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Film

Blue Line

Alain Sauma’s satirical short film, Blue Line, focuses on a flashpoint in the Middle East, Israel’s sometimes volatile border with Lebanon. Currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, this movie turns on a beefy Lebanese cow that strays into Israel, setting off a burst of excitement and anxiety on both sides of the […]

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Film

One Step To Freedom

Paul Gruninger was the Oskar Schindler of Switzerland. Instrumental in saving the lives of 3,60o Austrian Jews from 1938 to 1939, he was the police commander of the St. Gallen district, near Austria and Germany. Alain Gsponer’s absorbing movie, The Gruninger File: One Step To Freedom, is based on real events. Now available on the ChaiFlicks […]

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Film

Tarzan Triumphs

Toward the end of Tarzan Triumphs, the seventh of twelve Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller as the fictitious ape man, he exclaims, “Nazis bring trouble.” What an understatement! Tarzan should have reached this conclusion much sooner in this wartime film, but what do you expect from a primitive man cut off from the world and […]

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Film

Five Hours From Paris

Leon Prudovsky’s bitter-sweet and appealing romantic drama, Five Hours From Paris, largely unfolds in a drab suburb of Tel Aviv, its title notwithstanding. The protagonists are Yigal (Dror Keren), a divorced and lonely Israeli-born taxi driver, and Lina (Elena Yaralova), a married Russian immigrant and music teacher. The movie is currently being presented online by […]

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Film

49th Parallel: An Effective World War II Propaganda Movie

At the beginning of World War II, the Ministry of Propaganda in Britain asked the movie director Michael Powell whether he would be interested in making a documentary about minesweepers. He offered a counter-proposal  — a feature film that might inspire the United States to abandon its neutrality policy and enter the war against Nazi […]

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Film

752 Is Not A Number

On January 8, 2020, Hamed Esmaeilion’s life was torn asunder. Since then, he has struggled with loss, pain and agony. On that catastrophic day, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 bound from Tehran to Kyiv was shot down by an Iranian missile. All 176 passengers and crew were killed, including his wife Parisa and nine-year-old daughter, […]

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Film

Farha — A Palestinian Film About The Nakba

As Netflix began streaming Farha, a restrained Palestinian feature film that presents the Nakba in microcosm, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt a resolution to commemorate the seventy fifth anniversary of this event come next May. The resolution, sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, the Palestinian Authority and Senegal, was passed on December […]

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Film

The 90 Minute War

Turn off your reality monitor as you watch Eyal Halfo’s The 90 Minute War, which can be viewed on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. This fanciful Israeli film is built around a wildly implausible plot: The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have decided that the logical way to end their conflict is by means of […]

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Film

Beneath The Silence

On the last day of the 1967 Six Day War, an Israeli army officer named Menashe comes under fire from enemy positions and his comrade-in-arms is killed on the battlefield. Six years later, Menashe is still struggling with its psychic fallout and is not the man he used to be. Having been traumatized by the […]

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Film

Foreign Correspondent

Alfred Hitchcock’s second Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent, was released in mid-August 1940, a year after he left his native Britain to settle in Los Angeles. A spy thriller in the mould of his iconic 1935 film, The 39 Steps, it stars Joel McCrea as a hardboiled American reporter who’s dispatched to Europe on the eve […]