Joe Balass was born in Baghdad in 1966, only four years before he and his family were forced to leave Iraq for good. He has few memories of his birthplace, but his mother, Valentine, remembers it vividly in his 33-minute documentary, Baghdad Twist, which was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Available on […]
Travelling around Ukraine with a phonograph and wax cylinders in hand, Moyshe Beregovsky methodically preserved the musical heritage of Ukrainian Jews before the Holocaust. A folklorist and ethnomusicologist, he recorded hundreds, if not thousands, of Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian folk songs, love songs, revolutionary songs, klezmer music and wordless religious melodies (nigunim). He was also […]
Schwartz’s Jewish-style delicatessen on St. Laurent Boulevard in Montreal is not merely a restaurant but an institution. It’s immensely popular with locals and foreign visitors. On a normal day, you have you wait in line outside on the street before you’re ushered in. It’s a small and intimate place, with tables and chairs on the […]
Two strangers meet in a compartment of a train bound from Moscow to Murmansk in the dead of winter. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student. Ljoha (Yuriy Boris) is a Russian miner. They do not like each other at first sight and dread the countless hours they will have to spend together in cramped […]
Jeffery Robinson, the writer and narrator of Who Are We: A Chronicle of Racism in America, does not mince words. “America is one of the most racist countries on earth,” he says in the first few minutes of this hard-hitting documentary, which opens in Toronto on February 4. Elaborating on this claim, he contends that the […]
Shanghai in the late 1930s and early 1940s was the only place on earth that did not require entry visas from visitors. Nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany and Austria, poured into this frenetic and cosmopolitan Chinese port during this period to escape Nazi persecution. The story of their immigration to this unlikely destination […]
Shortly after Germany conquered France in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy regime of Henri Philippe Petain announced its first antisemitic law. It relegated Jews to second-class citizenship and paved the way for their deportation to Nazi extermination camps in Poland. Two years later, the French police began rounding up Jews and sending them to internment camps, […]
Apart from its unimaginable campaign of terror and genocide against the Jews of Europe, the Nazi regime in Germany was guilty of plunder on a massive scale, stealing great and irreplaceable works of art in virtually all the countries it invaded and occupied. The Rape of Europa, a nearly two-hour-long documentary directed by Richard Berge, […]
Run Boy Run is one of six films being screened free of charge by the Chaiflicks streaming service in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27. They will be available from January 26 to January 28. Adapted from a novel by Uri Orlev, and directed by Pepe Danquart, this absorbing movie is based […]
Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir’s documentary, Cabaret-Berlin, The Wild Scene, is a nostalgic excursion into a lost world. Currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it’s a bold and brash movie, composed of a collage of eclectic images taken from movie clips, photographs, drawings and paintings. It is narrated in theatrical style by the German […]