New York Jewish Film Festival Dates Announced

Opening Film: America by Ofir Raul Graizer
Centerpiece: Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden by Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin
Closing Film: Alegría by Violeta Salama

NEW YORK, NY (December 8, 2022) — The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center will present the 32nd annual New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) from January 12 through 23, 2023. Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, NYJFF presents the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience.

The 2023 edition will feature in-person screenings at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, NYC, and two virtual offerings. The NYJFF line-up showcases 29 wide-ranging and exciting features and shorts (21 features and 8 shorts), including the latest works by dynamic voices in international cinema, as well as the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of the groundbreaking 1997 documentary A Life Apart: Hasidism in America by Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum.

In the Opening Film, America, director Ofir Raul Graizer follows up on the international success of his acclaimed drama The Cakemaker with an enveloping and visually sumptuous story about sexual identity and personal trauma, following a swimming coach living in Chicago whose return to his home country, Israel, after his father dies, triggers a series of life-altering events for him and his childhood friend.

This year’s Centerpiece is Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden, receiving its world premiere at the NYJFF. This new documentary on artist Charlotte Salomon by Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin offers an intimate and expansive look at the young woman who, though she was murdered in Auschwitz at age 26, completed an astounding amount of art, including some 1,300 paintings, before her deportation. The film delves into her youth in Berlin, her escape to the south of France after the rise of the Nazis, her love affair with a music teacher, and the creative explosion that resulted in her brilliant body of multimedia work.

The Closing Film is Alegría. Filmmaker Violeta Salama makes her moving and wise feature debut with this layered, comic-tinged drama about women breaking free from patriarchal tradition in a contemporary Jewish diasporic community. Set in Melilla, an autonomous, multicultural Spanish city on Africa’s north coast, the film centers on Alegría, a single mother who has returned to her hometown from Mexico for her niece’s Orthodox Jewish wedding, although Alegría does not acknowledge her own Jewish heritage. Salama’s film sensitively depicts Alegría coming to terms with her roots and the cultural past she rejected, while reconnecting with family and friends.

Several other notable highlights in this year’s festival include June Zero, Where Life Begins, I Am Not, This Is National Wake, and Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Art of Un-War.

In June Zero, from American filmmaker Jake Paltrow, the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the mass murder of Jews during World War II, is revisited from the three disparate perspectives of Eichmann’s Moroccan prison guard; a Polish Holocaust survivor who helped capture the infamous Nazi war criminal; and a 13-year-old Jewish Libyan immigrant. Based on true accounts, Paltrow’s gripping and surprising new drama reminds us that the same histories are experienced differently by people all over the world.

Set in the bucolic Calabrian countryside during the citron harvest, Where Life Begins, an intimate and elegantly rendered romantic drama about family, faith, and freedom, is the directorial debut of veteran French actor Stéphane Freiss. The film follows the blossoming attraction between the farm owner and a rabbi’s daughter who is questioning the constraints of her religious upbringing.

Acclaimed filmmaker Tomer Heymann’s latest documentary, I Am Not, is a deeply emotional work that follows the life-changing journey of Oren, who was adopted from Guatemala by an Israeli family when he was a baby and now returns to his birth country to seek out his biological family and sense of self.

In This Is National Wake, her energetic and revelatory directorial debut, Mirissa Neff tells the amazing story of National Wake, a group of young Jewish and Black musicians who dared to start a band in 1979 against the rupture and racism of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Maria Niro’s compelling documentary Krzysztof Wodiczko: The Art of Un-War pays tribute to the artistry and political commitment of Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, whose large-scale works, often projected onto the facades of major architectural monuments, disrupt the complacency of a public increasingly inured to violence.

Several films in this year’s line-up incorporate the Yiddish language, including:

Jewish Life in Lwow, Shaul Goskind and Yitzhak Goskind. This rarely screened 1939 documentary short portrait of the daily lives of Jews in Lwow, Poland, now Lviv, Ukraine, home to a thriving Jewish community before World War II, captures a prosperous world on the precipice of obliteration by the coming Nazi invasion.

A Letter to Mother, Joseph Green and Leon Trystand. World Premiere of 35mm film restoration by the National Center for Jewish Film. A classic of Yiddish cinema, A Letter to Mother (also known as The Eternal Song) was among the final Yiddish films made in Poland before the Nazi invasion. Set in the years leading up to World War I, it follows a mother of three children trying to provide for her family after her husband moves to America.

A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum. World Premiere of 4K Restoration. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, this groundbreaking documentary was among the first American films to offer a full, distinctive, inside look at the Hasidic Jewish communities that found their most vital enclaves in America after mass migrations post-World War II.

SHTTL, Ady Walter. SHTTL, an ambitious and technically astonishing film, tells the expansive, multi-character story of a Jewish village in Ukraine on the border with Poland 24 hours before the Nazi invasion that will destroy it. The film was shot in a single take in Ukraine and features a remarkable cast speaking Yiddish and Ukrainian.

The films for the 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival have been selected by Rachel Chanoff, Director, THE OFFICE performing arts + film; Lisa Collins, filmmaker, digital journalist/writer/editor, programmer, and events/film producer; Indigo Sparks, performance artist and producer; and Aviva Weintraub, director, New York Jewish Film Festival, the Jewish Museum with Dan Sullivan, assistant programmer, Film at Lincoln Center as advisor, and assistance from Ana Maroto, film festival coordinator, the Jewish Museum.

For more information, visit the festival website.

Originally published at https://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on December 8, 2022.