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100 Voices: A Journey Home

100 Voices: A Journey Home

Most American Jews come from Poland, notes Cantor Nathan Lam, who led an assembly of American cantors on a goodwill trip to sing at the Warsaw Opera House. “Jewish life itself was defined in Poland.” Yet the Holocaust, which took place mostly on Polish soil, left Jewish culture there all but eradicated. This fascinating, heartwarming chronicle of the cantors’ 2009 trip combines a surprising history lesson with a stirring message of reconciliation and homecoming.

For 20 years independent filmmaker Doug Block (51 Birch Street, SFJFF 2006) toiled not only as an acclaimed documentary director and producer but also as a part-time wedding videographer. Block revisits a dozen of the wise and sometimes weathered husbands and wives he captured on their big day to reflect on the complicated reality of “happily ever after.” A funny, frank and fascinating film that explores the secret of what makes a lasting partnership.

As the Holocaust survivor community ages, the USC Shoah Foundation has embarked on an ambitious new project to transform survivors into 3-D digital projections that will interact with generations to come. 116 Cameras follows Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, as she goes through this unique process and reflects on how her role as a Holocaust speaker has changed over time.

17 Rue Saint Fiacre

17 Rue Saint Fiacre

About This Film

Photographer Jeff Cohen uncovers 21 portraits shot in San Francisco 50 years ago and embarks on a poignant journey to reconnect with, and re-photograph, his aging subjects.

Brother and sister filmmakers conduct an obsessive archeological dig through their deceased grandmother’s treasured mementos.

At 31, Leo Kadner begins studying for his bar mitzvah when he learns his former camp crush, Eva Shapiro, is in Manhattan working as a Torah tutor for kids.

32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide

32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide

In this heartfelt documentary director Hope Litoff struggles with her own demons as she explores the life and death of her sister, Ruth Litoff. A gifted photographer, Ruth was as lovely as the artwork she created, but she struggled with mental illness throughout her life. The film charts Hope’s excavation of the belongings that Ruth left behind and Hope’s journey of exploration to learn more about her older sister.

400 Miles to Freedom

400 Miles to Freedom

Preceded by Panta RheiAvishai Mekonen’s documentary celebrates the diversity of the Jewish diaspora as the director recounts his own extraordinary story. An Ethiopian Jew who suffered terrible childhood trauma while fleeing his homeland, Mekonen grew up in Israel only to be questioned about his faith. As he talks to rabbis of Ugandan, Korean, and Latin American descent on a similar quest for acceptance, his dogged curiosity makes for a refreshing meditation on identity and religion. [MINIGUIDE 72/70]

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus

Leaving their own young children behind, Jewish Americans Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus took it upon themselves to get 50 Jewish children out of Austria during WWII. This tense and compelling story, narrated by Alan Alda, is brought to life by detailed private journals and a trove of previously unseen color home movies.

500 Dunam on the Moon

500 Dunam on the Moon

About This Film

51 Birch Street

51 Birch Street

Veteran filmmaker Doug Block had every reason to believe his parents’ 54-year marriage was a good one, so he’s unprepared when, just a few months after his mother’s death, his father Mike announces that he’s moving to Florida to live with his former secretary. Spanning 60 years and three generations, Block’s superbly crafted documentary about his parents’ marriage eloquently shows what can happen when we question our most fundamental assumptions about family.

About This Film

A punk, an old man and a chicken gather round for a makeshift shivah after Jay (a Romanian/Guamanian/Catholic/Jew) puts an ad on Craigslist looking for mourners to join him.

A day in the life of New York’s only rapid-response koshering service. A humorous and enlightening documentary look at the Jewish Orthodox world.

A cohort of bold ultraorthodox Jewish women battle to create their own all-female ambulance corps.

A mother and son shop for a Bar Mitzvah gift at a 99 Cent store.

A.K.A. Doc Pomus

A.K.A. Doc Pomus

This musically rich biography pays homage to Doc Pomus, the legendary Brill Building songwriter who authored such enduring rock-and-roll hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas” and dozens of others for talents as diverse as Dion, Elvis Presley, Dr. John and B.B. King. Like so many of his R&B songwriting colleagues, Doc Pomus was a city-bred Jew. Born Jerome Felder, he spent a lifetime overcoming both visible and private pain through his extraordinary songs. In this spirited documentary, he is revealed as an American original. [MINIGUIDE 94/100]

Abe | Film & Feast

Abe | Film & Feast

The Israeli-Jewish side of his family calls him Avram. The Palestinian-Muslim side Ibrahim. His first-generation American agnostic lawyer parents call him Abraham. But the 12-year-old kid from Brooklyn who loves food and cooking, prefers, well, Abe. Just Abe.

Abortion: Stories Women Tell

Abortion: Stories Women Tell

Award-winning filmmaker and Missouri native Tracy Droz Tragos, director of the Sundance Grand Jury Award–winning documentary Rich Hill and Emmy-winning Be Good Smile Pretty confronts the power of Missouri’s restrictive abortion laws by sensitively telling the intimate stories of women who must surmount every obstacle to access abortion. This timely and relevant film reveals the ultimate connection between the right to choose and the right to live a fully empowered life. —Lexi Leban

About the Jews of Yemen

About the Jews of Yemen

About This Film

Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force

Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force

This gripping documentary unfolds like The Great Escape, a true-life wartime adventure story. Produced by Nancy Spielberg and directed by Roberta Grossman (Hava Nagila: The Movie, SFJFF 2012), it celebrates the daring young pilots who volunteered to fly for Israel in the war of 1948. Though their planes were WWII junk heaps, their flight suits Nazi discards, their bravery and skill helped turn the tide of the war.

Abraham and Eugenia: Stories from Jewish Cuba

Abraham and Eugenia: Stories from Jewish Cuba

About This Film

Absolutely No Spitting

Absolutely No Spitting

"So, you know how I told you to never spit? And that you're not allowed to spit and you shouldn't spit? SO... I need you to spit" And thus begins a very quirky, sometimes self-deprecating, and always heymish spit-driven DNA-journey-turned-love-letter between Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand, a fifty-something new old mom, and her much beloved and very spunky four-and-a-half-year-old adopted daughter Theo. And thank G-d they call NYC home - because it's the perfect place to embrace life as a multi-racial, multi-cultural, pan-global family.

Across Time and Space

Across Time and Space

About This Film

Next Wave Spotlight: Act One

Next Wave Spotlight: Act One

In this rhythmic psychological thriller, a lonely aspiring teen actress finds herself drawn to an acting teacher who pulls her into a web of desire and control, blurring the lines of seduction and obsession.

Directed by Transparent producer Rhys Ernst and adapted by Ariel Schrag from her novel of the same name, Adam drops us down in the hipster lesbian and trans culture of Brooklyn, 2006. It’s essentially a coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old straight, cisgender male who falls in love with a lesbian after she mistakes him for a transgender man. Adam decides to maintain this Shakespearean deception and a satirical and nuanced exploration of identity ensues.

When nice Jewish girl Beth (Rose Byrne) moves into a new apartment, the refreshingly literal, brainy guy next door, Adam (Hugh Dancy), is probably not what her upper-middle-class Jewish mom (Amy Irving) and dad (Peter Gallagher) had in mind for her. But cupid’s arrow strikes these two different denizens of Gotham hard; they have major chemistry and within minutes we find ourselves rooting for them to overcome differences in culture and communication styles.

Adam Sandler's Hanukah Song

Adam Sandler's Hanukah Song

About This Film

About This Film

Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

The Adventures of Saul Bellow is the first-ever documentary film on Bellow, the man described by critic James Wood as the "greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century."

Screened to great acclaim at Sundance, this documentary about third-trimester abortion hardly sounds life-affirming on its surface. Yet Martha Shane and Lana Wilson inject a welcome dose of rationality to the incendiary topic. With deliberate pacing and a calming soundtrack, they offer an intimate portrait of the only four doctors in the United States who still perform the procedure, despite the assassination of their mentor Dr. George Tiller by an antiabortionist in 2009.

Afternoon Delight

Afternoon Delight

Rachel is a quick-witted, lovable, yet tightly coiled, thirtysomething steeped in the creative class of Los Angeles’s bohemian Silver Lake neighborhood. Everything looks just right—chic modernist home, successful husband, adorable child and a hipster wardrobe. So why is she going out of her gourd with ennui? Plagued by purposelessness, Rachel visits a strip club to spice up her marriage and meets a stripper whom she becomes obsessed with saving.

Ofra Bloch, a New York-based psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family that emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. Disturbed by the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism around the world, Ofra travels to Germany, Israel, and Palestine to confront her own deep-seated feelings about Germans and Palestinians, and the tensions between the Holocaust and the Nakba. In the process, she explores the nature of resistance and the possibility of hope.

Meet Ruth Gruber, 97, ace journalist and photographer for more than 70 years. Hurtling herself out of Brooklyn and into global politics, she witnessed some of the most critical junctures in contemporary world history—and specifically Jewish history—while drawing the eyes of the world to the Nuremberg trials, the plight of the ship Exodus ’47, United Nations committee meetings in Palestine and the formation of the state of Israel.

Family secrets and lies are revealed in this documentary detective story which begins with World War II and ends with a 21st-century reunion of long lost brothers. With the help of a genealogical search organization, Izak, an Israeli kibbutznik, finally meets the Canadian blind younger brother he did not know he had, when both are in their mid-60s. Embracing one another, they work hard to try to pry secrets loose from their tight-lipped mother Aida. - Sara L. Rubin

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