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Cinegogue Sessions
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Filtered By: Ya Clear All

Love is Thicker Than Water

In this modern-day retelling of the story of Romeo and Juliet, Arthur is a bike messenger from a working-class Welsh mining town and Vida is a cellist and daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from London. Their hipster romance takes on gratifying depth when their families—and their divergent backgrounds—come into play. The film feels simultaneously polished and experimental as it delicately explores hard questions about faith, love and devotion.

The Matchmaker (2010)

An affectionate, bittersweet feature set in 1960s Haifa: Teenager Arik Burstein’s summer vacation explodes with novel attractions, including the sexy Iraqi-Jewish-American niece of his best friend and a seedy downtown movie theater run by Sylvia and a group of Jewish dwarfs who met at Auschwitz. But it is Yankele Bride—matchmaker, shady businessman and Holocaust survivor—who captivates Arik in Avi Nesher’s vibrant mosaic about coming of age and coming to terms with the past.

Memoir of War

In Nazi-occupied Paris, a young Marguerite Duras strikes up a delicate, high stakes entanglement with a Vichy collaborator.

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]

Netizens

This crucial and compelling doc draws connections between online harassment and older forms of persecution.

Off White Lies

Preceded by B-BoyThough set during the Second Lebanon War of 2006, this coming-of-age story from Israeli director Maya Kenig evokes the offbeat charms of Juno. Libby, a shy 13-year-old California resident, is sent to live with her father in Israel, only to discover that he’s a well-intentioned sham. Launched on a modern-day quixotic adventure, they discover a shared talent for telling “off-white lies.” Kenig’s laconic storytelling highlights her actors’ considerable gifts. [MINIGUIDE 69/70]

On Her Shoulders

Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi refugee and reluctant activist is the subject of this critically acclaimed documentary.

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.

Out in the Dark

When a handsome Palestinian grad student meets a charming Tel Aviv lawyer at a gay nightclub, it sets in motion both a cross-border love affair as well as a tense drama: Will Nimr’s militant brother in Ramallah discover his secret life? Can Roy’s connections keep Nimr from being deported? Out in the Dark is a taut tale of dangerous love played against a backdrop of the Middle East conflict.

Paradise

A compelling tale of loss, betrayal and redemption, Andrei Konchalovsky’s bold, black-and-white World War II drama won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion and was Russia’s entry in the 2017 Academy Awards. Three lives fatefully intersect when Russian countess Olga is arrested for sheltering two Jewish boys in Nazi-occupied France. Echoing the intensity of Laszlo Nemes Son of Saul, Konchalovsky’s deeply spiritual vision is a major contribution to Holocaust cinema.

Raise the Roof

In the early 2000s, two professors were captivated by a series of now vanished but once resplendent synagogues whose painted interiors captured the color of Jewish life in 18th-century Poland. Determined to restore the splendor of these wooden structures, the husband-and-wife team recruited 300 young artists and students to reconstruct a life-sized model of one such synagogue. Raise the Roof tracks the labor and love that illuminate a glorious piece of Jewish history.

Red Cow

When the beautiful Yael arrives in an East Jerusalem settlement, Benny discovers her suppressed lustful desires.

Red Trees

The Willers were one of only 12 Jewish families to survive the Nazi occupation of Prague. More remarkably, they survived openly as Jews. Red Trees is an exquisitely filmed essay that chronicles the family’s life in the Czech Republic, their narrow escape from the death camps and eventual emigration to Brazil; it is both a testament to the human will to survive as well as a celebration of diversity and acceptance.

Restoration

Yakov Fidelman struggles to hold on to the antique restoration workshop that has been his life’s work. After his longtime business partner dies, Fidelman rejects his estranged son Noah’s idea to close the business and build an apartment complex on the site. Anchored by Sasson Gabay’s (The Band’s Visit) mesmerizing performance, Yossi Madmony’s first feature yields a complex set of frayed character relations for which restoration proves an apt metaphor. [MINIGUIDE 70/70]

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.

Sarah's Key

About This Film

Six Million and One

Israeli filmmaker David Fisher initiates a road trip that becomes an extraordinary family psychodrama for his siblings at the site of the World War II concentration camp where their father Joseph was interned as a young boy. Traveling in a van they laugh at themselves and question their own willingness to go deeper into their family legacy. Stunningly beautiful forests and meadows silently conceal the reality of their father’s untold story. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

Snails in the Rain

In the summer of 1989 in Tel Aviv the brawny linguistics student Boaz is rattled when he receives a letter from a secret male admirer. With deeply internalized homophobia, Boaz both wildly anticipates and dreads the letters. Frustration bubbles to the surface and the tensions grows in director Yariv Mozer’s masterful first narrative feature marked by intimate flashbacks and remarkable performances by lead actors Yoav Reuveni and Moran Rosenblatt.

Standing Up, Falling Down

An unlikely, multigenerational friendship between a failed comedian and a charming, alcoholic dermatologist helps both confront long-simmering regrets in this warm-hearted buddy comedy.

Til Kingdom Come

Millions of American Evangelicals are praying for the State of Israel. This fascinating film exposes the controversial bond between Evangelicals and Jews, in a story of faith, power and money, revealing how messianic motivations are intersecting with an apocalyptic worldview that is insistently reshaping American foreign policy toward Israel.

Tiny Tim: King For A Day

The story about the outcast Herbert Khaury’s rise to stardom as Tiny Tim is the ultimate fairytale. And so is his downfall. Either considered a freak or a genius, Tiny Tim left no one unaffected.

Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me | Opening Night at the Concord Drive-In

Throughout the year we search the universe for films that reflect the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam- repairing the world through one’s actions. This year we only had to look in our backyard. Barbara Lee, the US Representative for California’s 13th District, has spent her life fighting inequality and racism, uplifting the stories of those falling through the cracks and speaking truth to power. The current protests and reactions to George Floyd’s death has only elevated her visibility in Congress and the country as she has called for a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission to confront the legacy of slavery and racism in the U.S. and propose ways forward.

Voyage of the Damned

Haunting in its relevance for today’s refugee crisis, this star-studded 1976 film evokes the hopes and fears of a people uprooted from their homes en route to a promised land on the MS St. Louis, the ship that brought 937 Jews escaping Germany on the eve of the Shoah in 1939 to the shores of Cuba, where they are forbidden to disembark (only to then be similarly rejected by the United States and Canada)

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