Results 1981 - 1990 of 3048 for the search term
He is credited with igniting the Golden Age of Yiddish cinema and yet was reviled for converting to Catholicism. He married an Italian countess and yet was openly homosexual. Like a real-life version of Zelig, Michał Waszyński, director of the 1937 classic The Dybbuk, tried on many identities and led a life filled with turbulent contradictions. This mesmerizing biography brings us closer to a fascinating, unknowable chameleon.
The late Lithuanian-French novelist and writer Romain Gary was called many things in his life: a fabulist, a poor Jew, a literary genius, a born statesman. In this adaptation of his autobiographical novel, Romain is presented as the son of a fervent single mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose ambitions for him are darkened by narcissism. We see both the value and the price of her grandiose dreams, which Romain is forced to adopt as his own.
In East Jerusalem, Benny is an outsider. She has red hair and she chooses to indulge in poetry and pot. When beautiful newcomer Yael arrives in their small community, Benny smolders with a strange new fire and her life becomes undone. While remaining specific to its location and community, Red Cow highlights the universal desire of first lust and the feeling of being alive for the first time.
Before the #MeToo movement, Steubenville, Ohio, sat in the center of a firestorm when the sexual assault of a young girl by high school football stars was showcased on social media, inciting a fearless blogger’s rebellion, a town’s scorn and even intervention from the hacker group Anonymous. Roll Red Roll delves into town perspectives, police interviews and the ensuing court case, all the while keeping the lens squarely on the rape culture that contributed to the incident and its aftermath.
It’s hard to imagine a more talented and groundbreaking performer who led a more complicated and contradictory life than Sammy Davis Jr. Featuring excerpts from his exhilarating performances and star-studded interviews, director Sam Pollard’s riveting documentary presents a very full and very human portrait of this complex, courageous and conflicted man.
LOCAL SPOTLIGHT. On a street in Harlem in 1986, a young blond-haired Jewish kid who plays a first-rate blues harmonic struck up a musical friendship with a street musician named Sterling Magee, who calls himself Mr. Satan. The duo puts together an act that leads to music festivals and a successful record. Just as quickly, the act crashes when Satan mysteriously disappears. This documentary captures a fascinating journey of friendship, heartbreak and the transformative power of the blues.
Deftly subverting coming-of-age genre expectations, Scaffolding provides a surprisingly nuanced meditation on the voids the people we love leave in our lives. Asher, a sensitive teen, is easily distracted and spoiling for a fight as he struggles to graduate high school. His domineering father and sympathetic literature teacher attempt to leave him with different approaches to masculinity, but each fails in his own way in this impressive debut feature.
Science Fair deftly weaves together the stories of nine high schoolers as they strive to earn the right to join 1,700 other students from around the world at the 2017 edition of Intel’s International Science Engineering Fair (ISEF). While not all of them are winners in the eyes of the judges, viewers cannot help but be impressed with the students as they tirelessly pursue their dreams.
This emotionally powerful documentary about one family’s misfortune is also a compelling indictment of the injustice of mandatory minimum prison laws. Cindy Shank was a wife and mother of three young daughters when she was arrested on drug conspiracy charges, a result of her involvement with a drug-dealing former boyfriend. Director Rudy Valdez (Cindy’s brother) documents the devastating impact her 15-year sentence in a federal prison has on her and her family.
In Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema, award-winning filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe tells the compelling tale of how a quartet of Jewish actresses came to dominate Indian cinema for nearly forty years. Performing under exotic names like Sulochana, Miss Rose, Pramila and Nadira, these daughters of the Baghdadi Jewish and Bene Israel communities carved their own paths in Bollywood while also retaining a deep connection to their heritage.