Boys of Terezin
Earlier this year, The Boy Choir of Seattle USA premiered a new oratorio telling the story the Jewish lads of Terezin House 1, who created Vedem, the covert weekly “newspaper” hand-made between 1942-1944, to keep up their more...
Bright Night
Placing her late father’s stethoscope to a window, Nissan listens for the heartbeat of her world, the one in which her successful father was a departmental head and healer. On his Jahrzeit she is eager to venerate his memory. But more...
Chametz
Ayala has stuff to deal with: not just studying in her orthodox girls-only boarding school, not just adolescence, not just having to go home to help her widowed mum with cleaning for Passover. Back home from school, this ingenue finds more...
Close Distance
As a student director, Richard Vilensky and his crew compressed the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Israel and the Palestinian Territories by playing out an episode in the suburbs of Sydney. What are guilt, right and justice? more...
Comrade Goldberg
June 12, 1964, Pretoria, South Africa: Nelson Mandela and seven others await their verdict in the Rivonia Trial for sabotage. The only white man is a Jewish revolutionary, Terrorist to the whites, Freiheitskampfer - Freedom Fighter to more...
Crime after Crime
A California real estate lawyer, Joshua Safran prays the daily blessing matir asurim, which asks for the release of captives. Safran could not have known that when filmmaker Yoav Potash took him into USA’s largest women’s more...
Father
The Jewish Film Festival returns Father to the screen following its restoration in the Deluxe/ Kodak collection of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Susanne Haydon – who will be a guest at our screenings - worked on more...
The Fire Within
When Jewish businessmen followed the Amazon, they began families with native women. A century later, a scholar studying their history aroused new awareness of their Sefardi origins and captured the heart of one of those Iquitos more...
Heart of Auschwitz
On December 12th 1944, a tiny birthday gift appeared at Fania's workbench at the Krupp munitions factory in Auschwitz and - if she is to be believed - she concealed it, carried it with her on the death march and brought it with her more...
In Bed at 10.00 pm
Rachel is a librarian; she knows all about how language works. When her lover’s mobile phone rings twice during a sleep over in her flat, he informs her of its meaning. His wife needs him, it is urgent and overrides their more...
In Heaven Underground
Since 1989, families from all over the world have made pilgrimages to find their ancestors among Berlin’s Weissensee Cemetery’s 115,000 Jewish graves. Melbourne families, including one Festival Patron and Director, have been more...
Joanna
Save one life and you save the world. Catholic Joanna (Urszula Grabowska) prays for her husband. After a Nazi roundup, she finds 8 year old Roza hiding in her church. Joanna’s parents, sister, workmates and neighbours cannot be more...
La Camara Oscura
When their baby girl is born on the gangplank of her parents’ migration vessel, rather than on terra firma, she can’t be registered as Argentinean – a bad omen for life in the “new country”. Thus begins the more...
Lea & Daria (Lea i Darija)
True stories don’t always make good movies, but in the hands of Branko and Lidija Ivanda this recreation of childhood rivalry is an artistic blend of feel good dance flick and edge-of-the-seat nail biter. The undisputed star of the more...
Lenin In October
Grisha dreams of opening a restaurant and uses his father and son to taste his recipes. When a legacy arrives from Russia to enable him to realize that dream, he must fulfill one critical condition before the restaurant can open. more...
Lia
The woman who presides over the Israeli Film Archive and International Film Festival, who had Mayor Teddy Kolek give the land for the Jerusalem Cinematheque and who received the Berlinale Camera Award in 2011 for her “contribution more...
Nicky's Family
At the time of going to press, Nicholas Winton, creator of the Czech Kindertransporte was 102. In 1939 he ordered stationery and rubber stamps in the name of The British Committee for Refugees In Chechoslovakia - Children’s more...
No 4 Street of Our Lady
Francisca Halamajowa was banished from Sokal, Poland, when unmasked for her risk taking in hiding Jewish families. As urvivors and their children return to the actual pig-sty hideaway with her daughters and grand-daughters, spine more...
Playoff
Eran Riklis’s (Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, Human Resources Manger) story of Ralph Klein, top Maccabi Tel Aviv basket ball star and 70’s coach of Israel’s team who died in 2008, is recreated for the screen through the more...
Precious Life
Shlomi Eldar has seen it all as an Israeli war zone correspondent. Given the opportunity to capture a more life-affirming story, he turned his camera to a documentary on the precious life of a baby from Gaza who will die without complex more...
Remembrance
Anna Justice (Max Minsky and Me) captures survival, love, courage and their consequences in a “must see” adaptation of this true story.
Hannah Levine, her husband David and daughter have a comfortable life in 1970s
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Reuniting the Rubins
Did you hear about Clarity the Buddhist, Danny (James Callis) the atheist, Andie (Rhona Mitra) the social activist and Yona the rabbi who all go home for Pesach? It’s never going to happen!!
Using many tried and tested
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Salsa Tel Aviv
Green Card Israel? Tequila vs grape juice? Salsa vs Jewish family life? Will Yoni marry chilly Dafna or spicy Vicky?
Mexican Vicky, warm and vivacious, passes through immigration wearing a nun’s habit under the
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Tony Curtis - Driven to Stardom
If he’d had a bar Mitzvah, Bernie Schwartz’s speech might well have included “Thank you to my crazy parents for putting on this function. I just want you to know that my ambition is to grow up to be an internationally more...
Toy Soldier
On the surface this is a deliberately generic tale of the battles that soldiers continue to carry after their active duty is done. Retreat to France is not necessarily the cure for what ails you. But something lurks in Magnus’s more...
Trace
Su Goldfish’s professional interest and personal testimony catch the final glimpse that her escaping father photographed and captures it once again. The daughter traces the photograph, superimposing hers on his original. By making more...
The Tribe
There are many kinds of Jews and Judaism. Tiffany Shlain chronicles almost as many as there were different kinds of Barbies (created by Jewish toy genius Ruth Handler) in the 18 (Chai) minutes which are an assault on lots that you know more...
Wrong Side of the Bus
Sidney Block graduated medical school in Cape Town, went to Israel where he met and then married an Aussie girl and settled in Melbourne. Professor Block has been responsible for the training of psychiatry students for decades and has more...
Wunderkinder
Ukraine 1941: in an uneasy alliance, Max Reich and his wife Helga arrange for Jewish children Abrascha, Larissa and their teacher Irina to provide music lessons for their own daughter Hanna. The communists hate the German Reichs and the more...
