2000 Archives

Date	Time	Film
Saturday, May 13	9:00 PM	More Precious Than Pearls followed by A Letter Without Words
Sunday, May 14	1:00 PM	In Our Own Hands
Sunday, May 14	3:00 PM	Leon the Pig Farmer
Sunday, May 14	5:00 PM	After the End of the World
Sunday, May 14	8:00 PM	Comedian Harmonists
Monday, May 15	8:00 PM	More Precious Than Pearls followed by A Letter Without Words
Tuesday, May 16	8:00 PM	Genesis
Wednesday, May 17	8:00 PM	Love At First Sight
Thursday, May 18	8:00 PM	After the End of the World
Saturday, May 20	9:00 PM	Comedian Harmonists
Sunday, May 21	1:00 PM	Leon the Pig Farmer
Sunday, May 21	3:00 PM	In Our Own Hands
Sunday, May 21	5:00 PM	Love At First Sight
Sunday, May 21	8:00 PM	Liberty Heights

Films & Synopses

A Letter Without Words
USA, 1998, 62 minutes, English and German with English subtitles
Director: Lisa Lewenz

Defiant amateur filmmaker Ella Arnhold Lewenz used some of the earliest known colour movie-film to document life in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. Her footage recorded the carefree life of a wealthy, cultured family, providing a fascinating glimpse of the German-Jewish aristocracy. Ella's everyday scenes include images of Albert Einstein, Rabbi Leo Baeck, actress Brigitte Helm and other future exiles at parties. She also documented the elaborate spectacles the Nazis staged during their rapid take-over of Germany.

Still, Ella kept her wits about her. She used her position of privilege to secure safe passage to America and escape the fate of the less fortunate millions. The films sat in an attic until 1981, when her granddaughter, director Lisa Lewenz, discovered them and began a unique inter-generational collaboration. Grandmother and granddaughter's footage are woven into a complex juxtaposition of two different historical periods and cultures. A Letter Without Words is not only a moving first-person account of family history, it is an excavation of German Jewish identity and memory.

After the End of the World
Bulgaria, 1999, 109 minutes, Bulgarian, Greek, Romani and Turkish with English subtitles
Director: Ivan Nichev

Albert Cohen, an Israeli historian of the Byzantine period, flies to a professional conference in Bulgaria. Here he meets Araksi, an Armenian piano instructor and his first love from the days when Bulgarians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Romanians and Turks lived together peacefully in the southern Bulgarian town of Plovdiv. During those distant days, the Orthodox Priest Isai, the Rabbi Ben David and the Mullah Ibrahim knew that they were praying to the same God. All three men of the cloth were also in love with the same woman, Zulfie, of Turkish extraction. This idyll was destroyed by the socialist regime. The Turks and Romanians were resettled elsewhere, the Jews left for Israel, and Araksi's family was detained after they tried to flee to Paris. Despite the long years of separation, the relations between Albert and Araksi are still warm. But the landscape of their childhood remains locked in photos of Costas, an old Greek who still lives in Plovdiv. While Albert meets his old friends, a lawyer working for the mafia does everything possible to take control of Albert's old family home.

Comedian Harmonists
Germany/Austria, 1997, 126 minutes, German with English subtitles
Director: Joseph Vilsmaier

Life in Berlin in 1927 was overshadowed by deep economic crisis and a drastic rise in unemployment. The flourishing cinematic and theatre productions turned the city into the cultural capital of the world. Harry Frommermann, a talented, penniless musician, decides, in a sudden moment of inspiration, to start a vocal group that will specialise in popular repertoire. Many tens of singers answer his ad, all crowding together in the staircase leading up to the tiny, frozen attic in which he lives, but none fit the bill. His despair vanishes at the moment Robert Biberti, an ambitious cafe singer, bursts in. Soon, a former opera singer from Poland, a former Bulgarian army officer, and a 19-year-old pianist join the group. Long months of rehearsals, unavoidable tensions, then the first concert - a dizzying success which leads to a crowded performance schedule. Popularity brings blindness to the political changes taking place at the time in Germany. The official anti-Semitic policy of the Nazi Party doesn't create a panic among the Jewish members of the group, nor does the authorities' unequivocal ultimatum.

Genesis
France/Mali, 1998, 100 minutes, Bambara with English subtitles
Director: Cheick Oumar Sissoko

The desert plains of Mali are the setting for this breathtakingly beautiful epic based on stories from Genesis about the lives of the Patriarch Jacob and his family. Three clans - Jacob's herders, Esau's hunters and Hamor's farmers - are wracked by jealousy, theft, and murder. Starring the great African stage actor Sotigui Kouyate as Jacob and world-famous singer Salif Keita as his brother Esau, the film, with its deep roots in African history and culture, offers a distinctly African perspective on nationalist conflicts, ethnic strife, and religious intolerance. Its message is universal and its characters, archetypes. For anyone who grew up on Hollywood versions of the Bible, Genesis offers a unique cinematic experience.

In Our Own Hands: The Hidden Story of the Jewish Brigade in World War II
USA, 1998, 84 minutes, English and Hebrew with English subtitles
Director: Chuck Olin

Lively interviews and rare archival footage tell the story of a rag-tag group of Jewish volunteers from Palestine who battled to become a fighting unit in the British army. Many of them had narrowly escaped Hitler, leaving friends and family behind. In 1945, they entered combat against the Germans in Northern Italy, but that is where the story begins.

Now in their seventies and eighties, brigade veterans vividly recall unsanctioned clandestine operations to find Jewish survivors and spirit them away to southern Italy, where ships to Palestine awaited. These "ordinary Jewish boys" stole trucks, weapons and ammunition out of British war depots, smuggled arms to Palestine and organised a covert operation to hunt down former Gestapo and SS officers.

The film reveals the intricate political manoeuvring of Zionist leaders who were able to convince British authorities first to agree to a Jewish fighting unit and secondly to allow it to fly the blue and white flag that was later to become the Israeli flag. Veterans of the Jewish Brigade later fought in the Israeli war of independence where they helped establish the nucleus of an army -- the Israeli Defence Forces.

Leon the Pig Farmer
UK, 1993, 98 minutes, English
Director: Gary Sinyor and Vadim Jean

An irreverent comedy from the production company of Monty Python's Eric Idle, Leon the Pig Farmer is considered a cult classic in Europe. The movie's zany story is set in motion when Leon Geller, a sensitive Jewish boy from London, accidentally learns that he is the product of artificial insemination. Leon's search for his biological parents leads him to the still more startling discovery of a sperm bank mix-up proving that he is the son of a Yorkshire pig farmer. The inevitable confusion results in a comic Jewish identity crisis.

Liberty Heights
USA, 1999, 100 minutes, English
Director: Barry Levinson

The period is 1954 in the Jewish neighbourhood of Liberty Heights in Baltimore. It is Levinson's personal homage to growing up Jewish under Eisenhower, school desegregation, and rock and roll. From one Rosh Hashanah to the next, the world is changing: Jews meet non-Jews, whites meet blacks, burlesque meets television, numbers meet the lotteries. Nate Kurtzman (Joe Mantegna) is the father who happens to run numbers. He also owns a dying burlesque house. Ben (Ben Foster) and Van (Adrien Brody) are Nate's two sons. Bebe Neuwirth plays Ada, the mother. While sensitive high school student Ben falls for Sylvia, a black classmate, and ventures into the unknown world of black neighbourhoods and families, college student Van falls for Dubbie, a stereotype of the white, Protestant, country club member.

Love At Second Sight
Israel, 1998, 90 minutes, Hebrew with English subtitles
Director: Michal Bat-Adam

After photographing a dramatic situation on the streets of Tel Aviv where a man is threatening to jump off a roof, Nina, 20, a news photographer becomes infatuated with the image of a young man she accidentally captures on film in the crowd. Without knowing why, she begins to search for him. As the search becomes an obsession, her friends and colleagues try in vain to dissuade her, but Nina has fallen in love with the face in her photograph and cannot live without finding him. The film also parallels a tender past relationship with her photographer grandfather who was her confidant and mentor.

More Precious Than Pearls
USA, 1998, 13 minutes, English
Director: Robert Friedman

Faith after the Holocaust is a theme that is rarely touched upon in Holocaust-related documentaries, let alone examined deeply. This short documentary film attempts to explore, in an engaging and compelling manner the complex emotional, intellectual and spiritual struggles faced by a survivor of Nazi concentration camps who immigrated to America after the war (via Northern Ireland and London). The film examines how he succeeded in achieving self-renewal as a human being and as a committed Jew, without forgetting the vivid, yet, incomprehensibly painful memories of the past, obscuring them from those around him or suffering from paralysing depression or anxiety.

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