The Jewish History Museum and Holocaust History Center will hold a free screening of “Who Will Write Our History” on Sunday, Jan. 27 at noon at The Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway Blvd., joining hundreds of partners in a global screening event for International Hololocaust Remembrance Day. The 90-minute… Read more »
Rachel Freier, center, is the protagonist of ‘93Queen.’
Like many heavily Orthodox sections of Brooklyn, Borough Park has been served for decades by an all-male volunteer ambulance corps called Hatzalah. The corps caters to a religious Jewish community with particular needs and customs — including one custom that can increase the tension for some patients in already… Read more »
Tim Kalkhof plays a German man who falls in love with a married Israeli man in "The Cakemaker." (Strand Releasing)
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — “The Cakemaker” has been one of the more successful indie films on the international festival circuit over the past year. Its recipe: a secret gay Israeli-German love affair, a tragic death and another secret affair — between a straight woman and a gay man. The… Read more »
From an inspiring family reunion to a jaw-dropping “shanda,” the documentary “Three Identical Strangers” offers plot twists and emotional turns that top anything Hollywood has to offer this summer. The New York-area triplets, who discovered by chance in 1980 that they had been placed for adoption with three different… Read more »
Cool treats Cool off from the inside out with some of our favorite spots. Atomic Frog Ice Cream Parlor and Café, 9725 N. Thornydale Road, is a perfect example. While it specializes in “Parlor Tricks,” including ice cream, smoothies and sundaes, it’s more than just an ice cream parlor.… Read more »
“Unrest,” a Sundance-award-winning documentary, will be screened at the Loft Cinema on Sunday, Oct. 22 at 2 p.m. Jennifer Brea, a Harvard Ph.D. student, was about to marry the love of her life when she was derailed by strange symptoms. Hoping to find answers, she grabbed a camera and… Read more »
Agata Trzebuchowska as Ida Lebenstein, right, and Agata Kulesza as Wanda Gruz in the Polish film "Ida." (Courtesy photo) (JTA) — After reburying the bones of her parents in a neglected Jewish cemetery, a soon-to-be Polish nun quietly crosses herself with earth-covered fingers. A devout and introverted young woman, Ida Lebenstein had learned only days earlier that her parents were Jews who were murdered by Polish Christians. As… Read more »
(L-R) Liesel (Nele Trebs), Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), Jürgen (Mika Seidel) and Günther (André Frid) in Lore. (Music Box Films) Set during the fall of Germany in April 1945, Cate Shortland’s “Lore” evokes and filters the moral weight of history through a single adolescent girl. Experiential rather than informational, subjective without being reductive, the German-language film is a parable of the end of innocence —the naive innocence of girlhood… Read more »
(L-R): Milla Bańkowicz as Krystyna Chiger and Robert Więckiewicz as Leopold Socha (Jasmin Marla Dichant/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics) In the last few decades, German and French filmmakers — reflecting and, in some cases, bravely advancing national attitudes — have examined the Holocaust with both blunt candidness and shades-of-gray maturity. Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s profoundly responsible and beautifully made “In Darkness” represents a rare cinematic attempt to address… Read more »
The place is the Warsaw Ghetto, the year 1942, and the black-and-white footage shows fashionably dressed men and women, with yellow Stars of David as accessories, having a high time at a champagne ball. Later we see emaciated kids rooting through mounds of garbage and excrement for scraps of… Read more »
