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Filtered By: 2008 Clear All

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

It plays like a mockumentary—think This Is Spinal Tap in the frozen North—but this wonderful and often hilarious documentary follows the antics, on- and offstage, of a once famous Canadian heavy metal band, Anvil, founded in the 1970s by two Toronto school friends (and nice Jewish boys). Anvil had a megahit album in 1982, influencing a generation of metal bands; then, missteps and struggles. But Anvil rocks on.

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jewish resistance fighter, an optimist in the face of dire circumstances and a poet. Roberta Grossman’s first-rate documentary Blessed Is the Match, narrated by three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, is a paean to Hannah Senesh’s courage and creativity. This inspirational film features gorgeous images of parachutes floating gracefully in the air, like Senesh’s poem “Blessed Is the Match,” written days before her capture by the Nazis.

Four Questions For a Rabbi

Four Questions For a Rabbi

About This Film

Before 1960, predominantly Jewish Weequahic High School in Newark, NJ, graduated some of the top students in the country. By 2000, the school had devolved into a breeding ground for gang violence in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities. Heart of Stone is a moving portrait of a bold principal who reaches into the school’s successful past to give his students a hopeful future.

Filmmaker Joanna Rudnick was 27 years old when she discovered she had BRCA—a genetic mutation that is particularly high among Ashkenazi Jewish women. We join Rudnick as she struggles with an impossible decision—whether to remove her healthy breasts and ovaries or risk a staggeringly high likelihood of developing a deadly cancer. The result is a powerful and gripping documentary that is as life-affirming as it is heartbreaking.

Israel’s 2008 box office hit focuses on the Levis, a large, fun-loving family—at times quirky, but mostly typical. As the naive days of the early 1980s wane, they encounter concurrent tragedies: a car accident that leaves the father wheelchair bound and the uneasy distancing of once-inseparable twins. When one of the sons joins a commando unit fighting in the nationally polarizing war with Lebanon, the Levis’ personal struggles become indelibly intertwined with Israel’s own.

Oscar-winning animator Adam Elliot’s bittersweet comic fable of an unlikely yet extraordinary friendship between a middle-aged, obese New York Jew with Asperger’s syndrome and his eight-year-old pen pal from Australia. Brought to life by the bravura voice work of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, Mary and Max is a poignant tale of a friendship between oddballs at their wits’ end with the world, but at peace with each other.

Still from Milk

In 1972, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) and his then-lover Scott Smith leave New York for San Francisco, with Milk determined to accomplish something meaningful in his life.

Waltz with Bashir thumbnail

Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir This devastating animated documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman is a kind of fictionalized documentary using rotoscope-animation techniques with live action footage to depict Folman's search for the traumatic lost memories of his experiences as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.

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.

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