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Filtered By: Clear All

10% - What Makes a Hero?

Checkpoint (SFJFF 2004) and Defamation (SFJFF 2009) established Israeli documentarian Yoav Shamir as an unapologetic provocateur. Michael Moore executive produced the filmmaker’s newest film, a globetrotting quest to identify the shared characteristics of heroic individuals. From a bonobo preserve in Congo to the suburban home of a Flemish woman whose family harbored Jews during WWII, Shamir takes viewers on a fascinating journey that is sure to spark thoughtful conversation and passionate debate.

5 Days

On August 15, 2005, Israeli defense forces were about to forcibly remove some 8,000 remaining Jewish settlers from their homes, schools, farms and synagogues in Gaza. This documentary gives us a front-row seat to the unfolding drama that many feared would cause catastrophic violence. Deploying eight camera crews simultaneously, Shamir gains unprecedented access to all sides of the confrontation as it happens.Followed in Berkeley by panel discussion.

500 Dunam on the Moon

About This Film

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.

Anita

Anita, a young Jewish woman with Down syndrome, lives with her devoted mother above the shop her late father started in a commercial district of Buenos Aires. Into their sweetly sedate domestic life the outside world intrudes with unexpected fury. But as Anita wanders the city lost, she finds compassion in unlikely quarters through the simple force of her ingenuous personality and open heart. Wrenching, lovely, suffused with life, Anita is a profoundly hopeful study of human innocence, compassion and resilience in a fragile, troubled world.

Ashkenaz

Ashkenaz, a pithy but panoramic view of Israel’s “white” Jews, undermines any preconceived notions of Jewish ethnicity. Director Rachel Leah Jones, a Berkeley native, flits from experts and scholars to just plain folks to reveal a nonhomogeneous Ashkenazi population seen through the eyes of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis. It’s a fascinating study in diversity within a single word.

Baba Joon

Israel’s submission to the 2015 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film surprises in many ways. For starters, the screenplay is almost entirely in Farsi, not Hebrew. The semi-autobiographical feature film debut from writer/director Yuval Delshad depicts three generations in the Morgian family, Persian immigrants from Iran to Israel eking out a living as rural turkey farmers. Sensitive performances, gentle pacing and refreshing plot twists combine to weave a richly satisfying story. —Emily Kaiser Thelin

Comedy Warriors

Five disabled Iraq/Afghanistan vets bring their painful life-altering experiences onstage, transforming tragedy into brutally fierce comedy gold, mentored by mirth masters Bob Saget, Zach Galifinakis and Lewis Black. With only days to prepare, the five are flown to Hollywood for a gig at LA’s famous Punch Line club. The big night finds the comedy warriors comprehending the healing power of humor and discovering that their lives are about to take an unexpected direction. Followed by live standup comedy by subject Joe Kashnow.

Critico, El

Víctor Tellez is jaded, emotionally repressed and arrogant. Not surprisingly, he is an influential but harsh film critic for a daily newspaper. Victor especially detests Hollywood romantic comedies until he meets Sofía, a spontaneous and vibrant woman. He finds himself going soft, and his movie reviews reflect this. El Critico is intelligent, funny, delightful and ultimately succumbs to the genre Víctor so derisively abhors. Love conquers all, even this cynical snob.

East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem

In the spirit of determined optimism legendary Israeli singer/songwriter David Broza pierces the divide with a new music album East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem. Broza’s vision brings him to the heart of the conflict, a divided Jerusalem where his musician friends, including Grammy-winning Steve Earle, Palestinian Israeli singer Mira Awad and Iraqi Israeli Yair Dalal, take a remarkable journey outside the political walls that is rich with musical improvisation and performance.

Flipping Out

Verité filmmaker Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, 5 Days) hangs out in India’s Himalayan foothills with some of the 30,000 young Israeli men and women who annually escape there, take drugs and often “flip out” after their military service. We also meet the growing band of Israeli social workers and barefoot rabbis who have followed the “lost generation” to their Shangri-La to keep them from going off the edge.

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.

Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection

FORGET BAGHDAD: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi ConnectionThe son of a Shi'ite emigrant family that fled Iraq for political reasons, Swiss film director Samir has created a brilliant tour-de-force in his new documentary FORGET BAGHDAD. This entertaining, ironic and visually stunning film essay is an exploration of the lives of Iraqi Jewish writers in Israel, former members of the Communist Party, in which Samir’s father was also a member.

The Hangman

Shalom Nagar is a Yemeni Jew living in Israel and working as a ritual butcher. He was also, as a young man, the prison guard and eventual executioner of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief who organized the transportation of Jews to the concentration camps. A fascinating and complex portrait of Nagar, an endearing and wise man whose simple, refreshing voice from the margins of Israeli society bears a profoundly humanistic message.

Harbour of Hope

In the spring of 1945 Irene, Ewa and Joe were among the nearly 30,000 survivors liberated from German concentration camps by the Red Cross and sent to the peaceful harbor town of Malmö, Sweden. Here they started life again. The survivors heartbreaking, yet life-affirming personal life journeys culminate in an emotionally powerful film about dealing with repressed wartime memories, the importance of a helping hand and finding a “harbor of hope.” [MINIGUIDE 72/70]

Here One Day

Nina Williams Leichter, the brilliant wife of a New York state senator, committed suicide by jumping from her apartment window. Years later, her daughter, filmmaker Kathy Leichter, returns to her parent’s home and discovers audiocassettes in which her mother reveals the extent of her mental anguish. This powerful personal statement threads together the disparate strands of Williams’ sorrow, ultimately becoming a moving evocation of life itself.

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

Preceded by Woody Before AllenAfter discovering the journals of his mysterious grandmother Maroussia, amiable English director Daniel Edelstyn sets off to Ukraine where he makes a startling discovery. In his family’s impoverished Russian village, he comes upon his great-grandfather’s vodka factory. Edelstyn returns to the UK with the wide-eyed ambition of importing his own brand of spirits and finds his life forever altered by the woman he never met.[MINIGUIDE 65/70]

Incessant Visions- Letters From an Architect

This artful documentary illuminates the life and work of German Jewish Expessionist architect Erich Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn’s story unfolds through letters exchanged with his wife Luise, both German Jewish emigres fleeing Nazism. Director Dror deftly juxtaposes the architect’s original drawings with contemporary views of his buildings, weaving in interviews with architects and the people who use these unique structures—a testament to the integrity and timelessness of visionary design.

The Kingdom of Survival

M.A. Littler’s film is one part travelogue and one part paean to eight radical thinkers—including Noam Chomsky, Joe Bageant and Bob Meisenbach—who have tried to make the world a better place. If you are uncomfortable with questioning capitalism, then stay home and check your investments online. If you are interested in questioning authority as a form of tikkun olam, then this beautifully filmed exploration of ideas is for you. [MINIGUIDE 70/70]

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.

My Dad is Baryshnikov

Preceded by Catherine the GreatIn 1986 Moscow, Boris Fishkin is a scrawny and struggling 14-year-old student at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy with a sideline selling Soviet kitsch on the black market, when a bootleg video convinces him he is actually the gifted child of the great Mikhail Baryshnikov—a dose of patrimonial chutzpah that does wonders. But is Fishkin really the Soviet Billy Elliot? Time will tell in this charming comedy of underdogs and new beginnings. [MINIGUIDE 71/70)

My Fantasia

The Darwish brothers are Iraqi Jews who run an Israeli menorah factory. Beyond that, nothing is simple in My Fantasia as the filmmaker probes the family secrets of his silent father and quirky uncles.

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.

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