When aspiring filmmaker David (Brandon Polansky) is mandated by a judge to attend a social program at the Jewish Community Center, he is sure of one thing: he doesn’t belong there. But when he’s assigned to visit the Brooklyn Bridge with the vivacious Sarah (Samantha Elisofon), sparks fly and his convictions are tested. Their budding relationship must weather Sarah’s romantic past, David’s judgmental mother (Jessica Walter), and their own pre-conceptions of what love is supposed to look like. Under the guise of an off-kilter New York romantic comedy, Keep the Change does something quite radical in casting actors with autism to play characters with autism, offering a refreshingly honest portrait of a community seldom depicted on the big screen. Rarely has a romcom felt so deep and poignant. Thoroughly charming and quite funny, the film’s warmth and candor brings growth and transformation to the characters, and ultimately, to us.
In the award-winning HANNAH ARENDT, the sublime Barbara Sukowa reteams with director Margarethe von Trotta (Vision,Rosa Luxemburg) for a brilliant new biopic of the influential German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist. Arendt’s reporting on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann in The New Yorker—controversial both for her portrayal of Eichmannand the Jewish councils—introduced her now-famous concept of the “Banality of Evil.” Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial and weaving a narrative that spans three countries, von Trotta beautifully turns the often invisible passion for thought into immersive, dramatic cinema.
Grierson award-winning director Iris Zaki enters the heart of Tekoa, an Israeli settlement in the West-Bank,and sits down to talk to the locals. Though fearful at first of the left-wing invader, settlers from various backgrounds gradually open up to her. Their honest, surprising and sometimes funny conversations offer a fresh take on Israeli reality from both sides of the Green Line.
During the 1920s, Café Nagler was the hottest place in Berlin. The director embarks on a journey to find out what’s left of the legendary café owned by her family. After discovering that family myths don’t always match historical facts, she’ll re-create her family’s past together with her Berlin peers.
A smash hit in Israel and winner of the Best Narrative Feature Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, Zero Motivation is a unique, sharply observed, sometimes dark and often hilarious portrait of everyday life for a unit of young, female soldiers in a remote Israeli desert outpost. Playing out like M*A*S*H meets Orange is the New Black, Talya Lavie’s brilliant debut details the power struggles of three women with different agendas and very little to do.
Pencil-pushers in the Human Resources Office, best friends Zohar (Dana Ivgy) and Daffi (Nelly Tagar) spend their time playing video games, singing pop songs, jousting with stationery and dreaming of Tel Aviv. The indolent twosome are watched over by their aspiring senior officer, Rama (Shani Klein), who dreams of a higher position and a significant military career, but with a platoon of unskilled, idle, female soldiers without any drive under her charge, her ambitions for promotion are constantly thwarted. With shifts of tone that go from slapstick to satiric to horrifying with fluid ease with a superb supporting cast of characters.
Based on the novel by Rachel Eytan. Summer 1944. 13 year old Maya is placed in a foster home. The director of the home falls in love with her, as Maya reminds him of a tortured love affair from his past. Maya, however, falls in love with a member of the underground who is engaged to one of the workers at the home. This complicated romance enthralls.
In a pastoral house on the Israeli countryside live the filmmaker’s grandfather, grandmother, and a big crystal mirror that was taken from a Palestinian house during the Nakba – the depopulation of hundreds of thousand of Palestinians during and after the establishment of the state of Israel in the 1948 war. The story of the mirror is not a secret, but it remains untold. The filmmaker asks why is it that Jewish Israelis cannot address the mirror and others remnants of the Nakba, even when they are placed in the center of their lives? In this short conversation, the filmmaker and her grandparents negotiate the ways to tell the untold, staging an allegory for the position the Nakba takes in the realities of Israeli Jews.
