Film Categories: Jewish

  • Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging

    “Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory…

  • Everything’s for You

    “Everything’s for You” reflects the filmmaker’s relationship with his deceased father, a man who survived both the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. The film utilizes a combination of previously shot material (1974-78), family photographs, archival footage, printed footage, cell animation sequences (by Emily Hubley), and computer graphics to create a mosaic, a meditation on filial relationships. Dialogue is in both Yiddish and English. “… Ravett makes old snapshots flicker like candles in the wind. Archival footage of the Lodz ghetto appears in ethereal negative. The film is composed of dreamlike fragments and traces, accompanied by Ravett’s incantatory interrogation of these mute…

  • Anna and Ariel

    A short drama about loss, friendship and memory. This film presents a crucial fragment from the connecting lives of two characters. Anna is an elderly woman of European Jewish origin, who as a child witnessed a family tragedy. Over time she has learned to conceal her sadness from everyone including herself. Ariel is a young Canadian-born woman who has recently moved into Anna’s building. When Ariel comes across a hidden item from Anna’s childhood, Anna must acknowledge her past. This discovery leads to a breakthrough in the friendship between the two women.

  • David In Brief

    The story of David and Goliath is one of the oldest narratives of all time. The legend continues to resonate with individuals and cultures from around the world and offers a perspective that everyone has the power to overcome impossible situations, even when the odds of failure are high. For years, I hid from my own Goliath: personal struggles with sexual identity and, questioning who I was as an individual. Like so many others, I had to risk relationships and acceptance to be the man I wanted to be. I wanted to hear how others, with larger-than-life obstacles, faced their…

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…

  • aw • rah • nyoosh

    A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother’s experience at a labor camp during the holocaust. As they get drawn into a world of the grandmother’s romance, they begin to lose control of their imaginations. “The son installs the camera, the father stands on the sofa. They are preparing to begin an intergenerational dialogue based on the newspaper that their mother and grandmother, Sari, held in the 40s, during his deportation. aw • rah • nyoosh [aranyos] , from Ben Neufeld, takes time to set up; the viewer takes time to understand the contract that the…

  • Building History: The Story of Benjamin Brown

    A portrait of Toronto’s first practicing Jewish architect. Working at a time of anti-Semitism in the city, Benjamin Brown’s buildings stand as a testament to Toronto’s cultural and industrial history.

  • The Shiva Callers

    When a closeted woman’s girlfriend shows up unexpectedly to her grandfather’s shiva, she must do anything in her power to stop her family from finding out.

  • Holding Hands with Ilse

    “Holding Hands With Ilse” is a moving documentary about the search for the German teenage girl who took care of the filmmaker between 1948-1950 in Walbrzych, Poland where he was born. Knowing only her first name and circulating a small photograph taken in 1950 of the two, the director explores the urban landscapes of western Poland and the journey involved in their unexpected reunion that recently took place in Ibbenbüren, Germany. Filmed in the USA, Poland and Germany.

  • THREE BORDERS

    “Three Borders” is a found-footage film reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). It consists of family photos of the artist and other anonymous found (family) photos. In the style of Magic Realism, the video narrates anecdotes from the families of Alisa Berger’s Jewish father and her North Korean mother. The ten stories narrate the meeting between Koreans and Jews from Galicia. They address the overcoming or the construction of inner, outer, national, ethnic, spiritual or emotional borders which span three generations.