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Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance

Film Type

Animation
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Shorts Program
Television Series

Program Type

Cinegogue Sessions
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Next Wave

Filtered By: French Clear All

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.

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.

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.

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

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]

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.

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.

Buenos Aires, 1994. Ahmed, a committed Muslim martyr, works as a successful young surgeon. But his destiny, when the inevitable day arrives, is to carry out an attack for radical Islam. Meanwhile, David, a cold-blooded Mossad agent, awaits the opportunity to exact some very personal revenge. This pulse-pounding thriller pits two determined men against each other in the aftermath of the deadly real-life bombings in Buenos Aries against the Jewish community.

A la vie (To Life)

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.

Live and Become

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

The Names of Love

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.

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)

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

Born into great wealth yet emotionally rebellious, American socialite Peggy Guggenheim spent a lifetime—and a fortune—breaking society’s rules to become one of the preeminent art collectors of the 20th century and a tireless champion of the avant- garde. This absorbing documentary profiles the bohemian tastemaker who helped discover such talents as Kandinsky, Cocteau, Dali, and Pollock, while pursuing sexual liaisons with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Paul Bowles.

La Petite Jerusalem

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.

Projections of America

Projections of America

Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town won him a 1937 Oscar. Less well known is Riskin’s series of short films, produced to aid America’s WWII effort. The films’ American values reflect his own Jewish, left-leaning principles, countering foreigners’ negative stereotypes of United States citizens. With narration by John Lithgow, director Peter Miller skillfully brings this effort to light.

Rashevski's Tango

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.

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.

Take a traditional Jewish funeral whose rituals no one can quite recall. Mix in a Yiddishkeit setting in a predominantly Sephardic Jewish community. Add one of the most beautiful cities in the world as your location and top it off with a terrific ensemble cast. The result, Idit Cébula’s charmingly poignant French film Rue Mandar, reminds us that the messy, sometimes humorous and often bittersweet business of death can lead to new beginnings.

About This Film

Saviors in the Night

Saviors in the Night

Based on true events, this bravura drama powerfully records one memorable instance of moral courage under desperate conditions. Menne Spiegel, a German Jew, meets his old army comrade Heinrich Aschoff on the eve of a mass deportation of Jews in 1943. Aschoff, a Catholic farmer with a conscience, agrees to shelter Spiegel’s wife Marga and their daughter in spite of the deadly risk to his own family. Saviors in the Night, based on Marga’s best-selling memoir, relates the extraordinary true story of the families’ perilous years together. Join us for Opening Night in San Francisco with special invited guests Marga Spiegel, director Ludi Boeken and principal actor Lia Hoensbroech. Followed by Opening Night Bash at Swedish American Hall.

Swim Little Fish Swim

Swim Little Fish Swim

Idealistic musician Leeward and his breadwinner wife Mary share a tiny New York apartment where they raise their three-year-old daughter. When aspiring young French artist Lilas crashes on their couch and strikes a chord with at-sea Leeward, the couple’s ideological conflicts come into sharper focus. Writer/directors Ruben Amar and Lola Bessis’s first feature (and her acting debut as Lilas) is a heartfelt film about the struggle between creativity and adulthood.

Watchers of the Sky

Watchers of the Sky

About This Film

The Wedding Song

The Wedding Song

Karin Albou (La Petite Jerusalem, SFJFF 2006) explores Jewish and Arab culture and female sexuality in her bold and exquisite second feature. In Nazi-occupied Tunis, two teenage girlfriends, Muslim Nour and Jewish Myriam, cling to their lifelong bond. Outside the intimate female quarters of home and hammam, the world shared by Jews and Arabs is split apart by German promises of liberation. When the propaganda seeps through the gender wall, Myriam and her mother are no longer safe, and a hasty wedding must be arranged. But marriage, like friendship, becomes a test of ethics and courage. Karin Albou in person at the Castro.

Ydessa,The Bears and Etc.

Ydessa,The Bears and Etc.

Pioneering French New Wave director Agnès Varda’s portrait of an eccentric art collector turns darkly mysterious when her collection of teddy bears photos is displayed in an infamous Munich gallery.

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