This documentary follows one family’s struggle to honor the wishes of a dead relative after she requests to be buried as a Muslim in an all-Jewish town. Her request causes conflict due to issues of identity and the true definition of what home really is.
This film explores the dish of hummus and the people who make it and enjoy it, going into depth about the history of the dish and the often supernatural power it has to bring people together or completely divide them.
Heading Home tells the story of the underdog national baseball team, Team Israel, who is competing for the first time in the World Baseball Classic. Following years of defeat, Team Israel is finally ranked among the world’s best in 2017. The journey takes them from Tel Aviv to Seoul to Jerusalem as they discover the pride of representing Israel on the world’s stage.
Israel has one of the hottest food scenes in the world and this film paints a portrait of Israeli people through food. Follow award-winning chef Michael Solomonov to fine restaurants, home kitchens, wineries, cheese caves, street vendors, and everything in between. In Search of Israeli Cuisine tours the 70+ cultures that make up the Israeli people, each with tasty and unique food traditions.
Shoshana Damari, “Queen of Hebrew Music” and Israel’s first diva, graced local and international stages with a larger-than-life personality and renowned voice. Yet beneath the persona, Shosana kept her personal and family life hidden. Now, for the first time, the woman behind the crown will come to light—a story of motherhood and affairs, fame and loneliness, isolation and confidence.
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.
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.
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.
Can the means used to resolve the conflict in South Africa be applied to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? As someone who experienced both conflicts firsthand, Robi Damelin wonders about this. Born in South Africa during the apartheid era, she later lost her son, who was serving with the Israeli Army reserve in the Occupied Territories. At first she attempted to initiate a dialogue with the Palestinian who killed her child. When her overtures were rejected, she embarked on a journey back to South Africa to learn more about the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s efforts in overcoming years of enmity. Robi’s thought-provoking journey leads from a place of deep personal pain to a belief that a better future is possible.
A father and his filmmaker son explore the previously untold Holocaust story of 1,000 Viennese Jews stranded on the frozen Danube River in 1941 awaiting rescue by Ruth Klieger, a senior agent of the newly created Mossad. Intriguing storytelling weaves together interviews with survivors, dramatic reenactments, and a father who must tell this story.
