Full Description
True life characters are often more compelling than fictional ones. A filmmaker’s childhood image from a forgotten home movie; a 90-year-old ready to eat bacon for the first time; a violinist parting with his sacred instrument; an actor with dual identities: These are the subjects of this year’s emotionally compelling documentary shorts program.
Bacon & God’s Wrath
A 90-year-old Jewish woman reflects on her life’s experiences as she prepares to taste bacon for the first time.
A Home Movie
Told through 8mm and 16mm home movies found after being stored in a wardrobe for over 50 years, this intimate family story hints at something unspoken: snatches of tales of those left behind, of silence about the past, of absences unexplained, of non-existent family members.
Joe’s Violin
Joseph Feingold, a Polish Holocaust survivor donates the violin he’s had for 70 years to a local instrument drive, changing the life of a 12-year-old schoolgirl from the nation’s poorest congressional district and unexpectedly, his own.
I, Dalio (or The Rules of the Game)
The great French actor, Marcel Dalio (Renoir’s Grand Illusion), made a career in French cinema of playing shady characters and small-time crooks: informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, the stereotypical Jew. Landing in American cinema after fleeing the Nazis, he was no longer “the Jew,” but now “the Frenchman.” Filmmaker Mark Rappaport presents us with two Dalios, or are they the same?
—Joshua Moore
