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The Balcony

A documentary portrait of Israel Becker, founder of the first professional Yiddish theatrical company in post-war Germany and writer and star of the historic film Long Is the Road, the first feature to portray the Holocaust from a Jewish point of view. The Balcony captures Becker at age 83, with an apartment adorned with his own paintings, many of which show family members killed during the Holocaust.

These images, along with footage from Long Is the Road, reveal a man whose past is always with him. Becker replies, “I am constantly on the run. All my memories are inhabited by countless escape instincts that I know not their origins. That is my fate, and I have lived until now only because I obeyed it.”

At the End of the Day

Four commanders in the same Israeli Defense Force Golan Heights paratrooper unit, were killed over a 22-month period. With great sensitivity and skill, Bargur, whose brother Zvi was among those who died, documents the ongoing attempts by these families to come to terms with the deaths of their loved ones.

Four Friends

Four women – Selma Dejani, daughter of an Old Palestinian Moslem family; Wadad Shihade, a Palestinian Christian, originally from Jaffa; Olga Belkind, daughter of a prominent Zionist family; and Sharona Aharon from the heart of cosmopolitan Tel-Aviv – who were roommates at an Anglican boarding school in Jerusalem in 1939, meet 50 years later for a reunion. For Olga and Sharona, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of a dream but for Selma and Wadad it spelled the beginning of a lifelong tragedy. Their emotional reunion encapsulates the drama and pain rocking the region.

Farewell

This short documentary chronicles a 90 year old man’s emigration to Israel from his native shtetl in Bessabaria. Yakhnis’ beautifully photographed film poetically captures the end of a rich Jewish heritage in Russia.