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The cast of The New Black lounges around on a couch in various poses. Text reads, "The New Black. Season 2."

The New Black (Season 2)

A new season of the award-winning Israeli series, following the exploits of four students who dropped out of their prestigious Yeshiva and are searching for their place in the world. In this season they’ll open a yeshiva on a central, non-religious street in Jerusalem – to the chagrin of the neighbors – and not only that, but right across the street from a co-ed secular seminary. Disagreements and differences will crop up soon enough, but there’ll also be moments of harmony and bridge-building between the two worlds.

Courtesy of ChaiFlicks.
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Promised Lands

40-year-old filmmaker Yael Reuveny returns to Israel to reunite with former classmates from 1988, who were all coming of age as Israel was turning 40. They were the first Jews born in Israel, a dream come true for the many generations before them. Examining a decade that began with optimistic peace agreements and ended with the painful clash of the Second Intifada, Reuveny and her classmates discuss growing up as the first Israeli generation to know hope and perhaps the first to lose it.

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The Tenth Man

Award-winning director Daniel Burman returns with The Tenth Man, a well-observed comedy that wrestles with notions of identity, home and the intricacies of the father son relationship. After years away, Ariel returns to Buenos Aires seeking to reconnect with his father Usher, who has founded a charity foundation in Once, the city’s bustling Jewish district where Ariel spent his youth. In the process of trying to meet his father and getting entangled in his charitable commitments, Ariel also reconnects with his own Jewish roots.

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Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

The true story of Germany’s most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to thrilling life in the multi-award winning drama Sophie Scholl – The Final Days. Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Sophie Scholl stars Julia Jentsch in a luminous performance as the young coed-turned-fearless activist. Armed with long-buried historical records of her incarceration, director Marc Rothemund expertly re-creates the last six days of Sophie Scholl’s life: a heart-stopping journey from arrest to interrogation, trial and sentence.

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The Last Resort

Before the arrival of Miami Vice and MTV Spring Break, South Beach was home to the largest cluster of Jewish retirees in the country. Drawn by the small apartments, low cost of living, sunny weather, and thriving cultural life, they came by the thousands seeking refuge from the Northeast’s brutal winters. By the 1970s, these former New Yorkers had turned from seasonal visitors to year-round residents, making Miami Beach home to a population that was primarily over 70 and overwhelmingly Jewish. The Last Resort takes audiences on a journey to the iconic Miami Beach of that era through the lens of young photographers Andy Sweet and Gary Monroe. With cameras in hand, they embarked on an ambitious 10-year project to document this unique chapter in the city’s history, which would soon be erased by the turbulent 1980s. Featuring interviews with Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Buchanan, filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, photographer Gary Monroe, and more, The Last Resort is a stunning testament to a community all but forgotten… until now.

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Keep the Change

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.

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Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

What do the most ravishingly beautiful actress of the 1930s and 40s and the inventor whose concepts were the basis of cell phone and bluetooth technology have in common? They are both Hedy Lamarr, the glamour icon whose ravishing visage was the inspiration for Snow White and Cat Woman and a technological trailblazer who perfected a secure radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during WWII.

Weaving interviews and clips with never-before-heard audio tapes of Hedy speaking on the record about her incredible life—from her beginnings as an Austrian Jewish emigre to her scandalous nude scene in the 1933 film Ecstasy to her glittering Hollywood life to her ground-breaking, but completely uncredited inventions to her latter years when she became a recluse, impoverished and almost forgotten—Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story brings to light the story of an unusual and accomplished woman, spurned as too beautiful to be smart, but a role model to this day.

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Happy Times

A boorish Israeli-American couple plan a Sabbath dinner party for a group of fellow ex-pat friends and family in their Hollywood Hills mansion. What could possibly go wrong? Well, start with a deadly mix of alcohol, add inflated egos, some inappropriate lust and top with raging jealousy and the result is of cauldron of murderous mayhem. A shot gun, garden sheers, kitchen knives and even a garbage disposal are used as weapons of choice as these deranged guests turn on each other in director Michael (“Out in the Dark”) Mayer’s outrageous and bloody comedy. Think “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” meets “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

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Hannah Arendt

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.

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Kiss Me Kosher

A subversive love story about clashing cultures and families, Kiss Me Kosher is a romantic misadventure crossing all borders. When two generations of Israeli women fall for a German woman and a Palestinian man, chaos follows. What happens when lovers don’t fit together but do belong together?