JAN 15 THU 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
ROSENSTRASSE
NETHERLANDS 2003
DIRECTOR: MARGARETHE VON TROTTA Ruth Weinstein, a New York woman, has just buried her husband. In her grief she ponders her orthodox Jewish religion and arranges a 30-day mourning period for the whole family. She disapproves of the marriage of her daughter, Hannah, to the South American Luis. In order to find out why her mother is behaving so strangely, Hannah goes to Berlin to look for clues. She meets Lena, who met her mother when she was a little girl on the street called Rosenstrasse where, in 1943, hundreds of women had gathered to demonstrate against the deportation of their Jewish husbands. As Von Trotta explores her ongoing interest in German history and the experience of women within it she adds a third theme: “One of the reasons why I wanted to make the film is memory. I’ve always been very curious as to how it works. Here there are two different types. There is Ruth, who has spent a lifetime succesfully suppressing it. For her, memory is linked to a deep wound. And there is Lena, whose memory is a type of victory and therefore she does not need to suppress what she experienced.”—MVT. (136 mins.)

JAN 17 SAT 5 P.M.
GUILD THEATRE
SECRET LIVES:
HIDDEN CHILDREN AND THEIR RESCUERS
DURING WORLD WAR II
US 2002
DIRECTOR: AVIVA SLESIN Non-Jews who saved Jews during the time of the Holocaust remains a source of fascination and admiration for many. Why, when so many were apathetic, did others risk their lives, and even the lives of others, to rescue their fellow Jewish citizens, including thousands of children? And how did those children cope with being torn from their parents and to live with strangers? Slesin (THE TEN YEAR LUNCH: THE WIT AND LEGEND OF THE ALGONQUIN ROUNDTABLE), herself hidden by Lithuanians as a baby, profiles brave, unique individuals, from France, Lithuania, Poland, Belgium and Holland and the children whom they sheltered to explore what compelled them to take extraordinary chances in the service of decency. (81 mins.)

JAN 17 SAT 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITROIUM
GLOOMY SUNDAY
HUNGARY 1999
DIRECTOR: ROLF SCHÜBEL A hit song during the 1930s, "Gloomy Sunday" was notorious for allegedly driving people to suicide. Here it's the inspiration for a romantic drama which artfully and humanely asks and answers profound questions about love, loyalty, beauty and more. Flashing back from the 1990s to the early 1930s in Budapest, three people are caught in a love triangle. Lászlò, a successful Jewish restaurant owner, loves his, beautiful waitress Ilona, who loves him, but unfortunately is also attracted to Andras, the young pianist he’s hired who composes "Gloomy Sunday" just for her. For a time, the lovers maintain a precarious balance. But their situation becomes increasingly perilous when Hans, a German restaurant patron who is also love with Ilona, returns to Budapest as a member of the SS. Anything but gloomy and full of surprises, Shübel’s film, based on a true story, will stay with you. (112 mins.)

JAN 18 SUN 4 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
IN VIENNA, THEY PUT YOU IN JAIL:
THE MAX BIRNBACH STORY
US 2003
DIRECTOR: CHERYL BLAYLOCK In 1938 Vienna, anti-Semitism was at its peak. Hitler’s army was threatening Austria’s border and Max Birnbach knew that he would have to flee Austria or risk certain death as a Jew. Blaylock investigates this dark time in history, chronicling the remarkable story of Max Birnbach, now a Portland resident—including his imprisonment by the Nazis, a dramatic escape to the Swiss border, life in a refugee camp, the futile efforts to save his parents from deportation to the concentration camps, and the remarkable meeting that made possible his emigration to America—revealing the sharp instincts he used to survive, the tragedy he had to leave behind, and the life-affirming courage and tenacity he still demonstrates today, in his nineties.
(52 mins.)
Max Birnbach will attend the screening.

JAN 18 SUN 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
MY TERRORIST
ISRAEL 2002
DIRECTOR: YULIE COHEN GERSTEL In 1978, El Al flight attendant Yulie Cohen was shot and wounded in London in a terrorist attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The attack also resulted in the death of another young Israeli woman. Twenty-two years later, Yulie, despite fearing for her own daughters' lives at the hands of Palestinian suicide bombers, decides to reach out to her jailed assailant, and forgive him. Growing up in an upper middle class neighborhood in Israel (where her neighbors included future Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon and military hero Moshe Dayan), she patriotically served in the military and was a proud, sixth-generation citizen of her country. After working as a photojournalist and visiting the occupied territories along the Gaza Strip, Gerstel came to realize that both Israelis and Palestinians played a role in perpetuating the cycle of hostility and bloodshed. But does she have the right to do such a thing, especially when other Israeli mothers continue to lose their children to terrorism? In examining one woman's moral dilemma, MY TERRORIST asks hard and provocative questions about the meaning of forgiveness and hate, the inevitability of violence and the possibility of reconciliation. (52 mins.)

FOLLOWED BY
HUMAN WEAPON
ISRAEL 2002
DIRECTORS: ILAN ZIV, SERGE GORDY Filmed in Iran, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Israel, Palestine, Europe and the United States, HUMAN WEAPON provides a sober, non-sensational perspective on the complexities of the suicide bombing phenomenon. Ziv and Gordy interviews key militants whose organizations use suicide as part of their strategy, doctors, psychiatrists, historians and government officials in a balanced attempt to better understand a kind or warfare that has changed the rules of conflict. “4 Stars! Chilling and instructive.”—David Sterritt, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR. “A gripping and important documentary.”—Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES. (55 mins.)

JAN 21 WED 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
KEDMA
ISRAEL 2002
DIRECTOR: AMOS GITAI May 1948, a few days before the creation of the State of Israel. On board an old, rusted cargo ship, the Kedma, hundreds of immigrants, most of them Holocaust survivors, are coming to Palestine from all over Europe. But when they arrive, British troops are waiting on the beach to halt their unauthorized landing. A small group of soldiers of the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli Defense Forces, helps a few of them escape into the hills. Gitai masterfully captures the confusion and disorientation of these refugees as they are caught up in the struggle against the British and the Arabs to find a place in the world. (100 mins.)

JAN 22 THU 7 P.M.
GUILD THEATRE
THE HEBREW HAMMER
US 2002
DIRECTOR: JONATHAN KESSELMAN SHAFT meets AUSTIN POWERS in this whacked-out “jewxploitation” spoof starring Adam Goldberg as Mordechai Jefferson Carver, a stylin’, Manishewitz-slugging, badass Semitic Superfly. The righteous “Hammer” is hired by the worried Jewish Justice League after the discovery that Santa's psychotic son (Andy Dick)—who has seized control of the North Pole after staging a coup with the help of a bloodthirsty reindeer, Blitzen—has plans to eradicate Hanukkah as part of a nefarious scheme to have Christmas be the only holiday icon at winter time. The Hammer joins forces with Esther (Judy Greed), the gorgeous and dangerous daughter of the world's top Jewish leader, and his friend Mohammed (Mario Van Peebles), head of the Kwanzaa Liberation Front who fears Santa may go after Kwanzaa next, to topple the evil Santa and save Hanukkah for future generations. Calculated to offend as many as possible, this sacrilegious, fearless and very funny satire is a vision you won’t soon forget. (85 mins.)

JAN 24 SAT 5 P.M.
GUILD THEATRE
NAZI OFFICER’S WIFE
US 2003
DIRECTOR: LIZ GARBUS Edith Hahn Beer was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into the Jewish ghetto and for a time into a labor camp. Knowing she was doomed, Edith tore the yellow star from her clothing and went underground. A Christian friend gave her identity papers which allowed her to escape to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her. Despite her protests (and even her eventual confession of her true identity) he married her and kept her identity secret. Their child was the only known Jewish child born in a Nazi hospital. Based on Beer’s autobiography memoir, Garbus’ film explores faith, family, identity and love as it provides a complex portrait of a woman who had to bury her true self and hide in plain sight in order to survive.”Packed with revelations and witheld information that comes to life; it is like an old movie castle full of false fireplaces and trap doors. Almost everyone ends up a person different from what we expect.”—Elvis Mitchell, THE NEW YORK TIMES (96 mins.)

JAN 24 SAT 7:30 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
DIVAN
US/HUNGARY/UKRAINE 2003
DIRECTOR: PEARL GLUCK Anyone who celebrates family, history and culture (never mind what religion) will delight in and be inspired by Gluck’s witty and charming work of first-person cinema. To reclaim an ancestral couch upon which generations of esteemed rabbis and family slept, Gluck travels from her Hasidic community in Brooklyn to find her roots, and the heirloom divan, in Hungary. Along the way, a colorful cast of characters punctuate the journey and telling of the tale—her ex-communist cousin in Budapest, a used furniture salesman, a zealous upholsterer, a pair of matchmakers, a renegade group of fellow, formerly ultra-Orthodox friends, and a disapproving father who wishes she would stop with filmmaking and research, return to Orthodox values, and “just get married like a woman is supposed to.” “DIVAN is a visual parable that offers the possibility of personal reinvention and cultural re-upholstery.”–PG. In Hungarian and Yiddish (with subtitles) and English. (77 mins.)

JAN 25 SUN 5 P.M.
guild theatre
FORGET BAGHDAD: JEWS AND ARABS—
THE IRAQI CONNECTION
SWITZERLAND 2002
DIRECTOR: SAMIR “Don’t let the clumsy title fool you: its ease in unsettling the most basic assumptions regarding who is an Israeli and who’s not, who’s a Jew and who’s not, will win you over.”—B. Ruby Rich, THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN. Samir profiles four extraordinary Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel in this entertaining and irony-filled essay. Like Samir’s father, a Shi’ite Muslim immigrant, the men were members of the Iraqi Communist Party, and they, along with tens of thousands of other Jews, fled Iraq during the ’50s and ’60s. The men include Arabic professor Shimon Ballas; best-selling writer Sami Michael (author of “A Trumpet in the Wadi”); contractor Moussa Houry; and Arabic writer Samir Naqqash. In separate interviews, they discuss the clash of language, culture, and identity that they have experienced in both Iraq and Israel. Samir’s survey of movie stereotypes of "the Jew" and "the Arab," taken from everything from newsreels, to Hollywood movies and Egyptian musicals, interwoven with the individual profiles round out a compelling mediation on exile identity and the question “What does it mean to be an enemy of your own past.” (111 mins.)

JAN 25 SUN 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE BURIAL SOCIETY
US 2003
DIRECTOR: NICHOLAS RACZ Mild-mannered Sheldon Kasner, a loan officer at the Hebrew National Bank, is a most unlikely criminal. Forced to flee the big city when a money-laundering scheme goes awry, Sheldon offers his services to a struggling small-town Chevrah Kadisha, the Jewish burial society that prepares bodies for interment. Pinning their hopes for survival on this unlikely stranger, the three kindly old men take Sheldon in and indoctrinate him into their world. Meanwhile, Sheldon sets in motion a complex scheme involving the theft of $2 million. A gripping thriller starring Rob LaBelle, David Paymer, and Seymour Cassel. (time)

JAN 28 WED 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
KLEZMER ON FISH STREET
US 2002
DIRECTOR: YALE STROM “If you’ve seen THE PIANIST you have a sense of Jewish life in Poland during World War II. What is Jewish live like in Poland today? When you travel to Krakow you can stay in the former Jewish Quarter of Kazimiercz, at a Jewish inn. You will wake up to a kosher-style breakfast, take the “Shindler’s List” tour, take a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau and return for a kosher dinner and Klezmer concert. . .Will you have met a Polish Jew? What does this revival of Jewish culture mean? Does it signal a revival of Jewish life? Can Jewish culture exist without Jews? Through music, intimate portraits and search for spiritual roots, KLEZMER ON FISH STREET explores the deeper, and more significant, theme of basic humanity in this environment. “ (90 mins.)

JAN 29 THUR 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
PRISONER OF PARADISE
US/CANADA/BRITAIN 2002
DIRECTOR: MALCOLM CLARK, STUART SENDER Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary last year, this is the startling true story of Kurt Gerron, a well known and beloved German-Jewish actor, director and cabaret star in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s. Ultimately, he was captured and sent to a concentration camp, where he was ordered to write and direct a pro-Nazi propaganda film THERESIENSTADT as a world-class city for the Jews, and in exchange, was promised his life. Shot on location in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and Prague, PRISONER OF PARADISE offers a unique prospective on this extraordinary period. (96 mins.)

JAN 31 SAT 7 P.M.
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
JAMES’ JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM
ISRAEL 2003
DIRECTOR: RA’ANAN ALEXANDROWICZ Nominated for seven Israeli Film Academy Awards including Best Film and Best Director. JAMES’ JOURNEY is a charming moral fairytale and poignant, satiric commentary on the obsessions and character of contemporary Israeli society. James, a devout pilgrim from the small African village of Entshongweni, is sent by his people to see Jerusalem. However, arriving at the airport, James is mistaken for an illegal guest worker and imprisoned. It is his luck to catch the attention of Shimi (Salim Daw) who bails him out of jail and puts him to work as part of his gang of guest workers who live in the shadows of Tel Aviv and clean the homes of yuppies along with other menial labor formerly performed by Palestinians. As James learns the "rules" of how business is done in the West, his character changes to heed the advice of Shimi's father who admonishes him, "Don't be a fryer (sucker)!" Like many other immigrants, he quickly discovers that this is not the Holy Land of the imagination. (87 mins.)