Miami Jewish Film Festival Celebrates 10th Year

Celebrating its 10th year, the Miami Jewish Film Festival presents award-winning, international and domestic features, documentaries and shorts, appearances by special guest actors and directors, and the Young Filmmakers Institute throughout the month of January. The festival is bigger and better than ever with the addition of a Yiddish Film Series; Best of the Fest – the most outstanding films from previous festivals; and a film series in collaboration with The New York Sephardic Film Festival. All of this is just part of the main event, scheduled to run January 18 – 28th with over 20 movie screenings. The Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE) is the festival presenter and enriches the film-going experience by presenting programs led by distinguished scholars and film buffs following the screenings.

THE BEST OF THE FEST, is a mini-retrospective and takes place at the Mary Ann Wolfe Theatre on the FIU North Campus, University Center, 3000 NE 151 Street.
Screening schedule:
January 3, at 6 p.m. All My Loved Ones (Czech Republic); 91 min. English subtitles. Inspired by the real life experiences of English stockbroker Nicholas Winton, who saved hundred of Czech Jewish children from the Nazis in 1939.
January 3, at 8 p.m. Like a Bride (Mexico); 115 min. English subtitles. This beautiful film contrasts the lives of two Jewish girls who come of age in the Jewish community of Mexico City in the 1960’s.
January 4, at 6p.m. Mendel (Norway); English Subtitles. This is a coming of age story about a nine-year old boy in 1950’s Norway who must learn to live in his new country while trying to understand his parents’ past.
January 4, at 8 p.m. The Harmonists (Germany). This is the story of the famous, German make sextet, five vocals and piano, from when they first meet to the day that they were banned by the Nazis, because three of them were Jewish. These past festival favorites address the classic topics of young love, survival and cultural identity.

Paul Azaroff, who has been called “The Google of Judaism”, leads an afternoon YIDDISH FILM SERIES filled with mysticism, history and humor, at Temple Israel, 137 NE 19 Street, Miami.

Series schedule:
January 2, 2 - 4 p.m.
Introduction: Lecture by Paul Azaroff with highlights of Yiddish film highlights, 2 hours.

January 4, 2 - 4:30 p.m.
Der Dybbuk (Poland) 1937 black and white, Yiddish with English subtitles;
120 minutes; discussion to follow led by Paul Azaroff.
Years after their fathers made a pledge that they marry, a young couple meets and falls in love; but her father, forgetting his vow to the dead man that their children will one day marry, keeps them apart. The film is the story of unfulfilled love, of broken promises, and of the supernatural, as the Dybbuk, the spirit of the dead young man, enters his beloved's body and possesses her. “ The romantic tragedy has been impressively reproduced in the cinematic adaptation from Poland. It has an enthralling power and is magnificently acted. Here is a motion picture of spellbinding strangeness and extraordinary distinction." The International Herald-Tribune.

January 9, 2 – 4 p.m.
Yidl Mitn Fidl, (Poland) 1936 black and white, Yiddish with English subtitles; 92 minutes; discussion to follow led by Paul Azaroff.
The classic Yiddish language musical-comedy that has been called the best Yiddish motion picture of all time. Molly Picon plays a shtetl girl who, disguised as a boy, goes off with her father and a band of traveling musicians into the Polish countryside. Made in pre-War Poland, the film provides a warm rendering of Eastern European Jewish life, made all the more fun and wonderful by Molly Picon's unequalled ability to amuse and entertain.

January 11, 2 – 4 p.m.
Undzere Kinder (Our Children) Poland 1948 black and white, Yiddish with English subtitles; 68 minutes.
Suppressed by the Polish Communist government as too "pro-Zionist" and lost for over 30 years, Undzere Kinder features the comedy duo of Dzigan and Shumacher who had themselves recently returned from the Soviet Union and Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust. Directed on location, a few years after the end of World War II, at the Helenowek Colony, an orphanage/school near Lodz. Dzigan and Shuacher visitthe orphanage and the children teach them about the healing possibilities of song, dance and storytelling. The story explores whether it is more therapeutic remember or to forget the nightmares of the Holocaust.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, January 24th, when Director and Screenwriter Joan Micklin Silver receives A Lifetime Achievement Award for her brilliant range of work documenting the immigrant experience in her films Hester Street and Crossing Delancey. Prior to Wednesday’s screening there will be a re-creation of New York’s Lower East Side with specialty foods and klezmer-style music.

Tickets are $10 each, seniors and students $6 and are available at the door.
For a complete schedule of the entire film festival and for educational forums log on to: www.caje-miami.org/filmfestival after December 22nd. Tickets for the January 18 – 28 films may be purchased after January 8, 2007 by calling 1-888-585-film.

TOP