Menemsha Films
2) Nora's will
Summary
When Nora dies before Passover, her ex-husband Jose is forced to stay with her body until she can be put to rest. Jose soon realizes that he is a part of Nora's plan to bring the family back together for one last Passover feast. Jose reexamines their relationship and their love for each other.
3) Mish Mish
Summary
In a basement near Paris a treasure-trove of Egyptian animated films has been found. The films show the work of the Arab world’s pioneers in this genre, the Frenkel brothers: three exceptional young film-makers, creators of Mish-Mish Effendi, the Mickey Mouse of the entire region, which disappeared from Egyptian screens when the State of Israel was created. Through their animated images, we uncover the history of the Frenkel family, marked by exile,...
Summary
Seeking safety and asylum, some 60,000 Africans have fled to Israel over the past decade and a half. The country, founded as a haven for persecuted Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, has no policy, infrastructure or political will to handle this wave of migrants. AFRICAN EXODUS explores Israel's other refugee crisis.
Summary
Since 1925 the Streit’s matzo factory has sat in a low-slung tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. While other matzo companies have modernized, Streit’s remained a piece of living history, churning out 40 percent of the nation’s unleavened bread on pre-War machinery as old as the factory itself. In a neighborhood where the Jewish immigrants long ago moved on, in a nation where progress and profits trump all else, where manufacturing...
Summary
In this documentary, survivors from World War II tell their stories as they view themselves on an archive reel shot on April 28, 1945, the day they were liberated from the concentration camps. In the archive film they are anonymous faces in large crowds of refugees. But they all have a name. And they all have a story to tell. Stories about escape, survival and starting life again. Winner of Best Political Film at the **Hamburg Film Festival**.
Summary
A film about truth, lies and how a dishonest man can rise to power. Ruth Beckermann documents the process of uncovering former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past. It shows the swift succession of new allegations by the World Jewish Congress during his Austrian presidential campaign, the denial by the Austrian political class, the outbreak of anti-Semitism and patriotism, which finally led to his election. Created from international...
Summary
Ordered in April 1945 by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS FACTUAL SURVEY is an official documentary about the atrocities committed at concentration camps under Nazi leadership. Producer Sidney Bernstein assembled a team at the Ministry of Information that included editors Stewart McAllister and Peter Tanner, writers Colin Wills and Richard Crossman; and Alfred Hitchcock who gave directorial advice. A...
10) The Museum
Summary
The Museum is a film that seeks to explore the Israeli soul through the galleries, storerooms and visitors of the Israel Museum, Israel's most important cultural institution. With a trenchant, ironic eye THE MUSEUM follows the visitors, observes the observers, listens to the speakers and descends to the storerooms, labs and conference rooms. The American museum director, the singing security guard, the Jerusalemite curator, the Haredi kashrut inspector,...
11) Sacred Sperm
Summary
An eye-opening documentary explaining the concept of sacred sperm within the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community which considers new life pure if born of “sacred sperm” and the spilling of sperm murder. In this documentary Director/Narrator Or Yashar shares his journey as he tries to fully understand the concept and come to terms with how to raise his son in good faith. This sensitive film also explores the difficulties worshippers face, and...
Summary
THEY AIN'T READY FOR ME is the story of Tamar Manasseh, the African American rabbinical student who is leading the fight against senseless killings on the south side of Chicago. The film explores the challenges and motivations of this fearless community leader as she works to prevent more people from being killed by gun violence. Tamar's complex identity and magnetic personality combine to make her a force to be reckoned with, and she hasn't even...
13) Belzec
Summary
Although it was in full operation for less than one-year, BELZEC was a very efficiently run Concentration Camp were over 600,000 Jews were slaughtered. As the Russian army was drawing closer and closer to the camp, the Nazi dismantled Belzec and eradicated virtually all the evidence that the camp ever existed. This documentary tells the story of Belzec and reminds the world "never forget". Official Selection at the **Venice Film Festival**.
Summary
Through a combination of rare archival footage, home movies and private letters, Yitzhak Rabin’s personal and professional dramas unfold. From his childhood as the son of a labor leader before the founding of the State of Israel, through a change of viewpoint that turned him from a farmer into an army man who stood at some of the most critical junctures in Israeli history, through his later years during which he served as Prime Minister and made...
15) The Ritchie Boys
Summary
THE RITCHIE BOYS is the riveting, untold story of a group of young men who fled Nazi Germany and returned as soldiers in U.S. uniforms. They knew the psychology and the language of the enemy better than anyone. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland, they were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare. Determined, bright, and inventive, they fought their own kind of war; they were victors, not victims.
Summary
At the end of the 1950s, Rachel (Virginie Efira), a young office clerk living in a provincial town, meets Philippe (Niels Schneider), a well-educated man from a wealthy family. They share an intense but short-lived romance, from which a daughter is born. Over the next 50 years, their lives will be shaped by the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, overshadowed by the impossible love of a woman for a man that rejects her, and of a...
17) Lest We Forget
Summary
LEST WE FORGET gives the culture of remembrance a voice and a face. To make this possible, the photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano recorded more than 300 stories of survivors. Unique and very personal stories that are also told for those whose voices can no longer be heard. Stories we must never forget because “When we forget the past, we are damned to repeat it.”
Summary
The film recounts the fate of four survivors of Jewish origin who were sent on their own by their parents to Sweden during the Third Reich, with the so - called “Kindertransports”, in order to save them from the Nazi terror – and experienced a trauma which exists even today . Most of them never saw their parents again. For the rescued children in Sweden a new life begins in a foreign county with a new language, unknown faces, uncertainty, fear...
19) Witness Theater
Summary
Aron is 88 years old, Eazek is 94 and Claudine is 89. Over seventy years ago, although they lost their entire families, they survived the holocaust and resettled in New York City. Now they are sharing their stories in a unique program led by a drama therapist with high-school students in Brooklyn. The hope is that this sharing will sensitize the students and give some closure to the adult survivors after all these years. The Witness Theater workshop...
20) Live and become
Formats
Summary
The magnificent, epic story of an Ethiopian boy who is airlifted from a Sudanese refugee camp to Israel in 1984 during Operation Moses. Shlomo is plagued by two big secrets: He is neither a Jew nor an orphan, just an African boy who survived and wants, somehow, to fulfill his Ethiopian mother’s parting request that he “go, live, and become.” Buoyed by a profound and unfaltering motherly love – both in his memory and in the arms of his adoptive...