Israeli filmmaker Michal Weits untangles her grandfather’s complex past as a state builder in Blue Box, a compelling 82-minute documentary that will be screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 9-26. Joseph Weitz, the father of Israel’s forests, was the director of both the Jewish National Fund’s Department of Lands […]
By Julia Mintz’s estimation, more than 25,000 Jewish partisans fought German troops in the forests of Eastern Europe during World War II. Usually attached to networks of Russian and Polish partisan groups, they came from all walks of life from Poland and Lithuania. Her stirring documentary, Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and […]
Monticello is one of the finest public buildings in America. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the author of the Declaration Independence, lived there periodically until his death in 1826. When he died, he was deeply in debt, compelling his daughter, Martha, to sell the estate, which had fallen into disrepair. […]
Wojciech Smarzowski’s unusually strong and emotive Polish-language movie, The Wedding Day, merges past and present, gliding over a ragged landscape torn by ethnocentrism and violence and healed by humanity. It will be screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs online and in-person from June 9-26. Shifting seamlessly between modern-day Soviet-and German-occupied Poland, it […]
During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes and fields in a catastrophe they refer to as the Nakba. Displacements occurred in towns such as Jaffa, Lod and Ramle. Alon Schwartz’s eye-opening movie, Tantura, documents what happened in the Arab fishing village of Tantura, which was […]
Left- wing Labor Zionists in Palestine and Israel attempted to build an egalitarian and socialist society within their web of cooperative settlements. The children they raised in this cloistered milieu from the 1920s to the 1970s were expected to transmit their parents’ and grandparents’ hopes and dreams to future generations, but this would not be […]
Holocaust memory lies at the core of Tacheles — The Heart of the Matter, a documentary film by Jana Matthes and Andrea Schramm. It will be presented in Toronto by the 19th annual Human Rights Watch Canada Film Festival on Sunday, May 29 at 3 p.m. at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. From May 30 to […]
Jews in the Diaspora have successfully adopted to local environments while keeping faith with Jewish traditions. This pattern of accommodation looms large in The People of the Book, a 28-minute documentary by Felix Lazarus which focuses on three towns in the Canadian province of Ontario — Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay. Released in 1973, […]
Winnipeg, in my imagination, is virtually terra incognita, a Canadian city on the prairies known for its bitterly cold winters and sweltering summers. What I actually know about Winnipeg is factual. Three decades ago, I found myself in Winnipeg in January, the coldest month of the year. What I mostly remember now is the extreme […]
Jacob Goldwasser, the director of Shoelaces, is intimately familiar with the unique world of special-needs people. He should be. His own son is mentally challenged. So it comes as no surprise that his feature film about this topic is genuine and empathetic in spirit and invariably moving. Starring two of Israel’s finest actors, it will […]