afraid that hiding illegal aliens will endanger Rita and himself, while Rita believes the arrival of these children could give meaning to her life. Nearby, a foreign film is being shot. Jerry, an English director, is making a movie about his parents’ love affair in 1947, when they served in the British army in Palestine. George is invited to play a part in the film. When the two stories intertwine, tensions erupt.
MATURE LANGUAGE, DRUG USE

Film: 96 minutes

Director: Ram Loevy

Production country: Israel

Year: 2019

A screen adaptation of Jerzy Ficowski’s poem under the same title from the volume ”Reading of Ashes” that is devoted to the subject of the Holocaust and World War II. The poetry volume was published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Film: 13 minutes

Director: Gabi Bania

Production country: Poland

Year: 2020

Nazi major Karl Plagge arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, as part of the occupation force during WWII. With the SS hellbent on murdering every Jewish man, woman and child, Plagge decided to save Jews rather than murder them. On the surface, he was commandant of the HKP forced labor camp; in reality, he was sheltering hundreds of Jewish families. By the end, many were saved, but many more were executed by the SS and buried in a mass grave. With the government about to tear down the former HKP site, a group of scientists arrives to locate the hiding places of those who were saved and identify the mass grave of the murdered. The film tracks the stories of a child survivor of the camp, an American physician whose mother was saved by Plagge, and Plagge himself.
MATURE LANGUAGE

Film: 52 minutes

Directors: Ric Esther Bienstock, Yaron Niski

Production countries: Canada, Israel

Year: 2019

“A road trip focusing on two old men coming to grips with memories of their parents. Extraordinary scenes from the countries they travel through.”
An 80-year-old translator, Ali Ungár, discovers a book by a former SS officer recounting his war experiences in Slovakia. Ali realizes that one chapter may well describe his own parents’ execution. Armed with a pistol, he heads for Vienna to find that SS man to take revenge; instead Ali finds the man’s 70-year-old son, Georg, a retired teacher. Georg has always avoided his father, but the translator’s visit arouses his curiosity, and he invites Ali on a trip through Slovakia, embarking on a bittersweet journey to meet surviving witnesses of the wartime tragedy. But while Georg is basically out to have a good time, Ali is hoping to find out how his parents died. Gradually, these two very different men begin to warm to each other, and together they discover a country eager to forget its past. Oscillating between comedy and tragedy, this road trip focuses on two old men weighed down by the unresolved conflicts that have plagued their lives who are now trying to free themselves from this oppressive burden.
MATURE LANGUAGE, MATURE THEMES

Film: 114 minutes

Director: Martin Šulík

Production countries: Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria

Year: 2018

Having spent a lifetime concealing his heritage, an aging German Holocaust survivor tries to come to terms with his past. Born Menachem Teitelbaum, Marcus Schwarz (German Academy Award winner Mario Adorf) escaped Auschwitz with his life only to exterminate his Jewishness. Without family, a synagogue, or a single Jewish friend, the hardened old man has so effectively created a new identity that, when faced with his own mortality, the rabbis refuse his appeal to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Cologne. Determined to return to his birthplace and establish his ancestry, Marcus enlists the help of Gül (Katharina Derr), a brash, chain-smoking Turkish woman with a troubled history of her own. The unlikely duo sets out on a road trip to a small village on the Hungarian-Romanian border, a journey that will irrevocably change them both.

Film: 93 minutes

Director: Pierre-Henry Salfati

Production countries: Germany, Switzerland, France

Year: 2016

The true story of Sara Goralnik, a 12- year-old Polish Jew whose entire family was killed by the Nazis in 1942. A powerful saga of courage and compassion—After a grueling escape to the Ukrainian countryside, Sara steals her Christian best friend’s identity and finds refuge looking after the children of a farmer and his young wife. Inadvertently stumbling across a dark secret behind her employer’s marriage, her own predicament becomes more precarious, compounding the greatest secret she must protect: her own identity.
MATURE LANGUAGE, NUDITY, SOME INTENSE SCENES, SEXUAL CONTENT

Film: 111 minutes

Director: Steven Oritt

Production country:  USA

Year: 2019

Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarves in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one.

Film: 112 minutes

Director: Avi Nesher

Production country: Israel

Year: 2012