The Jewish contribution to the Bollywood movie industry is explored exhaustively by Danny Ben-Moshe in his intriguing documentary, Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 6 and 9. From the 1920s until the 1960s, several of its leading ladies and one of its […]
The forthcoming Toronto Jewish Film Festival is presenting two documentaries about former Jewish communities in the Arab world. Remember Baghdad and Libya: The Last Exodus will be respectively screened on May 9 and 11 and on May 7, 8 and 9. Iraq, a nation torn by strife and violence, once had one of the most distinguished Jewish […]
The South Beach enclave of Miami Beach was home to a vibrant community of Jewish retirees and Holocaust survivors from the 1960s to the 1970s. Resembling a transplanted shtetl, it was mainly populated by former garment workers from New York City who were lured there by the warm weather and the relatively low cost of […]
Stephane Benhamou’s intriguing documentary, The No. 5 War, scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 6 and May 8, is centered around Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, the Parisian fashion designer whose name is synonymous with Chanel No. 5, which, for a while after its debut in 1921, was the world’s most popular […]
Oskar Groning, a functionary at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland, was charged with being an accessory to mass murder and put on trial in Germany in 2015, when he was 93 years old. Assigned to the camp as a bookkeeper, he spent much of his time there as a collector of valuables expropriated […]
In the summer 1992, a small group of Israelis and Palestinians met secretly in Oslo to discuss the prospects of peace. Their talks were sanctioned neither by the Israeli government nor by the Palestine Liberation Organization. These informal negotiations gave way to formal discussions that climaxed with the signing of the Declaration of Principles in […]
The Toronto International Film Festival and Human Rights Watch are co-presenting the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at the TIFF Bell Lightbox from April 18-25. One of the films, On My Way Out: The Secret Life of Nani and Popi, is about a Holocaust survivor who finally comes clean about himself. It will be screened on April […]
In 1980, at the age of 24, the Swedish tennis champion Bjorn Borg was at the top of his game, having won a succession of Grand Slam titles, including four consecutive Wimbledon titles. Now he was chasing his fifth Wimbledon title, but one of his fiercest competitors, the 20 year-old American John McEnroe, was determined […]
Stephen Hopkins’ workmanlike feature film, Race, pays homage to Jesse Owens, the African-American track and field star who, at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, left his competitors in the dust and demolished the Nazi notion of Aryan racial superiority, much to the ire of Adolf Hitler and company. But Race, which is now available […]
Alison Chernick’s uplifting documentary about virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman, Itzhak, is a marvel of sight and sound. Opening at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto on April 6, it’s a moving portrait of a gifted musician who’s devoted to his craft and his family and whose overarching goal is to pass on his […]