Virtual screening

“Tired of being pushed around, a disenfranchised Sephardic father, whose daughter is expelled from a school for her ethnicity, launches the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party.”
When Yakov Cohen’s daughter is expelled from school for ethnic reasons, he decides to fight back. It’s 1983, and Yakov, a printer in Jerusalem, is just a regular guy. He has no knowledge of politics, no money, no connections, and no political experience. But he does have the will and the passion to take action, and a belief that he and other Sephardic Jews should be able to hold their heads up high. Yakov brings two friends along, and together they start the first ethnic political group in Jerusalem, with an operation characteristic of the people they represent: not the suit-wearing types, but rather the people working their way up from the bottom. Their operation is informal, full of love for their fellow man, and animated by a sense of humor and a great deal of rage.

Film: 99 minutes

Director: Eliran Malka

Production country: Israel

Year: 2018

A comedy about how a mishap at a Jerusalem synagogue causes a major rift in a devout community in Jerusalem.”
When the women’s balcony in a small Jerusalem synagogue collapses, leaving the rabbi’s wife in a coma and the rabbi in shock, the congregation falls into crisis. A charismatic Hasidic rabbi appears to be a savior after the accident, but he slowly starts pushing his fundamentalist ways among the Modern Orthodox congregants. The changes he tries to impose test the women’s friendships and create a rift between the community’s women and men in this rousing tale about women speaking truth to patriarchal power.

Film: 96 minutes

Directors: Shlomit Nehama and Emil Ben-Shimon

Production country: Israel

Year: 2016

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

England, 1933. After running away from home, Kitty and her brother David cheer themselves up by playing soldiers. But their game takes an unexpected turn when they discover a suspicious German hiding in a clifftop hut. The man is a Jewish refugee by the name of Albert Einstein.

Film: 18 minutes

Director: Luke Rodgers

Production country: UK

Year: 2019

“Exhilarating… a masterful look at the Israel Museum, which goes much deeper than a conventional documentary.” (The Jerusalem Post)
Renowned Israeli director Ran Tal takes a behind-the-scenes look at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem over a period of 18 months. This documentary goes inside the museum to observe its daily life, noting how it brings together a colorful cast of characters—the American museum director, The Jerusalemite curator, the Haredi kashrut inspector, custodians, artists, a singing security guard, tour guides, volunteers, soldiers, art lovers and others—from all over Jerusalem, Israel, and the world. We are also given insight into the Museum’s attempts to incorporate Palestinian representation into its collection. Tal’s elegantly shot film shows us not only a microcosm of Israeli society, but also how this institution seeks to both reflect and mold Israeli history and culture.
FAMILY FRIENDLY

Film: 74 minutes

Director: Ran Tal

Production country: Israel

Year: 2017

ON THE MAP combines the pulse-pounding action of a high-stakes thriller with an incendiary political backdrop to deliver a film that will mesmerize basketball fans and captures the spirit of a nation triumphant against all odds.”
This film recounts how an underdog Israeli basketball team prevailed over a series of European basketball powers. This against-all-odds story of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s 1977 European Championship took place at a time when the Middle East was still reeling from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1972 Olympic massacre at Munich, and the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv. Through the lens of sports, ON THE MAP presents a story of how one team captured the heart of a nation amidst domestic turmoil and the global machinations of the Cold War. Told through the eyes of six American basketball players who joined Maccabi and helped the club defeat top teams from Spain, Italy and the Soviet Union, the film features interviews with basketball icon Bill Walton and former NBA Commissioner David Stern.

Film: 85 minutes

Director: Dani Menkin

Production countries: Israel, USA

Year: 2016