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Marc Smolowitz: The Lonely Child

Marc Smolowitz: The Lonely Child

THE LONELY CHILD is a feature documentary that tells the story of a little-known Yiddish lullaby “Dos Elnte Kind” written inside the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust.

Warsaw, Poland, 1968. Hania and Janek are typical university students joyfully spending their days and nights together, naively unaware of the political upheaval amid which they will soon find themselves.

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Marek Edelman... and There was Love in the Ghetto

Marek Edelman... and There was Love in the Ghetto

Imagine that the city where you were born is suddenly split in two, with a better half and a worse half. And you’re enclosed in the latter, by a wall 3 metres high, with broken glass and rolls of barbed wire along the top. If you cross it, they’ll kill you. If you stay, you’ll slowly die of starvation anyway. That is precisely what happened in Eastern Europe, in Poland’s capital city of Warsaw in the 1940s. “Why does nobody ask me if there was love in the ghetto? Why is nobody interested?” asked Marek Edelman, resistance fighter and the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, shortly before his death in 2009. In this film, he answers that very question, telling us that good and beauty did exist in the hell of the ghetto. And there was love, too. That was of the greatest value – even greater than life itself. A strong, unconditional love where you are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and give yourself completely to another person, body and soul.

Marisa Fox: My Underground Mother

Freedom fighter. Femme fatale. Double agent. My mother claimed she had been all three. Many years after her death, a secret diary from a Nazi women’s camp reveals a fourth, leading me on a global investigation to reckon with the harsh truths she took to her grave.

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The first visit of three young tourists at the Dachau concentration camp memorial leads to an unexpected chain of events. Just before returning to Munich, they notice an old man in the distance arguing with one of the employees. The three tourists meet the old man and are brought through the camp by him. Annoyed with the manner in which the site has been memorialized, the old man tried to convey to the tourists something about what really happened in the place years ago. After his personal tour, the old man gets on a bus and disappears. At the heart of the film lies an inconsistent documentary portrait of the survivor; more than objectively documenting him, the three tourists are swept along by him. Over the course of four day, they find their view of the man constantly changing. The accidental manner in which the story unfolds provokes questions concerning the relation between historical truth and memory.

Oscar-winning animator Adam Elliot’s bittersweet comic fable of an unlikely yet extraordinary friendship between a middle-aged, obese New York Jew with Asperger’s syndrome and his eight-year-old pen pal from Australia. Brought to life by the bravura voice work of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, Mary and Max is a poignant tale of a friendship between oddballs at their wits’ end with the world, but at peace with each other.

Acclaimed director Eytan Fox (Yossi & Jagger) brings us Meir, a young gay man coming of age in Israel, grappling with his mother’s desertion and living a double life as one of Tel Aviv’s most celebrated drag performers—all to a soundtrack by 1970s Israeli glam-rock sensation Svika Pick. This enthralling new gender-bending Israeli miniseries serves up high-energy choreography, infectious pop songs and hearty doses of high school ennui. All four episodes in one fabulous screening.

Israel 1991. A 12-year-old observes the tension rising at home as the threat of an Iraqi chemical attack on central Israel becomes more realistic, but she has a mission of her own: the pursuit for her first taste of alcohol.

A shattering documentary bringing together the silhouetted testimonies of six Lebanese perpetrators of the notorious 1982 massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in southern Lebanon, then under Israeli occupation. The film considers the nature of collective violence in a century that brought us Treblinka, My Lai, Rwanda and, now, Darfur.

The Matchmaker (2010)

The Matchmaker (2010)

An affectionate, bittersweet feature set in 1960s Haifa: Teenager Arik Burstein’s summer vacation explodes with novel attractions, including the sexy Iraqi-Jewish-American niece of his best friend and a seedy downtown movie theater run by Sylvia and a group of Jewish dwarfs who met at Auschwitz. But it is Yankele Bride—matchmaker, shady businessman and Holocaust survivor—who captivates Arik in Avi Nesher’s vibrant mosaic about coming of age and coming to terms with the past.

A Matter of Size

A Matter of Size

Herzl is a 340-pound chef who lives with his mother, and is immersed in a culture of rigid diet regimes and fitness classes. Just as he and his seriously overweight buddies in the working-class town of Ramle, Israel, seem beaten down by weight-loss failure, Herzl discovers the one place where fat guys can be rock stars: the world of sumo wrestling. An endearing and poignant comic tale, with echoes of The Full Monty, A Matter of Size traces these flawed men’s tender and funny path from body shame to body celebration, and from loneliness to love. A touching movie with a plus-size heart.

Matzo Balls and Black-Eyed Peas

Matzo Balls and Black-Eyed Peas

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Maurice at the World's Fair

Maurice at the World's Fair

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On a train to nowhere, a former drag queen remembers a night from her past in one of Paris’ first queer bars and its mysterious Jewish-Algerian owner.

Max Baer's Last Right Hook

Max Baer's Last Right Hook

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Max Minsky and Me

Max Minsky and Me

In the world of Jewish film, an often serious and mature genre, it’s rather rare to come across fun, gentle, family-oriented comedies—so imagine our delight to find Max Minsky and Me, a little gem of a story set, of all places, in modern Berlin.Nelly Sue Edelmeister is a supersmart, rail-thin 12-year-old whose twin obsessions are astronomy and her distant heartthrob (and fellow stargazer), young Edouard, Prince of Luxembourg. Nelly lives in Berlin with her German Christian dad and American Jewish mom, who is very eager for Nelly to crack down on her bat mitzvah studies. Nelly doesn’t take much interest in them, and has even less patience for the very unbookish concerns of her schoolmates, whose lives center on the girls’ basketball team.But when Nelly learns that those who make the basketball team will go to a tournament in Luxembourg hosted by her favorite prince, she negotiates a deal with a 15-year-old neighbor, Max: she’ll do his homework for him if he coaches her to become a clutch basketball player.Thus begins the delicate and unlikely friendship between gawky Nelly and reluctant Max, brought charmingly to life by Zoe Moore and Emil Reinke. The film’s glimpses of today’s Jewish Berlin—Nelly’s gossipy great-aunt, an overearnest rabbi, an insecure mother—are handled with an easy nonchalance, aided by Holly-Jane Rahlens’s jaunty script, full of sharply observed adolescent angst laced with the occasional cosmic fantasy taking us into the outer spaces of Nelly’s vivid imagination.

Maya Cueva: A Rebel Without a Pause

Maya Cueva: A Rebel Without a Pause

A Rebel Without a Pause shines a light on Dr. Quentin Young, a Jewish doctor from Chicago, who teamed up with the Black Panther Party and its Chairman Fred Hampton throughout the 1960s—and fought the FBI at great personal cost—to bring healthcare to the most vulnerable Americans.

Mazel Tov: Lesbian and Gay Weddings

Mazel Tov: Lesbian and Gay Weddings

Get ready to sing "simon tov and mazel tov" at two Jewish lesbian weddings in the U.S. and a gay Jewish wedding in Rotterdam. Local filmmaker Bonnie Burt’s My Sister, My Bride, Academy Award-nominated Chicks in White Satin, and The Gil & Moti Wedding Project will have you heading for the chuppah!

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mdbr mdbr: Brian Chase & Annie Albagli

mdbr mdbr: Brian Chase & Annie Albagli

Pushing the boundaries of sound and image, drummer Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) presents a one-of-a-kind experimental collaboration with Bay Area-based video artist Annie Albagli, developed only for SFJFF46.

Meaning of Hitler, The

Meaning of Hitler, The

What can history tell us about the present? Filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (Karl Marx City) search for answers, taking inspiration from Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 German best-selling book The Meaning of Hitler. Shot in nine countries, the film explores what Hitler means in the current waves of white supremacy, antisemitism, and the weaponization of history. We hear provocative insights from historians and writers such as Martin Amis, Deborah Lipstadt, and Saul Friedlander, along with famed Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, on why understanding history is more urgent than ever.

Mediterranean Fever

Mediterranean Fever

An aspiring but depressed writer from Haifa befriends his new neighbor in an attempt to convince the man to help him realize a sinister scheme.

Meet Michael Oppenheim

Meet Michael Oppenheim

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Meg Moritz: Isobel Lennart: The Forgotten Funny Girl

She fled a Jewish past only to rediscover it in her last and most famous work, "Funny Girl." Now meet Isobel Lennart, the Hollywood screenwriter who forever changed the way audiences view Jews and women on the silver screen.

Meika Rouda: My Peeps are Whiteys

Meika Rouda: My Peeps are Whiteys

MY PEEPS ARE WHITEYS is an exploration of identity and how we become who we are. Meika Rouda was adopted as a newborn and never knew her biological background until she was in her thirties and trying to make a family of her own. Because she has exotic looks, she often had people tell her what ethnicity they thought she might be, and in turn sometimes took on those identities to see if they fit.

Melinda Hess: Letter from Cloudcroft

Melinda Hess: Letter from Cloudcroft

Finding an old suitcase, filmmaker, daughter Melinda Hess looks inside and finds an unopened letter from the piles of her Jewish family’s ephemeral materials. The discovery of the 1946 letter inspires her journey to uncover an American Space Race story as seen through a daughter and Father story lens, revealing the true story of how we got to the moon from the rocket slave camps of the Holocaust.

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In Nazi-occupied Paris, a young Marguerite Duras strikes up a delicate, high stakes entanglement with a Vichy collaborator.

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Memories of a River

Memories of a River

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Menachem and Fred

Menachem and Fred

Meet Menachem and Fred, brothers who themselves have only just re-met as adults. Since separating as children during the Holocaust, they’ve become very different men, with different nationalities and religious orientations. Each has avoided his memories, and each is finally forced—by an old letter and a regretted commitment to the filmmakers—to confront history. We travel with them to Germany and France on an emotional tour of their past.

Joshua Z. Weinstein’s Brooklyn-based Yiddish drama is an authentic, tightly written, compelling story for anyone jonesing to hear more than a bisl (little bit) of the mamaloshen (mother tongue). Menashe, a complex and lovable schlemiel, is a young widower deep in the heart of New York’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community who is fighting for custody of his son and struggling with his aversion to marrying again.

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