[2008-05-21] The first edition of the Jewish Culture Festival in 1988 was built around the film series. Now, after 20 years, films are still an important part of our Festival. Our film program is prepared in close cooperation with annual Jewish Film Festival, organized by the Jewish Museum in New York. This year we will present mostly documentaries, showing different aspects of Israeli life but we will also face once again a painful chapter of Polish-Jewish history: March 1968 events in Poland. Most of the screenings will take place in Alchemia Club in Krakow's Kazimierz. Please click 'more' for details about the films.

Hebrew Lesson
Dir. David Ofek

“Learning Hebrew has been central to establishing one‘s personal identity and sense of collective belonging. Language transcends political, religious and ideological divisions; it is what unites and coalesces the different parts of society.“ (The Jewish Agency pamphlet for Hebrew Ulpan teachers)

Chin left her daughter in China and came to Israel to make a living. She cleaned Ehud‘s house, and they fell in love. Sasha never considered immigrating to Israel. But four years after his woman left Russia with their daughter, he understood that life without his child is worthless. He left a thriving business behind only to find himself in Tel Aviv‘s worst neighborhood. These and other characters meet in a Hebrew language Ulpan where their personal stories meld with the complexities of Israeli reality. Israeli society is revealed through the foreigner‘s eyes.

June 28, 8.30 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

***

Song of David
Reż. Oded Turgeman

Full of symbolism movie, telling the story of two possibilities of deep faith, illustrated by religiously engaged rap music.

David Fisher is a sixteen year old soul-searching Hasidic who is studying to become a rabbi in a Los Angeles Yeshiva. Alienated by the social boundaries that enclose him, he reaches out to the broader world. He becomes obsessed with rap music, wherein he discovers artistic freedom and honest self expression. He then must choose between diverging worlds. David Fisher is played by real life Hassidic Jew and East Coast Rap artist, Nosson Zand, that makes the movie more realistic.

June 29, 5.00 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

* * *

Orthodox Stance
Dir. Jason Hutt

It is a portrait of seemingly incompatible cultures and characters working together to support Dmitriy's rare and remarkable devotion to both Orthodox Judaism and the pursuit of a professional boxing title.

For the last 60 years, the term "Jewish boxer" has been an oxymoron. But Dmitriy Salita, a 24 year-old Russian immigrant is making history as a top professional boxer and a rigorously observant Jew.. The film travels with Dmitriy from his home in the Russian section of Brooklyn to a dilapidated Orthodox synagogue, from a Black and Hispanic amateur gym in the projects to boxing's biggest stages in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Puerto Rico. Intimate verite scenes of torah study, prayer, and keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath on the road are juxtaposed with training, weigh-ins, business negotiations and locker room and fight footage. In so doing, the film reveals a first-of-its kind insider's view of professional boxing and a first-of-a kind professional boxer.

June 29, 5.30 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

* * *

Tovarisch, I am not dead
Reż. Stuart Urban

The film takes the form not of a standard biographical documentary but a probing analysis of an identity, a rolling narrative whose chapters bring fresh surprises as we come into the 21st century.

Garri Urban was a survivor – not a victim – of both the Holocaust and Gulag. He overcame adversity through a mixture of charm, aggression, and chutzpah. His autobiographical account of his adventures took its title from when he was shot during his attempt to swim across an icy river from Soviet territory to Romania. He told the snipers who stooped to lift his apparently lifeless body; “no, tovarisch (comrade), I’m not dead”. In 1992 his son, film-maker Stuart Urban, follows Garri into the former Soviet Union as soon as Communism disintegrates. The video diaries that were made over a 14 year quest into Garri’s KGB records and the fate of his family in the Holocaust, plus extensive 16mm Kodachrome home movies from the 1950s onwards, form the core of the film. As Stuart closely questions his father while he is alive, and then goes in search of answers he could not get until his father was dead.

June 30, 8.30 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

* * *

Description of a struggle
Dir. Chris Marker
Awarded a Golden Bear for best documentary at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961, it was dubbed ‘a work of art in which truth is complementary to beauty’. Legendary as a cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet, Chris Marker was one of the most innovative filmmakers to emerge during the postwar era. He has made countless films, videos and related projects, active not only as a director but also writer, producer, and cinematographer.
In “Description of an struggle”, Marker’s idiosyncratic style, combining location footage with archival material, builds a complex and personal portrayal. Israel’s demography is explored, from the kibbutzim to the Arab minorities, the orthodox Jews, and the tourists. The "battle" of the title does not refer to the tank-and-artillery variety, but to the inner struggle of Israeli citizens to adapt to a new view of themselves, in a new country.
02.07, 5.00 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

* * *

Description of a memory
Dir. Den Geva

A poetic dialogue with one of the most important documentary movies about Israel. Cinematic clash of two visions of Israel. DOTŁUMACZYĆ – PAN WILIAM BRAND

A cinematic journey to the recesses of the photographed memory in Chris Marker’s 1960 impressionist film about Israel, ''Description d'un combat'' (Description of a Struggle), which won the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Festival. Dan Geva creates a poetic and philosophic cinematic dialogue with the original text. Geva takes us to places that Marker warned about half a century earlier and to those which the French master could not even have imagined. The present film goes into the innermost parts of the original and places Israel’s present as a future to Marker’s prophecy. It allows us to ask: when the future will turn our present into its past, will we longingly remember this morning?

July 2, 8.30 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

* * *

Ashkenaz
Director: Rachel Leah Jones

Aszkenazim- Jews of European origin – are Israel’s ‘white folks’. And like most white folks in multicultural society they see themselves as the norm and don’t think of themselves in racial or ethnic terms becouse by now. Yiddish has been replaced with hebrew, exile with occupation, the shtetl with a kibbutz and old-fashioned irony with post-modern cynicism. But the paradox of whiteness In Israel is that Aszkenazim are’t exacly „white folks” historically. Ashkenaz looks At whiteness In Izrael and wonders: how did the „Others” of Europe become the Europe of the others?

July 6, 5.30 pm
Alchemia Club, ul. Estery 5

* * *

GDANSK STATION


Directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz

Gdansk Station is an attempt to deal with a historical period that is painful for Poles--1968, the explosion of anti-Semitic hysteria that led to the mass exodus of Polish citizens of Jewish origins.

The film takes place in the Israeli Mediterranean resort of Ashkelon where, beginning in 1988, the émigrés from 1968 gathered every few years. Even when 37 years had passed since their departure, Poland remained a presence in their homes. This was a haunting presence, as we learned when we talked with them from morning until night. For them, Poland means something different from what it means to those who left after the war or in the 1980s. The reasons for this include the circumstances under which they departed, the backdrop of the train station, the hostility or mistrust that they encountered at times before their departure, and above all their profound experience of rejection, exclusion, and humiliation. They were deprived, against their will, of their homeland--in the worst of ways: by official decree and with the tacit acquiescence of the majority of society. For many of them, especially the young, departure was a tragedy. They did not regard themselves as Jews, and some of them were not even aware before 1968 that their parents had Jewish origins.
For the emigrants from Poland, the Gdansk Station became a symbol of banishment. For those who stayed behind (who came to bid them farewell at the station) it was a place of humiliation. No one could then foresee the future course of events in Poland, and many treated the farewell at the station as a final parting, forever. So it was for all of them: the departing, their families, and those who accompanied them to the Gdansk Station.

June 4, 4.00 p.m.
Kupa Synagogue, ul. Miodowa 27

* * *

March ’68: Unfinished History
Directed by Jacek Chojecki

This is a film that searches for the meaning and impact of “March ’68” on the generations that followed. It features the children of people who were involved, and we learn about the aftermath of the March events from their perspective. The interviewees are now as old as their parents were in 1968. Most of them grew up outside abroad; we see Poland through their eyes. The March events changed the lives of their parents. The children talk about their parents’ attitudes, what their parents told them about those events, and how all of this influenced their own lives. This younger generation was uprooted from the roots their parents grew up with; nevertheless, the March events cast a very long shadow on their lives. The dramatic cornerstone of the film is a dialogue between the outstanding director Maciej Prus (who was director Kazimierz Dejmek’s assistant on the 1967 production of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve that sparked the March 1968 events) and Damien Łukawski, an acting student at the State Higher School of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. Others featured in the film are Monika Smolar (UK), Anna Blumsztajn (Poland), Jowita Kretkowska (Poland), Bogna Pawlisz, Anat Sawicki, Emi Sward, Jonathan Rozenbaum (all from Israel), and Adam and Jakub Tenenbaum (Sweden).
Director Jacek Chojecki, who also wrote the screenplay, is 25, the same age as the people he interviews. He is a student at the film school in Katowice. His parents were actively involved in the events of March 1968.
July 4, 4:00 p.m.
Kupa Synagogue, ul. Miodowa 27

* * *

THE WITNESS OF THE SURVIVOR
Directed by Bernard Offen (USA)

Bernard Offen was born in 1929 in the Krakow district of Podgórze, which the Germans changed into the getto for the city’s Jews during the war, where he and his family were prisoners within it. Bernard Offen survived the the nearby camps of Płaszów and Julang. Then Mauthausen, Auschwitz- Birkenau (camp numer B-7815) and Dachau. Later he was liberated on a death march by the American Army. There were 59 people in my family, but only three of us survived, my two older brothers and I. For over twenty years I have been returning each Sumer to teach what Jewish life was like in Krakow before the war. As an eyewitness and now an American Citizen. I have produced four films ( The Work, My Hometown Concentration Camp, Process B-7815 and Hawai and the Holocaust…) I continue to lead groups as a proces sof witnessing-healing and self confrontation, only through the places I survived.


Entrance tickets (10 PLN) to all screenings at Alchemia Club are to be purchased before each screening at Alchemia.
To the screening about March '68 events and films by Bernard Offen - entrance free.

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