The Festival is pleased to return to CineArts at Palo Alto Square for a terrific lineup of films on the Peninsula. Browse the select Palo Alto highlights below or click here to explore the whole Peninsula schedule. Can't choose just a few films? See them all with a Palo Alto Pass!
Valid for all shows at the CineArts Theatre in Palo Alto.
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Riveting from the first frame to the last, Fanny’s Journey is the true and absorbing story of a 13-year-old girl who is separated from her parents in Nazi-occupied France. Fanny is brave and determined and leads her younger sisters and a group of Jewish children towards sanctuary in Switzerland. Expertly directed and well acted, the film emphasizes the resilience of these young heroes and is especially relevant in the present moment.
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When you first catch sight of the light in her eyes, it is hard to imagine that Sonia Warshawski lived through one of the darkest periods of human history. Yet this 92-year-old, who drives herself to her tailoring business six days a week with a set of brightly painted fingernails and an equally vibrant smile, was forced to come of age in Auschwitz and now shares her story with school children and prisoners alike.
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Tadeusz Goldberg is having a midlife crisis . . . at the age of 90. He misses the loves of his youth and hates the libido-suppressing medication he must take to avoid memory loss and confusion. A Polish communist who fought against Franco in Spain, he later fled to exile in Buenos Aires, and became an adored chess champion. Defying clueless doctors and relatives, Tadeusz wonders if he can ever recapture the romance of his youth.
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“After World War II approximately 4,000 Jews stayed in Germany. Later, none of them could explain to their children why,” we learn in Sam Gabarski’s Bye Bye Germany. This stylized, humor-laced drama devotes itself to answering this question by portraying the lives of a sundry group of survivors who remain in Germany immediately after liberation and are led by a charismatic, top hat–wearing jokester (Run Lola Run’s masterfully expressive Moritz Bleibtreu).
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In this dry, bitingly funny satire set in Nazareth, Ramallah and Sweden, a long-married Palestinian couple communicates through an elaborate series of mutually inflicted micro-aggressions. An official selection for the Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Maha Haj’s deftly insightful debut is both a timeless portrait of domestic discontent as well as a thoroughly contemporary and droll look at the bemusing indignities of border checkpoints, communications technology and impulsive romance.
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Notorious for a nude scene in the 1933 film Ecstasy, Hedy Lamarr became a sex symbol for the ages and achieved top stardom in Hollywood. But her deeper passion had to do with mechanics and technology. She was obsessed with creating useful inventions to benefit mankind, and her inventions were predecessors of wi-fi, bluetooth and cell phones. Spurned as too beautiful to be smart, she nonetheless upended stereotypes and serves as a role model to this day.
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Harry Schein, a Jewish refugee from Austria, became Sweden’s “intellectual playboy.” Schein revolutionized the Swedish film industry as a millionaire careerist who had obtained his wealth through a water treatment facility. This eloquent cataloguing of Sweden’s 20th century cultural landscape is the backdrop for the more disturbing accounting of the historical and personal events that shaped Schein’s meteoric rise and tragic fall as he struggled to find his own identity.
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