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...
Monday, April 23----The Palm Beach International Film Festival is presenting a number of thematic programs to bring a sharper focus to its diverse programming for attending audiences. This past weekend, the Festival inaugurated its Weekend of Shorts, an eclectic program of American and international short films screening at the main Festival venues of the Sunrise Cinemas at Mizner Park and the Muvico Parisian 20 at Cityplace. The program featured an exciting group of short fiction and documentar...
"A little letter to mama" A BRIVELE DER MAMENViewed on video, at J.M's Seattle, Wed. nite, March 7, 2007.This one of the great classics of the pre-war Yiddish cinema and one of the great all time films on the subject of immigration to America. It was the culmination of Joseph Green's amazing four film cycle of Yiddish films made between 1937 (Yidl Mitn Fidl) and 1939, on the brink of WW II.This saga of a Jewish family opens in 1912 in Lubin, a little shtetl in the Ukraine and terminates in Ameri...
Tuesday, January 9----It is often said, and I would be a fool to disagree, that anyone who lives in New York City long enough becomes a kind of “honorary Jew”. Whether it is an uncontrollable yen for matzoh ball soup, a love of klezmer (Jewish soul) music, or a few Yiddishims creeping into everyday speech, New Yorkers are in spirit, if not in reality, more than just a little bit Jewish. Therefore, the 16th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival, which opens tomorrow and runs through January ...
In the past two years the subject matter of this festival concentrated heavily on themes of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations. This year the program is of a spicier variety with a heavier than usual input of films from Israel. The big discovery and surprise so far has been a rib-tickling comedy from Israel entitled "Like a Fish Out of Water" (RT, 56 minutes) by 28 year old helmer Leon Pudovsky. The story centers on a freewheeling Argentine immigrant to Israel, a thoroughly unkosher Lat...
2ND WARSAW JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL (MAY 19 -- 25, 2005)A ROUSING SUCCESSBy Alex Deleon-PevnyThe second convening of the new International Jewish Film Festival in Warsaw proved to be an even bigger success than the first edition a year ago. The official Polish designation, directly translated, comes out as "The Warsaw International Film Festival on Jewish Motifs" which seems to leave room for a broad interpretation of just what it is that counts as a "Jewish film". Indeed, as we shall see, some of ...
