New York Jewish Film Festival

The New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) is an annual festival that features a wide array of international films exploring the Jewish experience. The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center work in partnership to present the NYJFF every January. Since its creation in 1992, the festival has more than doubled in size and scope. Screenings are typically followed by discussions with directors, actors and film experts. Audience participation is encouraged.

The festival celebrates the richness and diversity of the Jewish experience and explores Jewish identity. The NYJFF seeks to broaden perceptions of the Jewish experience from a multitude of perspectives and nationalities. The New York Jewish Film Festival presents an opportunity to discover new and challenging films that are often otherwise hard to find. The 21st annual festival will take place in January, 2012.

The Huffington Post writes: “The festival’s variety is impressive—and for viewers, it’s a cultural education.”^[1]

Festival Highlights

It is co-presented by The Jewish Museum (New York) Key works and noteworthy presentations of the past few years have included:

• The screening of Nowhere in Africa (2003 Festival), directed by Caroline Link, which won an Academy Award in 2002 for Best Foreign Language Film.
• The N.Y. premiere of Ajami (2010 Festival), directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, which was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
• The World premiere of Strangers No More (2011 Festival), a short film directed by Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon, and nominated for an Academy Award.
• The N.Y. premiere of Mahler on the Couch (2011 Festival), directed by father-son duo Percy Adlon and Felix Adlon, about a discussion between Mahler and Freud about creativity and passion.
• The N.Y. premiere of The Matchmaker (2011 Festival), directed by Avi Nesher, about a teenager’s struggle with love and identity, working for a matchmaker and Holocaust survivor in Haifa.
• The U. S. premiere of Saviors in the Night (2010 Festival), Ludi Boeken’s WWII drama, based on the memoir of Marga Spiegel, about German farmers who risked their lives to hide a Jewish family.
• The N.Y. premiere of Within the Whirlwind (2010 Festival), about the life of Jewish poet Evgenia Ginzburg, who survived 10 years in a Siberian gulag; directed by Oscar-winner Marleen Gorris (Antonia’s Line) and featuring actress Emily Watson.
• The World premiere of Villa Jasmin (2008 Festival), Ferid Boughedir’s adaptation of Serge Moati’s novel about a Tunisian-born Jew who takes his Parisian wife to Tunisia (French and Arabic).
• Ten new Israeli films (2008 Festival) including the U.S. premiere of Itamar Alcalay’s Stefan Braun; N.Y. premiere of Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort; and Oded Davidoff’s Someone to Run With.
• The U.S. Premiere of My Mexican Shiva (2007 Festival), a comedy by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Springall in which family and friends mourn the passing of a much-beloved patriarch.

Additional noteworthy films have included:

• Michael Haneke’s The Castle (1998 Festival)
• Alain Resnais’s Stavisky (1993 Festival)
• Jeroen Krabbé’s Left Luggage (1999 Festival), featuring Maximillian Schell and Isabella Rossellini
• Andrea Frazzi and Antonio Frazzi’s The Sky is Falling (Il Cielo Cade) (2001 Festival), featuring Isabella Rossellini and Jeroen Krabbé
• Pierre Grimblat’s Lisa (2001 Festival), featuring Jeanne Moreau and Marion Cotillard

History

The birth of the NYJFF was linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union. On the heels of liberation, a torrent of cinematic work—new films by young directors as well as long-suppressed older works—flooded into the West. Recognizing an extraordinary opportunity to bring untold stories to New York audiences for the first time, the New York Jewish Film Festival was launched in January, 1992 in a lasting partnership with The Film Society of Lincoln Center. 500 films from 36 countries and over 300 premieres later, the NYJFF marked its 20th anniversary in 2011. The festival includes feature-length and short films, documentaries, and animated and experimental films.

Special Presentations

The Festival has also featured sidebar presentations such as premieres of restored archival prints and screenings of rarely-viewed films. The 2011 Festival presented three restored films: Lies My Father Told Me (dir. Ján Kádar), a 1975 film about a boy living in a Montreal Jewish community in the 1920s; the 1956 film Singing in the Dark (dir. Max Nosseck), one of the first American feature films to dramatize the Holocaust, starring Moishe Oysher as a concentration camp survivor; and the 1930 Tevye (dir. Maurice Schwartz), restored with new English subtitles.

The 2010 Festival presented N.Y. premieres of restored prints of Falk Harnack’s The Axe Of Wandsbek (based on Arnold Zweig’s novel) about a man who was a paid executioner for the Nazis; and Henry Lynn’s classic 1935 Yiddish melodrama, Bar Mitzvah, which features vaudeville jokes, songs, and dancing, and stars legendary actor Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance.

References

1. ^ Fern Siegel, New York Jewish Film Festival, The Huffington Post,01/12/11.

External links

• Official website