In the film’s droll, double entendred opening sequence, a breathless woman, Catherine (Aurore ClĂ©ment), speaks off camera in dulcet, anxious tone as she provides a series of guiding, seemingly appetent directions against the image of a grand piano craned precariously overhead, culminating with a stray tear that falls from her cheek at the point of […]
Tag: New York Jewish Film Festival
The Mortal Storm, 1940
During a dinner party to celebrate the occasion of Professor Roth’s (Frank Morgan) 60th birthday, news of Adolf Hitler’s ascension to the position of German chancellor at the Roth home is met with fervent excitement by his stepsons Otto (Robert Stack) and Erich (William T. Orr), and his daughter’s suitor Fritz Marberg (Robert Young) who […]
Nina’s Tragedies, 2003
On the day of his father’s funeral, the curious and meddlesome adolescent Nadav (Aviv Elkabeth) peeps in through the window of the funeral home where the rabbi is making last minute preparations for the burial, a task that involves calling an unreliable, impatient repairman during a torrential rain in order to fix a chronically squeaky […]
The Man Who Loved Haugesund, 2004
In the early 1910s, a hardworking and ambitious textile traveling salesman of Polish Jew ancestry named Moritz Rabinowitz arrived at the insular, Norwegian herring export town of Haugesund and, touched by the townspeople’s humble existence and diligent work ethic, decided to settle in the community. Establishing a clothing company near the town port (where sailors […]
Permission to Remember, 2003
Shot on DV, Permission to Remember opens to a shot of a bustling Ukrainian market as a holocaust survivor and expatriate now living in Israel named Moishe begins to recount memories from his childhood, only to be interrupted by an aggressive woman who complains of the “foreigners” who are blocking her way into the market […]