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Cinegogue Sessions
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Filtered By: Clear All

Bang! The Bert Berns Story

Music meets the Mob in this biographical documentary, narrated by Steven Van Zandt, about the life and career of Bert Berns, the most important songwriter and record producer from the sixties that you never heard of.

Barney's Version

Toward the end of his life, Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) looks back on his triumphs and tragedies, beginning with an ill-fated relationship with Clara (Rachelle Lefevre), whom he marries when she becomes pregnant.

Ben Lee: Catch My Disease

At the age of 14 a nice Jewish boy from Sydney, Australia, became a rock star, and at 16, an international pop star. His name is Ben Lee and like his music, he's still evolving. Featuring interviews with his former girlfriend Claire Danes and friends Winona Ryder, Jason Schwartzman and Michelle Williams, Ben Lee: Catch My Disease is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist’s evolution. [MINIGUIDE 67/70]

Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM tells the story of the unlikely bond between Razi, an Israeli secret service officer, and his Palestinian informant Sanfur.

Beyond the Fear

In 2005, Israeli scholar and divorced mother of four Larisa Trembovler married Yigal Amir, the infamous assassin of much-loved Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In 2007, after a series of conjugal visits, she gave birth to her fifth child, Amir’s son. It’s their son that documentarians Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko skillfully build the film around as they reexamine the years of moral complexities surrounding his parents’ union.

Beyond the Walls

About This Film

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jewish resistance fighter, an optimist in the face of dire circumstances and a poet. Roberta Grossman’s first-rate documentary Blessed Is the Match, narrated by three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, is a paean to Hannah Senesh’s courage and creativity. This inspirational film features gorgeous images of parachutes floating gracefully in the air, like Senesh’s poem “Blessed Is the Match,” written days before her capture by the Nazis.

Blumenthal

The presence of famed New York playwright Harold Blumenthal looms over everyone in the weeks following his unexpected death, but life goes on for his family. In attempting to distinguish between the forces they do and don’t have control over, the Blumenthals address the feelings that are holding them back from fulfillment. Writer, director and co-star Seth Fisher delivers a charming, low-key dark comedy with endearing, heartfelt performances.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Notorious for a nude scene in the 1933 film Ecstasy, Hedy Lamarr became a sex symbol for the ages and achieved top stardom in Hollywood. But her deeper passion had to do with mechanics and technology. She was obsessed with creating useful inventions to benefit mankind, and her inventions were predecessors of wi-fi, bluetooth and cell phones. Spurned as too beautiful to be smart, she nonetheless upended stereotypes and serves as a role model to this day.

Brave Miss World

About This Film

The Bubble

Eytan Fox (Walk on Water, Yossi and Jagger) continues his extraordinary run of sleek, chic films that define the contradictions of modern Israeli life. A trio of charming gay and straight twenty-somethings share a flat in a hip Tel Aviv district. But the carefree “bubble” they live in threatens to burst when one of them falls in love with a young Palestinian man.

Budrus

When Palestinian Ayed Morrar learned the Israeli security barrier would veer from the border separating Israel and the Palestinian territories, and would instead cut through his West Bank village, he decided to organize, galvanizing both Palestinians and Israelis in an effective strategy of nonviolent protest. This groundbreaking documentary neither romanticizes nor demonizes the many viewpoints it reveals, instead capturing with raw intensity the power of ordinary people fighting peaceably for change.

Bugsy

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel has a dream—or is it a mirage?—of a casino named the Flamingo rising out of the Nevada desert. What Siegel doesn’t gamble on are construction delays or falling in love, and he falls hard for actress Virginia Hill (played to perfection by Annette Bening). Warren Beatty’s tour de force performance as the sexy, psychotic New York gangster shines among excellent turns by Ben Kingsley and Harvey Keitel.

Censored Voices

Oral histories recorded by Israeli writer Amos Oz and other young kibbutzniks in the weeks immediately following their experience during the Six Day War are brought to life in this revealing documentary. The censored 1967 recordings, coupled with striking archival images, reveal the moment that Israel’s soldiers, in their own words, went from identifying with David to Goliath. The act of trying to remember is what gives this documentary its profound resonance.

Chasing Portraits

Moshe Rynecki’s granddaughter is on a quest to recover the Polish-Jewish artist’s works lost during World War II.

Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology

The kaleidoscope of clips in this wide-ranging documentary is so entertaining one could happily watch it with the sound off. But it would be a shame to miss Tiffany Shlain’s meditations on modern life and technology. The Bay Area–based filmmaker delves into everything from the honeybee crisis to her household’s weekly “technology shabbat” to her father’s struggle with brain cancer, all in an effort to understand our need to connect.

Crime After Crime

Yoav Potash’s documentary is a shattering chronicle of Deborah Peagler, an African American woman imprisoned for the 1983 murder of her horribly abusive boyfriend. After a law passes allowing survivors of domestic violence to appeal their sentences, two idealistic lawyers, one an Orthodox Jew, become convinced they can set her free. This is a staggering account of a fight against injustice and a suspect system still imprisoning hundreds of thousands of women across America today.

Crossing Delancey

A contemporary romantic comedy in which single, sophisticated Isabelle confronts family tradition when her grandmother hires a matchmaker to find her a marriage prospect.

Cupcakes

Set in contemporary Tel Aviv, six diverse best friends gather to watch the wildly popular UniverSong competition. Appalled by the Israeli entry, they decide to create their own and record it on a mobile phone.

Dancing in Jaffa

World champion ballroom dancer Pierre Dulaine has a dream: to see Jewish and Palestinian Israeli children dance together. A passionate man with humble beginnings in Jaffa, he returns to attempt what seems to be an impossible feat: teaching children ballroom dance in a divided society. With warmth and tenderness, this inspiring documentary captures the children’s amazing transformation, offering hope that for a new generation Dulaine’s dream will become reality.

Danny Says

A dazzling trip through the entertaining life of Danny Fields, the little-known Jewish godfather of punk rock and provocative record "company freak" who discovered legendary underground music pioneers the MC5, Iggy Pop, and the Ramones. Drawn from a breathtaking trove of rare footage and audio recordings, this fascinating chronicle is capped by the wry and wistful reminiscence of Fields himself, the tastemaker who just may have been responsible for breaking up the Beatles.

The Decent One

A recently discovered cache of hundreds of personal letters, diaries and photos belonging to the Nazi Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler, seem to reveal a thoughtful, loving husband and devoted father to his daughter.

Defamation

Israeli director Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, Five Days) explores the ways contemporary Jews learn and think about anti-Semitism, both real and perceived. Spending time with the Anti-Defamation League’s crusading director Abe Foxman, and with Israeli teens at Auschwitz who assume “everybody hates the Jews,” Shamir worries about the future of the Jewish soul in an atmosphere of persecution. But while he is willing to poke a stick at a sacred cow, he’s too nuanced a filmmaker to let ideology trump thought. A daring documentary.

Deli Man

Laugh your way through hilarious stories of American delicatessens while drooling over the wonderful Jewish food being prepared before your eyes.

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