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Impoverished couple Fishke (David Opatoshu, Exodus) and Hodel (Helen Beverley, Green Fields) dream of life in the big city of Odessa free from the shtetl’s poverty, corruption, and stifling old-world prejudices. The benevolent and enlightened bookseller Mendele (Isidore Cashier as Mendele Mokher Sforim) takes them under his wing. One of the most important films in NCJF’s archive collection, The Light Ahead is arguably the finest of the four Yiddish films directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Made on the eve of World War II, the film is at once romantic, expressionist, and painfully conscious of the danger about to engulf European Jew. The shtetl denizens’ embrace of superstition over science and modernity amidst a cholera outbreak makes The Light Ahead especially poignant for contemporary audiences. The film’s climax is a mageyfe khasene (plague wedding), a folk ritual believed to ward off disease.
Recently restored by the National Center for Jewish Film, A Light Ahead is a forgotten Yiddish classic by B-movie maverick Edgar G. Ulmer (The Black Cat, Detour). At once a touching comedic drama and pointed social critique, the film follows Fishke and Hodel, a young disabled couple, as they strive to escape the oppressive disease and poverty of their shtetl.
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.
A boy tries to find out what happened in the old local synagogue. Obsessed, he is chasing something he never saw and does not pay any attention to what is happening around him.
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.
Shortly after the death of his unique uncles, Didier Frenkel descends to the basement of their shared home and finds a treasure: an ancient animated archive from Egypt starring Mish-Mish Effendi, the Arabic equivalent of Mickey Mouse. His uncles have kept this surprising chapter in their lives under cover. Didier begins restoring the films and unveils the story of the rise and fall of these pioneers of Arab animation. Surprisingly, Didier’s mother strongly opposes the project.
Misha and the Wolves is the dramatic tale of a woman whose Holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher – who turned detective – revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
Misha and the Wolves is the dramatic tale of a woman whose Holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher – who turned detective – revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
Documentarian Nick Broomfield has never made a movie more distinctly personal than this complex and moving film about his relationship with his humanist-pacifist father, Maurice Broomfield, a factory worker turned photographer.
Acclaimed directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West follow the rousing success of their Academy Award nominated RBG with a new documentary based on the life of attorney, activist, priest, and memoirist Pauli Murray, who inspired Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.