Join us for a vibrant program of new film premieres and rare archive treasures best experienced on the big screen! All screenings will be in person.

Highlights include new films from Israel, Germany,  Australia and Italy. And the New England premiere of our Center’s 35mm restoration of the Yiddish feature film Mothers of Today starring Esther Field, the 1930s radio personality known as the “Yiddishe Mama.”

Schedule:

Sunday, May 12, 2024

1:00pm - Mothers of Today

This essentially unknown 1939 Yiddish film stars Esther Field, the 1930s radio personality known as the “Yiddishe Mama,” in one of her only appearances on film. Field plays an immigrant Jewish widow in New York who suffers the gradual deterioration of her family and Jewish tradition at the hands of neighborhood criminals and the realities of assimilation. This soapy, over-the-top drama - with cantors and gangsters, Yiddish songs, liturgical singing and comedy interludes - is surprisingly moving in its authentic emotional directness.

Mothers of Today is a surviving example of the era’s shund genre: proudly sentimental, low-budget and low-brow films, books, and theater. Shund films were particularly popular with working-class Jewish immigrant audiences, who recognized and enjoyed seeing their own daily lives reflected on the big screen, especially the central role women played in Jewish family life. Mothers of Today is a fun ride, a time capsule, and a rescued piece of Jewish and cinema history. Bring a hanky for the tsuris, and a few insults to yell at the no-goodniks.

4:00pm - Kidnapped

The latest by legendary Italian director Marco Bellocchio is a grand, historical fresco depicting the scandalous true story of a young Jewish child who, in mid-19th century Bologna, was abducted from his family by the church under direct orders from the Pope.

In 1858, in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take seven-year-old Edgardo (Enea Sala). Allegedly, the child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and papal law dictates that he receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s distraught parents (played by Barbara Ronchi and Fausto Russo Alesi) battle the Vatican to have their son returned. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly takes on a political dimension, all against the backdrop of the riveting true events that shook the world. 

Awash in painterly chiaroscuro evoking the masterworks of Caravaggio and Delacroix, Kidnapped uses light and shadow to convey the baroque drama of the events. Kidnapped is at once a personal, human-scale narrative of a family in crisis who will do anything to retrieve their child from the clutches of a ruthless theocratic government, and a wide-scope portrait of a country on the cusp of revolution.

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

7:00pm - The Plot Against Harry

Don’t miss this rare screening of one of cinema’s least known, singular showstoppers. Revealing too much of the plot of Michael Roemer’s 1969’s The Plot Against Harry would spoil all the fun, satire, and surprises.  All you need to know is that after a nine-month stint in prison, Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest), a New York racketeer, tries to regain his lost turf in a neighborhood much changed since he went inside. Harry’s life is complicated exponentially when he runs into his estranged ex-wife, grown children and ex-brother-in-law. What follows is a verité but slightly surreal world of Mafia barbecues, Kosher catering, call girls, bar mitzvahs, lingerie fashion shows, Cuban-Chinese mobsters, subway parties, and much more.

In 1969, writer-director Michael Roemer failed to find distribution for the film and it languished unseen until two decades later when Roemer overheard a technician laughing hysterically while making a video transfer of the film. Finally released in 1990, the film garnered critical acclaim and cult status.

Thursday, May 16, 2024

4:00pm - Shoshana

Set in British Mandatory Palestine, this gripping historical thriller from celebrated British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart), weaves a story of star-crossed love with one of political radicalization and violence. The year is 1938 on the eve of the Second World War, and tensions are high in Tel Aviv where the British control a mixed Arab and Jewish population in Palestine. English police officer Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) and Jewish journalist and activist Shoshana (Irina Starshenbaum), the daughter of Zionist Labor movement co-founder Dov Ber Borochov, are passionately in love. But political unrest is escalating. Avraham Stern (Aury Alby) is leading the Irgun in a deadly campaign against the British authorities, who under the leadership of officer Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling, The Queen’s Gambit) have unilaterally increased their crackdown on both Jews and Arabs.

Based on real people and events, the film is plotted with surgical precision. Its subtle homage to the noir classic The Third Man makes for great entertainment, but also an insightful portrait of the legacy of British colonialism and political violence.

Friday, May 17, 2024

1:00pm - Blind at Heart

Based on Julia Franck’s International bestselling novel Die Mittagsfrau - winner of the German Book Prize and translated into 37 languages - Barbara Albert’s film adaptation is a richly textured portrait of one woman’s struggle to maintain selfhood in an increasingly hostile landscape. Hélène’s complexity is brought to life by the mesmerizing Mala Emde in this stirring drama.

Hélène arrives in Weimar-era Berlin as a young woman with aspirations of becoming a doctor. As the city’s carefree ambiance darkens and tragedy befalls her fiancé (Thomas Prenn), Hélène’s grief gives way to a determination to keep her half-Jewish lineage a secret. When a handsome Luftwaffe officer (Max von der Groeben) professes his love and offers her a forged Aryan identity, she accepts his offer-yet the steps she takes for self-preservation leads her down a difficult path.

Sunday, May 19, 2024

11:00am - Stella. A Life.

Stella, played by the magnetic Paula Beer (Never Look Away, Transit, Frantz), is a vivacious, talented young woman in Nazi Berlin working as a Jazz singer despite the repressive climate and the risk of passing as a non-Jew. When tides turn and she is forced into hiding with her parents, Stella begins working with a passport forger. Exposed and captured by the Gestapo, she faces the most dire and deadly of choices: face deportation to Auschwitz for herself and her parents or become an informant for the Gestapo identifying Jews hiding in Berlin. This provocative drama is based on the true story of Stella Goldschlag who, from September 1943 until the end of the war, delivered hundreds of fellow Jews to the Gestapo, and was put on trial after the war.

2:30pm - Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer

In this murder mystery documentary, three brothers in sunny Melbourne Australia engage the help of a decorated private detective and investigate a rumored family secret. Was their father Boris, a suburban watchmaker and family man, Holocaust survivor and Jewish WWII partisan leader, actually involved in revenge killings of Nazis in 1950s Australia.

After WWII, the largest number of Holocaust survivors who did not go to Israel, started life anew in Australia. So too did nearly 4,000 Nazis. Featuring never-before-seen archives, police reports, government files, and home movies, this newest documentary from award-winning director Danny Ben-Moshe opens up a secret history of Nazi fugitives, Cold War spies, covert Jewish vigilante intelligence networks, and high-level government conspiracies. What the brothers also encounter is the timeless question of whether we ever really know our parents. And the profound question of when - if ever - is it justified to take the law into your own hands.

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

6:00pm - Seven Blessings

In early 1990s Jerusalem, a boisterous Moroccan-Jewish-Israeli clan reunites for a cross-cultural wedding, celebrating the Moroccan-Jewish bride and French-Ashkenazi groom over the course of seven nights of dinners and ceremonies each hosted by a different family member in honor of the newlyweds. The week-long ritual of sheva brachot (seven blessings) occasions joy, laughter, dancing, and oh so much delicious food. But behind the joie de vivre and togetherness, are family secrets and lies. With humor, pathos, and confidence, Seven Blessings puts Mizrahi mothers, daughters, and sisters at the beating heart of this rich enveloping story.

Directed by Ayelet Menahemi (Noodle, NCJF’s 2008 opening night film), Seven Blessings was written by Reymonde Amsallem and Eleanor Sela, who co-star as sisters in the film.

Cousins in real life, Sela and Amsallem (star of NCJF festival films Three Mothers, Human Resources Manager, Kidon, The Attack, My Lovely Sister, Lebanon, Seven Minutes in Heaven) were inspired by their own family as well as interviews with Moroccan Jewish women. One of the best Israeli films in years, Seven Blessings became a cultural watershed upon its theatrical release this winter.

Buy Tickets

Date: May 12-21, 2024

Location: Coolidge Corner Theatre

290 Harvard St Brookline, MA 02446

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