"That night I just remember running. No time to catch your breath, just running, because you want to be gone from the village before the sun comes up." -Avishai Mekonen, 400 MILES TO FREEDOM. In 1984, the Beta Israel, a secluded 2,500-year-old community of observant Jews in the northern Ethiopian mountains, fled a dictatorship and began a secret and dangerous journey of escape. Co-director Avishai Mekonen, then 10 years old, was among them. In this...

A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and rn. The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American...

What happens when a rabbinical matchmaker, a Hasidic couple and a single person explore the precise meaning of humanity's most powerful word? Using downright silliness, KOSHER LOVE reveals that we're all the same in our search for love.. “... A fascinatingly quirky, thought-provoking examination of the meaning of love." - Flare

A look into the complex and contradictory personality of Yossef Nachmani, the man largely responsible for the first Zionist settlements in the Galilee. As director of the Jewish National Fund office in the Galilee, Nachmani acquired as much land from Arabs as possible to establish Jewish settlements upon it. The film focuses on events in Tiberius, Nachmani's hometown, a mixed community where Arabs and Jews coexisted harmoniously. Nachmani left behind...

Narrated by Martha Teichner, the film follows the trajectory of Jewish American life from the earliest arrivals in the mid-17th century through the impact of the Nazi regime in World War II, the creation of Israel, and the new challenges of 21st century assimilation.. Explore the personal stories many faced as they migrated to America, whether for economic opportunity or to escape persecution.

A small municipality in Montreal finds two very different cultures living side by side: Hassidic Jews and their mostly French-speaking neighbors. Intent on preserving their religious traditions, the Hassidim meet outsiders with a kind of protective wall. Misunderstanding the Hassidic way of life, many of the French residents respond to their neighbors with a mixture of mistrust, frustration and curiosity. Faced with a growing transformation of their...

From Israel's most important filmaker, Carmel is Amos Gitai's (Kadosh, Kippur) deeply personal and resonant meditation on Jewish and Israeli identity. Using both fiction and documentary techniques, Gitai links his family history to ancient history. Through exquisitely composed long takes, he re-enacts the Jewish-Roman wars that began in 66 A.D. , and contrasts them to the young soldiers enlisting in Israel's army today, including his own son, making...

The Warsaw Ghetto 1940-1943 is documentary project that features three films. The main film is 912 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto (37 min.), and the two short ones are Children in the Ghetto and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. These films were created for the Jewish Historical Institute as part of its permanent exhibit on the fate of Warsaw's Jews during the period from 1939 to 1945. They present the daily lives and deaths of those imprisoned in the ghetto, their...

Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, 3 million three hundred thousand Jews lived in Poland ­ By 1945 only 300,000 survived. Of the survivors, approximately 80% escaped the Holocaust as a result of Stalin’s deportation deep into the Soviet Union. This film tells the story of seven deportees, who in 1940 were sent to Gulag labor camps.. In 1940, a year before the Nazis started deporting Jews to death camps, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation...

In the spirit of Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir les Enfants” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” the Emmy Award-winning documentary “The Children of Chabannes” has been called “a moving record of the unassuming, uncompromising heroism of ordinary people” (New York Times) and “one of the most heartening Holocaust films ever made: splendid, informative and emotionally involving.” (Los Angeles Times). “The Children of Chabannes”...