History & Humanity at the New York Jewish Film Festival 2022

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Tuesday, 11 January 2022 16:56

Written by Brad Balfour

Now in its 31st installment, the New York Jewish Film Festival 2022 showcases films from around the world that embody the Jewish experience. Running January 12 to the 25th at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street) as well as some films streamed online, the festival mixes narrative features, shorts, and documentaries from around the world.

The Opening film is Neighbours, in which a young boy and his family live in a Kurdish community near the Syrian/Turkish border in the early 1980s. He’s extremely fond of his Jewish neighbors, but perplexed when a new teacher propagates fiery nationalism and antisemitism. Director Mano Khalil (Die Schwalbe) mines childhood experiences with a welcome sense of humor while drawing parallels with contemporary refugee crises.

The Centerpiece film is Sin La Habana, winner of the award for Best Canadian Film at the 2021 Vancouver International Film Festival. In the film, a salsa dance instructor and his girlfriend, a lawyer, seek to escape Cuba by any means, ensnaring an Iranian-Jewish woman in their plot. Writer/director/composer Kaveh Nabatian, himself Iranian-Canadian, offers a lyrical and deeply felt meditation on cross-cultural relationships, with their attendant gulfs of religion and background, further complicated by the hidden agendas of all concerned parties.

As part of a special screening, the NYJFF will also present the World Premiere of the new 4K digital restoration of Steve Brands’ Kaddish, an engaging chronicle of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor’s son that reveals 1980s New York and activist Yossi Klein Halevi in his formative years.

In Rose, by Aurélie Saada, a 78-year-old Parisian woman, played by iconic French actress Françoise Fabian (My Night at Maud’s, Belle de Jour) , rebels against ageist and sexist stereotypes to reinvent herself.

Set on Wall Street in 2008, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff offers a singularly creative perspective on financial fraud as musician/poet Alicia Jo Rabins plays herself, obsessing over Madoff and the capitalist system that enabled him.

The essay film, The Will to See, grew out of writer, activist, and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy’s journalistic coverage of places where human suffering predominates. Journeying from Mogadishu, Somalia, “a ghost town abandoned to the warlords,” to Nigeria, where Christians are massacred with impunity, Lévy spotlights locations the world cannot afford to keep ignoring.

In addition, the festival includes the special program: Tribute to Pearl Bowser (presented virtually), focusing on the celebrated film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor. Harlem-raised Pearl Bowser is a stalwart champion of independent film and filmmakers of color. Alongside her late colleagues, psychologist and artist Mel Roman, and Charles Hobson, producer-writer at ABC-TV, Bowser researched and curated a landmark retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1970 called “The Black Film,” igniting a new wave of enduring interest in exhibiting, producing, and engaging with African American cinema beyond borders. She has spent her multifaceted career cultivating audiences for marginalized voices in motion pictures, particularly with her groundbreaking work on early 1900s Black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux. This virtual tribute program includes a recent short-film interview with Bowser and several films, including Body and Soul (1925) by Oscar Micheaux, which features Paul Robeson in his acting debut.

To learn more, go to: https://www.filmlinc.org/festivals/new-york-jewish-film-festival/

New York Jewish Film Festival 2022
January 12 - 25, 2022

Online & The Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St.
New York, NY 10023

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