New York Jewish Film Festival

Justice, injustice.

Crime after Crime  is a profoundly moving documentary film on the legal battle to free Debbie Peagler, a woman imprisoned in California for over a quarter century due to her connection to the murder of the man who abused her for several years.

She finds her only hope for freedom when two rookie attorneys – one of them an Orthodox Jew named Joshua Safran – with no backgrounds in criminal law step forward to take her case. Debbie should have been in prison for a maximum of six years, instead she was serving a life sentence.

During the Q&A after the screening, Safran described how he told his friend and filmmaker Yoav Potash about Debbie and her story. He said he thought the legal process to free her would only take a few months and when Potash met Debbie for the first time he immediately wanted to make the film.

In the end, the whole process took over six years. In the meantime, Safran was laid-off from his law firm because he was doing “too much pro bono work.” At the end of the Q&A, Safran said that Debbie kept telling everybody not to forget her sisters – most women behind bars are survivors of domestic violence – and that she got to see the film before she died of cancer 10 months after her release.

To support the film please visit: http://crimeaftercrime.com/

Aaron Galliner, 2011 Blogger and Festival Volunteer

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A religious roadtrip through Eastern Europe. 

Daniel Burman (Waiting for the Messiah, NYJFF 2002; Lost Embrace, NYJFF 2005; Empty Nest, NYJFF 2009) returns to the NYJFF having made his first documentary, 36 Righteous Men/Los  36 Justos. Camera in hand, Burman joins a group of Orthodox Jews on their annual pilgrimage to the tombs of Tzaddikim (righteous men) in Russia, Ukraine and Poland, culminating at the tomb of the 17th-century spiritual leader, the Baal Shem Tov. To incorporate his fellow travelers’ views, the director occasionally handed over the camera to one of them. “I found it very interesting what people would focus on who have never filmed before,” he explained during the Q&A.

Intrigued by the Jewish mystical belief in 36 hidden Tzaddikim who are always on this earth yet must remain anonymous, Burman takes the audience on an intimate journey across 2,500 miles and into his own identity as a Jew. Although he didn’t undergo a “transcendental change,” he said during the post-screening Q&A, the trip did change his prejudices about Orthodox Jews and this kind of pilgrimage.

After both screenings Burman was asked whether women played any significant roles on his journey or as Tzaddikim. “This question comes up after every screening of the film,” Burman said smiling, adding that, “women are a great subject.” He explained that although righteous women existed, he didn’t want to specifically look for them out of political correctness. “It seemed more honest to me to tell the story the way I experienced it,” he said.

Aaron Galliner, 2011 Blogger and Festival Volunteer

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IMDB: Daniel Burman

When filmmaker Eytan Harris heard the story, he began shooting As Lilith that same day. His riveting documentary takes the viewer through the aftermath of a teenage girl’s suicide. Her strong-willed mother, Lilith, wishes to cremate the body, but Israel’s emergency service, ZAKA, does everything it can to prevent it .

As the family grieves and tries to come to terms with their profound loss, they find themselves on the defensive for being different while also trying to explain the circumstances of the young girl’s death. During the Q&A after the screening, Harris described how he himself found it difficult to accept Lillith’s way of grieving and coping with her situation when he first started filming . It was only later in the process that he began to accept that she was different from others, while still not fully understanding her.

Harris stressed that everything he filmed really happened spontaneously in front of the camera. “People see different things in this film. Some like her, some hate her—I think, that is the interesting thing about the story.”

Aaron Galliner, 2011 Blogger and Festival Volunteer

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“Frankly there’s nothing so unusual about being a Jewish Cowboy”   - Socalled

When  watching the The “Socalled” Movie, the first thought to cross your mind may well be— what a likeable guy! Documentarian Garry Beitel, who was a guest at  the NYJFF in 2003 with his film My Dear Clara, returned with this portrait of the artistically fearless klezmer hip-hop artist Socalled, aka Josh Dolgin —pianist, singer, arranger, rapper, producer and composer (and also a magician, filmmaker and visual artist).

But it’s not just klezmer that Socalled plays – it’s clever klezmer. He’s blasting through boundaries that separate music styles from different cultures, eras and generations. He lets them meet, harmonize and befriend each other. Socalled is not out  to be political – but he does hide subtle messages in his music, sending  them out through the musicians he works with such as the jazz and funk trombonist Fred Wesley and the clarinetist David Krakauer, among others. “Its not political, its not religious, its just music. … the politics are that people should get along with each other,” he says in the film.

Shot in Socalled’s Montreal neighborhood, where Hasidic Jews and hipsters crowd the sidewalks, and in New York, France and Ukraine, The “Socalled” Movie is a multifaceted depiction of inspiration, collaboration and transformation. In making this film Garry Beitel explained during the Q&A that he tried to “bring the forgotten music, in a different and contemporary form, to the audience.”

Socalled has performed all over the world, from Canada, to the U.S., Europe, off the coast of Madagascar, China and at The Jewish Museum in 2008.  He said that sometimes he struggles to focus, yet hard-won intensity is there for all the world to see.  And I believe the work he has done is impressive.

Aaron Galliner, 2011 Blogger and Festival Volunteer

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Socalled’s YouTube Channel
Special Exhibition (2008) - Off the Wall: Artists at Work

The incomparable Moishe Oysher plays Leo, a German concentration camp survivor suffering from traumatic amnesia. He works as a hotel clerk next to a nightclub where he is befriended by comedian Joey Napoleon (played by borscht-belter Joey Adams). Gradually his memory is restored with the help of Napoleon, some gangsters, a psychiatrist and the love of a good woman.

One of the first American-made feature films to dramatize the Holocaust, it tried to cross over to an American audience, but it failed at the box offices in the 1950s. Sharon Rivo, Executive Director of the National Center for Jewish Film where the film was newly restored, explained, “Americans didn’t want to deal with this subject in the movie theaters. People did talk about it but not in a cinematic way.”

This fascinating film was Oysher’s only English-language film, and was shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront, 12 Angry Men).

Aaron Galliner, 2011 Blogger and Festival Volunteer

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Wikipedia: Moishe Oysher
National Center for Jewish Film

Jews in the Civil War. What?

Very little is known about the role Jews played during the Civil War, but the demand for knowledge is there as seen at Wednesday’s (January 19) sold out screening of Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray.  

This fascinating documentary is a first-of-its-kind film that reveals the little-known struggles that faced Jewish Americans both in battle and on the home front during the American Civil War. The Civil War was reported on with great interest in Jewish Communities across Europe, and it falsifies the myth that WWI was the first modern war in which Jews fought against Jews, explained Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna, Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University. Featuring the voice of Sam Waterston as Abraham Lincoln, and narrated by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Milius, the film includes numerous voice-overs with diverse accents, reminding the audience of the diversity of experiences.  Through period photographs, rare documents, letters and artifacts, and exclusive interviews with experts and descendants, the film chronicles the sacrifices that Jews made for their beliefs and how they took up arms to defend their country both in the Union and the Confederacy.

Following the screening was a discussion with filmmaker Jonathan Gruber, Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna, and Robert Marcus, co-producer/co-writer. Gruber discussed the amazing wealth of material in Marcus’ archive, and said he had to remind everyone that they were making a movie not a mini-series.  The film introduces the viewer to a subject about which “a lot more can be said,” explained Marcus, “for example the role Jewish women played in the Civil War as spies, nurses or femmes fatales.”

At the end of the Q&A Jonathan Gruber added that what surprised him the most: “I ask myself, how could they celebrate a Seder in the South? How could they celebrate our ancestors’ freedom from slavery in Egypt when they had slaves working in their own gardens?”

Aaron Galliner, 2011 Blogger and Festival Volunteer

Related Links:
New York Jewish Film Festival Schedule
Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray website