Jewish Film Festival Returns to Lincoln Center
For the first time since the pandemic, the popular and influential New York Jewish Film Festival, organized annually by the Jewish Museum of New York in partnership with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, will return to public screenings at the Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street). The festival will be held for the 32nd time, from January 12 to 23, and will present 28 films: documentaries, feature films, short films (there will be 8), completely new or restored, created by filmmakers from around the world and dedicated to various aspects of Jewish life and history.
The content range is wide: from Hasidism in America (the restored 1997 documentary film “A Life Apart”) to the romance between a farmer and a rabbi’s daughter in Calabria (the French drama “Where Life Begins”), from pictures of active Jewish life in Lviv in 1939 (pre-war documentary short film) - to touching, psychologically apt, not without humor, stories about returning - to family, homeland, to oneself (feature films "America" and "Alegria" - the first will open the festival, the second, from Spain, was chosen for closure), from the portrait of the contemporary Polish artist “Krzysztof Wodiczko: the art of non-war” to the detailed fate of the brilliant Charlotte Salomon, who lived in Berlin, fled to France and was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 26 (premiere of the documentary “Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden" will be the central event of the festival).
A special group is Yiddish films. It highlights the classic of Jewish cinema, Letter to Mother (or Eternal Song), one of the last Jewish films made in Poland on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The film has just been restored by the National Jewish Film Center and this restored copy will be shown for the first time at the festival. It is also worth paying attention to the exciting American-Israeli drama “June Zero”, two more French feature films - “Farewell, Mr. Hoffmann" and "Haute Couture", the Polish "March 1968", the documentary "Jews of the Wild West" and the unusual, masterfully filmed "SHTTL" (in Ukrainian and Yiddish).
However, for details and tickets it is best to go to the website www.filmlinc.org/festivals/new-york-jewish-film-festival.
Posted by Maya Pritzker
