The 26th Warsaw Film Festival ended on Sunday, 17 October 2010. “I feel great satisfaction after this year’s festival. Our programme included about twenty European and international premieres. More than a hundred filmmakers from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas visited us to present their films in person in Warsaw. We had waited for some of them for years, to mention Jan Sverak, double Oscar winner, or Alexei Uchitel, whose new film The Edge is Russia’s Oscar candidat...

The 26th Warsaw Film Festival ended on Sunday, 17 October 2010.“I feel great satisfaction after this year’s festival. Our programme included about twenty European and international premieres. More than a hundred filmmakers from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas visited us to present their films in person in Warsaw. We had waited for some of them for years, to mention Jan Sverak, double Oscar winner, or Alexei Uchitel, whose new film The Edge is Russia’s Oscar candidate this...

YIDL MITN FIDL Complete Plot Synopsis by Alex De Leon (Chaim Pevner) The film opens with a series of establishing shots establishing the small town of Kazimierz nad Wisla, (Kazimierz. on the Vistula) a town between Warsaw and Lublin which, at the time (1937) had a large and very old Jewish community. The camera holds on the castle on the hill and then pans to the left over many tiled rooftops coming to rest at last on a high crane shot of the central market square. We see several quick sh...

Chaim Pevner, Film CriticFILM NOTES TO THE BARBICAN YIDDISH FILM RETROSPECTIVE(London, October 12-24, 1996) THE YIDDISH language cinema is nearly unique among world cinema cultures in that it had no specific homeland.  Yiddish films, including “silent Yiddish” films, were produced wherever there were major Yiddish speech communities and a Yiddish theatrical circuit  from which  talent could be recruited.  The majority of Yiddish language films were therefore made in New York or in P...