This journey into the world of Yiddish cinema showcases spectacular film performances and celebrates the varieties of Eastern European Jewish culture with an abundance of music, humor, irony, and self-awareness.
Read full descriptionKen Jacobs (U.S., 1975). Introduced by Jeffrey Skoller. Ken Jacobs constructs a picture of Brooklyn in the thirties and forties from fragments of home movies. With Ernie Gehr short Untitled (Part One) 1981. (88 mins)
Leon Jeannot, Zygmund Turkow (Poland, 1937). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. The famed Warsaw cabaret duo Dzigan and Shumacher play two schlemiels in a poor shtetl who suddenly strike oil. “The closest the screen came to a Yiddish cabaret sensibility: irreverent, mordant, and consciously theatrical.”-J. Hoberman. With short I Want to Be a Boarder. (77 mins)
Abraham Ravett (U.S., 1989). Abraham Ravett in person. Abraham Ravett examines the loss of his father, who had been a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. With Ravett shorts The March and Non-Aryan. (95 mins)
Performance by the Sala-Manca Group. Live music by Yarden Erez. This performance is both an homage to Goldin and Abramson's East and West and a study in cultural and linguistic translation. (c. 60 mins)
Joseph Green (Poland, 1938). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. The inimitable Molly Picon plays mama to her siblings, her father, and the rest of the tenement in Joseph Green's film, which transposes Meyer Schwartz's play from the Lower East Side to Lodz. (95 mins)
Sidney M. Goldin, Ivan Abramson (Austria, 1923). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. Judith Rosenberg on piano. A thoroughly modern Molly Picon steals the show in Sidney Goldin and Ivan Abramson's good-natured comedy of worldly American Jews encountering shtetl life. (85 mins)
Joseph Green, Jan Nowina-Przybylski (Poland, 1937). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. This musical comedy set in a Galician shtetl is “a wistful romance that's interspersed with songs but rooted in the wisecracks and banter of oral Yiddish culture.”-J. Hoberman (88 mins)
Michał Waszyński (Poland, 1937). Introduced by Zehavit Stern. Jewish mysticism is fused with cinematic Expressionism in this haunting tale based on S. An-ski's famed folkloric play. “The most ambitious Yiddish movie of its day.”-J. Hoberman (123 mins)
Eleanor Antin (U.S., 1991). Introduced by Jeffrey Skoller. Performance artist and experimental filmmaker Eleanor Antin conjures a lost world of Yiddish literature, cinema, and theater and reengages the debate on popular art, politics, and modernism. (98 mins)