Scripted by Richler biographer Charlie Foran in collaboration with Pelletier, this film looks at Mordecai Richler, the man and the writer, as one of a generation of gifted, angry Jewish writers and intellectuals who dominated much of North American culture in the late 20th century. Best known for “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “Barney’s Version,” Richler was born to immigrant parents and raised on a heady mix of Talmudic teachings and comic book superheroes. Richler was a natural agitator and provocateur and, like his famous American counterparts Saul Bellow, Irving Layton, Lenny Bruce, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, possessed the courage to rattle the complacent and the sacred. (52 mins.)

FOLLOWED BY

AHEAD OF TIME
DIRECTOR: ROBERT RICHMAN
US, 2009
Ruth Gruber, 97, was a journalist, photographer, and author for more than 70 years, witnessing some of the most critical junctures in contemporary world and Jewish history. She was, at age 20, the youngest person in the world to earn a Ph.D. and the first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic in 1935. During World War II, she escorted 1,000 Holocaust refugees to Oswego, New York, for the Interior Department and, after the war, covered the Nuremberg trials and the Exodus for The New York Herald Tribune. Weaving rare archival footage with sharp remembrances, Richman emerges with a fascinating portrait of an iconic woman. (73 mins.)

Sponsored by Portland Chapter of Hadassah.

In July 1942, French police conducted a mass arrest of some 13,000 Parisian Jews, including more than 4,000 children. The infamous “Vel’ d’Hiv’” round up (also portrayed in SARAH’S KEY) is told through the story of the Weismann family, whose Montmartre lives are upended when authorities raid their Jewish neighborhood. Detained in a stadium under hellish conditions, a Jewish doctor (Jean Reno), aided by a Protestant nurse (Mélanie Laurent), struggles to minister to the doomed deportees. Carefully reconstructing a long-suppressed chapter of French history and based on years of research by writer/director Rose Bosch and noted Holocaust expert Serge Klarsfeld, THE ROUND UP follows the destinies of the victims, perpetrators, and those who fought in horror to help. (115 mins.)

Sponsored by Oregon Holocaust Resource Center.

Loosely based on renowned Polish author Pawel Jasienica’s autobiographical thriller, LITTLE ROSE tells the erotically charged story of a beautiful young woman recruited by the secret police to disgrace a Jewish professor. Set against the backdrop of anti-Semitism in 1968 Poland and government efforts to discredit intellectuals and other dissident voices, the brutish Colonel Rozek convinces his sexy but naive girlfriend Kamila to spy on the writer and suspected Zionist Warczewski. Uninterested in Communist ideology, she nonetheless agrees to seduce the academic and gather evidence against him, operating under the code name Róeyczka (Little Rose). As their relationship deepens, loyalties waver, and a dangerous love triangle develops. (118 mins.)

Winner, Best Film and Best Actress, Gydnia Film Festival; Best Director, Moscow Film Festival.

Author (“The Little Disturbances of Man”) and activist Grace Paley (1922-2007) shares her short stories, poems, and essays, along with her timeless anecdotes. Her female, urban New York tales, filled with emotional and sexual frankness, became classics in the 1950s. Often referring to herself as a “combative pacifist,” Paley committed her life to fighting social and political injustices, activities that frequently landed her in jail. Rivlin and Murphy’s inspiring film traces the life of a seemingly ordinary woman with extraordinary talents for writing, engaging the world, and challenging her family, friends, and readers to confront life’s struggles with humor, passion, and tenacity. “Art is too long, and life is too short.”—Grace Paley. (74 mins.)

Judith Arcana, Grace Paley’s literary biographer, will introduce the film.

Guédiguian’s taut, heroic thriller, set in 1943, is based on the true story of a group of working-class immigrants (Poles, Jews, Romanians, Spaniards, Italians) who risked their lives during the French Resistance. Led by idealistic Armenian poet Missak Manouchian and his French wife, the independent group of 22 assassins and saboteurs plot against the German occupiers and the Vichy government, who respond with an equally vicious campaign to characterize the Resistance as “an army of crime” conspiring against French life and the sovereignty of France and to extinguish their ranks. (139 mins.)

THE MATCHMAKER mixes warm comedy with drama as it tells a fresh coming-of-age story set in Haifa in 1968. Arik, a teenage boy, gets a summer job working for Yankele, a mysterious Romanian Holocaust survivor and a matchmaker who promises to get you “what you need, not what you want.” As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, who has just returned from America full of talk about women’s rights, free love, and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik’s life collide in unexpected, often funny, and very moving ways as his eyes open to an Israeli society coming to terms with its post-Holocaust identity. (118 mins.)

Nominated for seven Israeli Ophir (Academy) Awards including Best Film, and winner of the Best Actor and Best Actress Awards.

Sponsored by the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco.

“Dorman’s new film is a moving portrait of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the man whose stories became the basis of the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ Using the author’s works and his own life story, the documentary presents a riveting tale of a traditional Jewish world on the cusp of profound change. Ultimately, LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS reveals Sholem Aleichem’s genius in capturing this world—its darkness, its disorientation—with brilliant humor as he explored the struggle to create a new modern Jewish identity.”—New York Jewish Film Festival. (93 mins.)

Sponsored by Cedar Sinai Park.

For his first documentary, Daniel Burman (WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH, LOST EMBRACE, BROTHER AND SISTER) joins a group of Orthodox Jews on their annual pilgrimage to the tombs of Tzaddikim (righteous men) in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, culminating at the tomb of the 17th century spiritual leader, the Baal Shem Tov. Intrigued by the Jewish mystical belief in 36 hidden Tzaddikim who are always on this earth yet must remain anonymous, Burman takes us on an intimate journey across 2,500 miles and into his own identity as a Jew. (70 mins.)

Formed in New York City’s East Village in 1986, the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics have followed many musical paths—from collaboration with the Woody Guthrie family, to projects with Israeli greats Chava Alberstein and Itzhak Perlman, to kosher-gospel sensation Joshua Nelson—but have always fashioned a dynamic bridge between the lost shtetls of Eastern Europe and the Jewish-Yiddish culture’s resurgence and relevance today. Part lively concert performance film, part backstage documentary, Anjou’s (A CANTOR’S TALE) celebratory film follows the band members over four years on the road and at home with their families, as they keep their hybrid musical vision full of fresh energy and engagement. (105 mins.)

The Percy Bernstein Orchestra will perform following the film.

VISITING ARTIST—For the last seven decades, San Francisco dance pioneer Anna Halprin has redefined modern art by exploring one key question in her work: What is important in life? The search for that answer has ushered in such revolutionary experimentation in theater, music, and performance that its reach extends beyond the arts and into our cultural conscience. Gerber’s rich cinematic portrait blends recent interviews with the late Merce Cunningham and husband, collaborator, and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (Portland’s Forecourt Fountain); archival footage, including her establishment of one of the first multiracial dance companies in the US; and excerpts of recent performances such as “Parades and Changes” at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. BREATH MADE VISIBLE offers a stunning, inspiring account of one of the most important icons in modern dance and avant-garde culture. (80 mins.)

PRECEDED BY

STRANGERS NO MORE
DIRECTORS: KAREN GOODMAN, KIRK SIMON
US, 2010
This year’s winner of the Oscar for short documentary tells the story of a school in Tel Aviv where children from 48 countries come together to learn. (40 mins.)

Sponsored by White Bird Dance.

Gabriel Pomeraniec’s documentary presents an unknown history of an extremely popular music genre: the vital Jewish influence on the origins of tango. Eastern European Jews in the late 19th century found a safe haven in Buenos Aires, a melting pot of cultures and races, and with them, they brought the klezmer, the festive and deeply lyrical music that lies at the core of tango. Anecdotes, family memories, and forgotten stories are skillfully interwoven to present a largely untold history, including the story of the tango “Plegaria” giving solace to those shut away in concentration camps. The film is narrated by journalist and historian José Judkovski and is based upon his book of the same title. (70 mins.)

Sponsored by White Bird Dance.

Anita (Alejandra Manzo), a young woman with Down syndrome, lives a happy, routine life with her devoted mother, Dora (Norma Aleandro). One fateful morning, the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires is bombed and Dora does not return. Anita is left alone, confused and helpless. But what starts as a tragedy turns into an odyssey of discovery, resilience, and compassion. As Anita wanders the city lost, she finds kindness in unlikely quarters through the simple force of her ingenuous personality and open heart. She also comes face to face with cruelty and abandonment, forcing her to learn to care for herself. (104 mins.)

Manzo, an actress living with Down syndrome, won the Best Actress Award from the Argentine Film Academy for her heartbreaking performance in the title role.

Sponsored by Jewish Family & Child Services.

A sensitive portrayal of a boy’s journey into adulthood, complicated by the travails of growing up under a violent dictatorship, I MISS YOU is set during Argentina’s infamous, bloody Dirty War of the 1970s. High schooler Javier and his older brother Adrian are swept up in the violence plaguing the country. When the boys are blacklisted because of Adrian’s involvement with the Resistance protests, Adrian is “disappeared” and Javier is sent by his middle-class Jewish parents to Mexico to live with relatives. Separated from the brother he idolizes and far from home, Javier presses his family to confront the truth they know in their hearts but cannot bring themselves to face. (95 mins.)

Family friendly.

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her family by the French police to the Vel’ d’Hiv’ stadium—one Jewish family among thousands rounded up to be sent to the camps. Desperate to protect her younger brother, she locks him in a secret cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking that they will all be back soon. Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Through her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel’ d’Hiv’, to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah’s past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage, her adopted nation, and her life. (113 mins.)

Sponsored by Oregon Holocaust Resource Center.

Released in Germany in 1948 but never seen in the United States until now, this remarkable documentary about the post-war Nuremberg trials ranks among the great courtroom dramas in history. It shows how international prosecutors built their case against the top Nazi war criminals and established the foundation for all subsequent trials for crimes against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Commissioned by the US government, NUREMBERG remained undistributed in America for political reasons and ultimately became a lost film, its original negative and all sound elements destroyed. Sandra Schulberg, the filmmaker’s daughter, and filmmaker Josh Waletzky collaborated on this extraordinary restoration, recreating the soundtrack from scratch and enlisting actor Liev Schreiber to record the narration. The result is an indelible record of history. “Riveting. More powerful than any fictional courtroom drama could hope to be.”—New York Magazine. (80 mins.)

Sandra Schulberg will introduce the film.

Click here for more information about NUREMBERG.