Film Categories: Jewish

  • Both Sides of the Wire

    A documentary which chronicles the experiences of German and Austrian refugees, the majority of whom were Jewish. They came to England to escape Nazi oppression, only to be deported and interned in Canada as “dangerous aliens” in 1940. What has become of them 50 years later?

  • Walnut Tree, The

    As a follow-up to the award-winning “Zyklon Portrait,” “The Walnut Tree” offers a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches to examine Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history. Three girls in Dutch costumes stand posing for their father. This fleeting moment, made static in a photograph, is contrasted with the moving imagery of railway tracks – tracks that carried the death transports – now blurred with memory and time. In a matter-of-fact tone, Schogt’s mother describes how her parents tore several pictures out of the family albums when they fled the Nazis in 1943. The…

  • Silent Song

    “Silent Song” brings new life to a remarkable piece of 1945 footage found by chance in an archive. “Silent Song” completes a deeply personal trilogy on family history and Holocaust memory. The first two films of the trilogy, “Zyklon Portrait” (13min. 1999) and “The Walnut Tree” (11min. 2000) have been seen in 20 countries around the globe, garnering numerous awards. In the pandemonium of the liberation of Nazi concentration camp Dachau, a U.S. army cameraman filmed a young boy playing the accordian. This strangely poetic moment offers an unusual contrast to the all-too-familiar WWII liberation images of emaciated prisoners in…

  • Once

    “Once” is a film about language, loss, and the construction of memory through language. Through voiceovers and fragmented footage, the characters in “Once” tell how they have come to study language in an attempt to relocate themselves at particular junctures in their lives. They describe their desire to learn Yiddish, a language they have speculative connections to or memories of. Their distance from the language and its intrinsic power to link them to an identity seems to increase their appetites for this language lost. Yiddish, it appears, while providing the elements of language, also represents a loss for, and only…

  • In Search of Joy

    A Celebration of the Human Spirit. This half-hour documentary takes the viewer on a journey into the lives of individuals of diverse ages, cultures, and occupations who offer their perspectives and experiences of joy. In the midst of their search, both filmmakers suffer within one month the sudden death of both their fathers. They unintentionally become part of the film as they discover through their loss that one cannot experience true joy without responding honestly to pain. “In Search of Joy” is an interweaving of interviews, evocative images, and original music of several traditions, embracing a broad range of the…

  • Memories That Sing

    “Memories That Sing” is how filmmaker Isabel Fryszberg captures the unsung stories and songs of her mother, just before her unexpected death. She reveals the songs and stories of her mother’s childhood in Poland just before the Holocaust. At the end Fryszberg becomes the song and story of her mother’s forgotten world.

  • All U Can Eat

    Increasingly separated from his place of birth, a 70-year-old Jewish native of Quebec fuses personal and historical memory to create a sense of belonging.

  • My Mother at the Consulate

    “My Mother at the Consulate” is a montage-based exploration of absence and presence and the passage of time. It is an addition to a series of personal pieces about the filmmaker’s mother.

  • Past Perfect

    “Past Perfect” is a spirited meditation on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of (Jewish) history as conveyed through sightseeing tours of “Jewish” Poland, a grandmother’s recollection of life in America during War II, and memoir-like “last moments” of a great aunt believed to have died in Treblinka. Shot almost entirely in contemporary Poland, “Past Perfect” lyrically portrays the relentless yet ultimately futile attempt to resuscitate a history literally gone up in smoke. “It is not entirely out of line to call ‘Past Perfect’- filmmaker Cynthia Madansky’s meditation on Jewish history, notably the Shoah – spirited and darkly amusing. After all, Madansky’s…

  • Surviving Memory

    “Surviving Memory” is a film about the role of loss in the formation of identity. It is a narrative intercut with documentary fragments of political actions, which connect the various characters to event through collective memory. Through autobiographical spoken texts, the narrator relays fragments of a relationship between two Jewish women. The fragmented texts speak of the relation between these women as well as recounting various past and contemporary historical events of fascist and neo-Nazi activity (and resistance), Lesbian/Gay rights, Pro-Choice and AIDS demonstrations. While these instances tell a personal/political story about loss, they are also meant to elucidate the…