The 12th Festival
November 29 - December 9, 2001
News, 10/09/2001
What's
in Store for WJFF 12
The 12th Washington Jewish Film Festival: An Exhibition of International Cinema
November is just around
the corner and you know what that means: The Washington Jewish Film Festival:
An Exhibition of International Cinema is on the way. Mark your calendars,
boot up your Palm Pilots and don't forget these dates: The 12th Washington
Jewish Film Festival opens on Thursday, November 29th at the historic Lincoln
Theatre, located in the heart of Washington DC, and closes on Sunday,
December 9th, 2001.
Now in our 12th year, this year's Festival promises to the best yet, with
documentaries that will stir the mind, dramas sure to warm the soul, and short
films that'll keep even those with the shortest attention span riveted in
their seats!
Here's a sneak preview of what you'll see at The Lincoln Theatre, the DCJCC's Cecile Goldman Theater and other satellite venues throughout DC:
In the stylish film Taking Wing, the ruggedly handsome Clement Sibony (from Dad on the Run) stars as Stan Keller, a scrappy Parisian youth who is determined become an actor. Defying his Orthodox parents' wishes, Stan quits his job at the family butchery, drops out of high school, and applies to a drama academy. His audition monologue, a matchless interpretation of Al Pacino's speech from The Godfather Part II ("Kay, did you think I'd let you take my children?"), wins him entry to the school but his travails have just begun. Director Steve Suissa's autobiographical film immerses the viewer in a world accented by the love of theater, film and the art of acting.
50 female cadets in training for the prestigious Israeli Women Field Officers School are documented over a grueling five month period in Company Jasmine, Director Yael Katzir's superb in-the-trenches documentary.
In the beautiful summer of 1932, writer/actor Kurt and his girlfriend, Lydia, travel to Gripsholm Castle in Sweden for a holiday. Joined by flyboy Karlchen and seductive cabaret singer Billie, the lovers soon see their idyllic summer fade away as they learn that the German army plans to prosecute Kurt for his anti-militarist writings. Based upon the semi-autobiographical novel Schloss Gripsholm by renowned Jewish author Kurt Tucholsky, Gripsholm is a sensually hewn period piece that immersed the viewer in the time just before the second World War.
A unique, bittersweet epic, The Komediant is a look at the history of Yiddish theater through the story of the marvelous Burstein family. Brimming with Yiddish culture, music and song, Director Arnon Goldfinger's film charts the family on their amazing journey from Europe, through Israel and South America all the way to New York's Second Avenue.
Director Sandi Simcha Dubowski's (Tomboychik, WJFF 1998) taboo-shattering, Sundance Film Festival winner, Trembling Before G-d, is a measured and powerful documentary that, for the first time, brings to light the subject of homosexuality within the Orthodox Jewish community. Set in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Miami, Jerusalem and San Francisco, Orthodox Gays and Lesbians speak about their struggles to integrate their deep love of Judaism with the biblical edict that forbids homosexuality.
The Optimists: The Story of the Rescue of the Jews of Bulgaria tells the remarkable, yet little known story, of how fifty-thousand Bulgarian Jews survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of Bulgarian Christians, Muslims, trade unions, Communists, professional guilds and others who sheltered Jews and defied Nazi deportation orders.
In the French film Once We Grow Up, thirty year old Simon is at his wits-end, trying to juggle his job as a writer, his girlfriend with whom he's trying to have a child, his colorful friends, dodgy parents, not to mention his scatterbrained grandma who has taken to wandering the Paris streets. Add Claire, his alluring Algerian neighbor who has been abandoned by her husband, and you have the ingredients for a witch's brew of comedy and romance. With Matthieu Demy (Jeanne Et Le Garçon Formidable) and Amira Casars (Would I Lie to You?, 2000 WJFF).
In Time of Favor (Hahesder), a plot is hatched to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount. Menachem, the commanding officer of a religious soldier's combat unit, is unknowingly drawn into this web of intrigue and is falsely charged with conspiracy. In this nail biting thriller that won an amazing total of six Israeli Academy Awards including Best Picture, Menachem finds himself torn between his loyalty to his rabbi (actor/director Asi Dayan), his duty as a commanding officer and his love for the rabbi's daughter (Israeli film sensation, Tinkerbell).
The award winning Promises documents the lives of Israeli and Palestinian children during a period of relative calm from 1997 to 2000. Through first hand interviews, Yarko, Daniel, Moishe, Mahmoud, Shlomo, Sanabel and Faraj, all aged between 11 and 13 when filming began, tell their stories of growing up amid conflict and violence. Deeply insightful and compassionate, American born-Jerusalem raised Director, B.Z. Goldberg's film rises above the din of rhetoric, politics and jingoism, thus allowing these children to create and tell their own stories.
Imagination is non-linear and memory is not orderly in Jeanine Meerapfel's beautifully languid film, Anna's Summer. Upon readying her ancestral Greek home for sale, Anna is revisited by memories of her own past and that of her Sephardic-Jewish family. She finds old telegrams from her grandmother and the diaries of her father's first love. All help her to soothe the pain of losing her husband and to ignite the flame of passion between Anna and a mysterious younger man. A unique British - German - Greek - and Spanish co-production, Anna's Summer is alive with the sights, sounds, and smells of the Mediterranean (with Angela Molina, star of Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh, as Anna).
An ancient coin. A dead body removed from the scene of a crime. A femme fatale with suspicious motives. Based upon a story by A.B. Yehoshua, Facing the Forest is a crisp film-noir that unleashes a deluge of paranoia from the outset. Alex, an erstwhile graduate student-become-park ranger in Israel's Carmel Forest, makes a discovery that could amend the history of the Middle-East.
In Good Morning Cinderella, it seems that everyone has Ayelet's life figured out for her: whom she should marry, where she should work, and with whom she should live. Set to a blistering rave beat, director Liora Belford's film stars Liron Levo and Liat Glick-Levo from Kippur (2000 WJFF).
An amazingly gifted performer who brought Yiddish folk songs from the shadows of pre-Revolutionary Russia to many of world's greatest concert stages, nightingale Isa Kremer has been all but forgotten. With her remarkable documentary, Isa Kremer: The People's Diva, director Nina Baker Feinberg uses archival footage and photos to recover the story of this fabulous performer who, in the face of totalitarianism and despotism, sang proudly in Yiddish and was feted the world over by princes, sultans and czars.
Summer In Ivye chronicles the events that took place during one remarkable summer when American choreographer, Tamar Rogoff, staged an international theater production in a forest outside a remote, dirt road village in Belarus. She brought together an unlikely mix of actors, dancers, musicians and local townspeople to create a performance that surrealistically echoed life in the once vibrant Jewish town before World War II. With warmth and humor, the film captures the group's attempt to transcend differences in language, religion and culture in order to tell a moving story of love and loss. With original music by composer Frank London (of the Klezmer-fusion band, The Klezmatics), and performances by renowned Lithuanian actor Kostas Smoriginas and Yiddish theater veteran David Rogow.
Set amidst Buenos Aires' Jewish porteño neighborhood of Once, twenty-something Ariel is being groomed to inherit his father's kosher restaurant, marry a nice Jewish girl and settle down in Director Daniel Burman's Waiting For the Messiah. Wishing to blaze his own path, Ariel instead takes a night job as a video editor at a cable network. At the same moment, a newly homeless bank employee tries to put his life back together after world stock markets plunge. Their lives overlap when Laura, Ariel's tempting bisexual co-worker, convinces him to work on a documentary about the banker's story. Meanwhile, Estela, a beautiful woman from Ariel's past, waits patiently for him to return.
A late-night Shorts Program, with a smorgasbord of experimental, dramatic, and animated films from across the world is sure to please, tease and inspire.
Our Festival Catalog will be available for download from this Web site; at the DCJCC; at our theater venues; inserted among the advertising circulars of selected home-delivery copies of The Washington Post on Friday November 16; and inserted into Washington Jewish Week on Thursday November 22. Tickets go on sale to DCJCC members November 15, and to the general public (including online) on November 18.
If you do not receive the Festival catalog in your copies of either of these newspapers and wish to receive a copy by mail, please leave a voice mail at 202.777.3248 AFTER November 16, and we will be happy to send you a copy of the catalog. In your voice mail message, please leave your name and mailing address as well as your email address, so that we may add you to our email newsletter mailing list as well.
Our periodic email newsletter, WJFFnews, is the best way to receive the most information about future events. Only selected events are publicized through paper mailings. In addition to our email newsletter and occasional paper mailings, all events will also be announced in Center in the City (the DCJCC's monthly publication, available to both members and non-members), as well as on this Web site. Sign up for WJFFnews, our email newsletter, today! If you would like to see sample issues of WJFFnews, you can see the latest issues online.
|
Phone, TDD, & Online
ticketing services by
|
 Order securely online through boxofficetickets.com |
 |
Washington
Jewish Film Festival |
Copyright © 1998-2001, District of Columbia Jewish Community Center. All rights reserved.
Redistribution of any part of this World Wide Web site - including film stills, photographs, multimedia clips, logos, graphics, text, and links -- is prohibited without prior written permission from the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center.
Web development and maintenance by DJ Horowitz Consulting and the WJFF
Volunteer Web Operations Team
Graphic design by Circle Studio, Inc.
Web hosting by Web2010, a HostCentric company
a division of WebSideStory
HitBox privacy information