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Filtered By: France Clear All

24 Days

The 1986 kidnapping of 24-year-old Ilan Halimi by a suburban Parisian gang of thugs became a cause célèbre because of the anti-Semitic nature of the crime. This thriller based on the true events is expertly helmed by Alexandre Arcady and focuses on the police team and the ransom calls that are the detectives’ only clue to the kidnappers’ psychology. Ilan’s mother has another clue, one that the authorities are regretfully too slow to recognize.

Alila

In a working-class Tel Aviv neighborhood, the turbulent and poignant lives of illicit lovers, a divorced couple whose son has gone AWOL from the army, the ex-wife’s younger lover, an elderly Holocaust survivor, illegal foreign workers, and a half-crazed policewoman all converge. Renowned director Amos Gitai’s visually powerful and emotionally masterful ensemble drama is a microcosm of Israeli society.

Aliyah

Alex sees aliyah, immigration to Israel, as a way out of his troubled life dealing hashish in Paris. Plus, he’ll no longer have to clean up his deceitful older brother’s messes. But no plan is simple. To immigrate, Alex needs cash to buy into the restaurant he’ll help a cousin build in Tel Aviv. And just when his ex announces her engagement, her friend falls for him, and it’s mutual.

The Art Dealer

A breathtaking 18th century painting on a crumbling wall ignites a noirish mystery and inspires one woman to delve into family secrets, long-buried memories, and perhaps even WWII-era government cover-ups. Dashing around Paris in her trenchcoat and fedora, Esther whispers in dark rooms, forges signatures and draws long, thoughtful puffs on cigarettes (though this may be more French than noir) in her journey to recover family paintings presumably stolen by Nazis.

Belzec

This is a significant new Holocaust documentary about one of the first camps built to exterminate Poland’s Jews. Belzec saw more than 600,000 perish in gas chambers and mass graves, but in 1943 the camp was razed in an effort to hide what had happened. The film’s focus is on one of Belzec’s few survivors, Braha Rauffmann, who as a child had been secreted away in a woodpile by a Polish woman.

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

This modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet tale is set in Israel and Gaza. After witnessing a suicide bombing, a girl writes a letter to Gaza seeking understanding and sends it into the Gaza Sea in a bottle. It’s found by a young Gaza man who emails back. Though they live less than 100 kilometers apart, they communicate only through emails and letters. While they often disagree, their relationship deepens as the political situation worsens. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

Family Secret

A letter from Romania inspires a woman to travel halfway across the world to meet the brother she never knew she had. Like an archaeologist discovering pieces from the past, she finds the secrets to her late father's life, sparked by the discovery of a photo of a little boy.

For a Woman

Diane Kurys (Peppermint Soda, Entre Nous) once again mines her autobiography to fictionalize the early years of her parents’ marriage, a mysterious uncle of whom nobody speaks and the circumstances of her birth. Intimacy and suspense are the keys to Kurys’s novelistic framing of Jewish life in a corner of Lyon, France, just after the war, when freedom meant one thing to a man, another to a woman.

Free Zone

When Rebecca, an American, ditches her fiancé in Israel, she finds solace with tough, pragmatic Hanna, a Russian-Israeli limo driver. Hanna is headed for the "free zone" in Jordan to pick up money owed to her husband. There, they cross paths with Leila, a Palestinian businesswoman, and the three women form an inextricable bond despite their disparate backgrounds and views. A film about borders and terrain, both political and psychological.

Jaffa

This gut-wrenching drama has both mainstream appeal and a keen political and psychological edge. Reuven owns an auto shop where he employs his son and daughter, as well as two Arab mechanics, when an explosive argument at the dinner table sets off a tragic chain of events. Jaffa showcases a raw performance by Dana Ivgy as daughter Mali, a young woman who—against all odds—transcends the culture of fear and hatred consuming her family.

Kedma

In veteran director Amos Gitai’s majestic narrative, the Kedma, a European cargo freighter packed with concentration camp survivors, heads towards Palestine as underground Jewish forces prepare for its arrival and British soldiers position themselves to stop its unauthorized landing. Gitai recreates a tough, anguished reconstruction of an episode in the founding of the state of Israel, which profoundly impacted Jews and Palestinians .

A la vie (To Life)

Three women, Auschwitz survivors, are reunited 15 years after the war. They spend a holiday at a seaside resort in northern France. Set at the start of the ’60s, the era’s bright colors and cheerful music mark the end of one period in their lives and the start of another. Friendships forged in horror begin anew with tasty ice cream cones, stylish bikinis, a romantic adventure and basking in the sun.

The Lab

How does a small country like Israel become the world’s third largest weapons manufacturer and exporter? And how does the never-ending fighting in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank help Israel invent, develop and test its military products and innovations before selling them to the highest bidder? In this chilling documentary we go on a surreal journey into the world of arms dealing and security exporting in Israel.

Live and Become

In this sweeping, emotional saga from the director of Train of Life, an Ethiopian boy from a Sudanese refugee camp is airlifted to Israel during Operation Moses, which transported 8,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984. Adopted by a Mizrahi family, Shlomo grows up, falls in love and serves in the Israeli army but is plagued throughout by two secrets: He was not born a Jew and is not an orphan. Radu Mihaileanu has created a monumental drama following one young man’s epic quest for his roots and identity.See also: Spotlight On: Ethiopian Jews and Jews of Color

A Matter of Size

Herzl is a 340-pound chef who lives with his mother, and is immersed in a culture of rigid diet regimes and fitness classes. Just as he and his seriously overweight buddies in the working-class town of Ramle, Israel, seem beaten down by weight-loss failure, Herzl discovers the one place where fat guys can be rock stars: the world of sumo wrestling. An endearing and poignant comic tale, with echoes of The Full Monty, A Matter of Size traces these flawed men’s tender and funny path from body shame to body celebration, and from loneliness to love. A touching movie with a plus-size heart.

The Names of Love

What happens when a tightly-wound Jewish scientist falls for a young Algerian sexpot in modern-day France? Cultures, mores and tragic histories collide—to surprisingly humorous effect. By hook, by crook and by routine wardrobe malfunction, the charming Baya seduces right-wingers in order to convert them. When she mistakenly propositions socialist Arthur and he politely declines (having to perform an autopsy on a goose), the spark of love ignites in this whimsical, unexpectedly sensitive romantic comedy.

Naomi

Tight, edgy Israeli film noir sets off a ring of betrayal and deception after a radiant young Haifa artist has an affair behind the back of her much older science professor husband. An homage to the thrillers of Hitchcock past, the story features a heaping dose of repressed Jewish guilt and builds to an unexpected twist with the professor and his mother forming an unlikely alliance. [MINIGUIDE 66/70]

Next Year in Bombay

Next Year in Bombay profiles the surprising diversity of India’s Jewish communities, some of which have existed for over 2,500 years. Now, however, they are struggling to maintain their culture and traditions as their populations dwindle. At the heart of the film is the story of a young couple torn between their desire to see Judaism thrive in India and their commitment to providing their children with a Jewish education only possible if they move to Israel.

Odessa...Odessa!

Odessa...Odessa! is a poetic journey to find the Jewish soul of Odessa, Ukraine, moving poignantly from Odessa today to Brighton Beach and to Ashdod, Israel.

Dana Ivgy headlines this powerful drama, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and earned Ivgy the Israeli Oscar for Best Actress. With graphic intimacy, Or takes us inside the private lives of Or (Ivgy) and her working-class mother Ruthie (veteran actress Ronit Elkabetz). Or is desperately trying to convince her mother to stop working as a prostitute, but after 20 years in the business, Ruthie finds her options narrowing.

The Other Son

How would one go about approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that transcends the history and politics and delves deeper into our shared humanity? Not an easy task, but one that writer-director Lorraine Levy has achieved in the remarkable new film, The Other Son. The high concept premise is ingenious: an Israeli teen discovers that he is not the biological son of his parents and was switched at birth with the child of a Palestinian family. The lives of both families are shattered by this revelation and they are forced to reconsider their identities, values and beliefs. A must-see. [MINIGUIDE 100/100)

La Petite Jerusalem

Eighteen-year-old Laura is torn between her Orthodox upbringing and the intellectual and physical pleasures of the secular world. She lives in a low-income suburb of Paris with her tight-knit Tunisian family and is very close to her sister Mathilde. When Laura meets Djamel, an Algerian Muslim émigré, a romance ignites. This passionate drama follows a young woman finding her spiritual, sexual and intellectual true north.

Rashevski's Tango

Rosa Rashevski believed that tango could heal the body better than chicken soup. She is the catalyst for considerable family drama in Rashevski’s Tango, a charming ensemble feature by Belgian director Sam Garbarski. Set in Paris, the film is a portrait of three generations of a Jewish family wrestling with issues of identity, love and interfaith marriage after the death of matriarch Rosa.Rosa’s sons Simon and David struggle with their abandonment by their father, who left Rosa decades ago to become Orthodox and move to Israel. Simon and his Christian wife Isabelle fight over whether he will be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Their daughter Nina is falling in love with Antoine, who isn’t Jewish (but at least knows how to tango!). Meanwhile, Rosa’s grandson is in love with a Muslim woman. From the generation who lived through the Shoah, to their children and grandchildren, Rashevski’s Tango delivers laughs, tears and romance with its nuanced script and stellar performances.

The Roundup

Long a taboo subject in France, the infamous Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup is brought to stirring life in this gripping drama starring Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) and Jean Reno (The Professional). Two days after Bastille Day 1942, more than 13,000 Jews were arrested and interned before being sent to Auschwitz. The Roundup brings us inside these events, revealing both the heartless complicity of the Vichy elite and the heroism of some ordinary citizens.

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