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Vilnius was once known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” but by 1943 its vibrant Jewish community had been decimated from 80,000 before the war to only 600 survivors. Based on records from the 1963 ten-day trial of SS officer Franz Murer, known as the “Butcher from Vilnius,” this transfixing courtroom drama restages the vivid testimonies, World Jewish Congress conspiracy theories and unruly behind-the-scenes machinations of the case with an aptly titled “anatomical” intensity.
Housing one of the world’s greatest collections of art and antiquities, the Israel Museum poses for its own portrait in this elegant observational documentary, revealing its central role in the complicated narrative of the nation. We eavesdrop on curators, museum guards, archaeological conservators, and visiting schoolchildren, who together form a kaleidoscopic picture of the way art, history and national destiny intersect. Ultimately, the museum emerges as a shining example of a nation’s highest aspirations.
Award-winning filmmaker Julia Bacha (Encounter Point, Budrus SFJFF 2010) specializes in documentaries about the struggle for democracy in the Middle East. Her dynamic portrait of Palestinian activist Naila Zakout begins as one woman’s fight against the occupation and grows into a complex quilt of women’s stories. Bacha delves into the first intifada, the Madrid peace talks and the Oslo Accords, offering a crash course in the conflict from the unique perspective of Palestinian women.
Carrie Goldberg, an internet privacy attorney; Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and activist; and Tina Reine, a financial trader whose career was derailed by a vicious campaign of cyber harassment, are the three extraordinary subjects profiled. Coinciding with the #MeToo movement, as the internet becomes the next frontier for civil rights, the arc of the online moral universe may also be long, but here too, Netizens shows it bending towards justice.
Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi refugee and reluctant activist who was appointed a UN Goodwill Ambassador, is the subject of this piercing, powerful and critically acclaimed documentary. Alexandria Bombach, winner of the directing prize at Sundance this year, deftly captures the complexity of being a survivor and an outcast in search of a homeland, an all-too-common experience that must be told in order for genocide to truly happen “never again”.
EAST BAY OPENING NIGHT. In 1992, with Israeli-Palestinian relations at a low and official communication suspended, an unlikely group of negotiators—two Israeli professors and three PLO members—met secretly in Norway. Faced with a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin needed a new direction. The political drama with all its intrigue, suspicion and discord is told through the actual diaries of the negotiators and the long-discarded footage of the actual Oslo negotiations.
How much is a life worth? What is the monetary value of a livelihood lost to 9/11? How do you put a price on losses of this magnitude? These are the questions Kenneth Feinberg routinely wrestles with in his role as the overseer of funds disbursing tens of billions of dollars for damage claims and death benefits. He inhabits a unique role in the American legal system, where everything—including a life—has a price.
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.