Westchester Jewish Film Festival Kicks Off at Jacob Burns

Posted OnMarch 4, 2019

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Westchester Jewish Film Festival Kicks Off at Jacob Burns: The Jacob Burns Film Center will feature 42 entertaining and thought-provoking films about the Jewish experience around the world during their annual Westchester Jewish Film Festival from April 2 through April 17. The lineup delivers a mix of narrative and documentary feature films and some of the best Israeli television programming including all 12 episodes of the hit comedy series Shababniks (The New Black) a “Tarantino-esque dark comedy” that swept the comedy prizes at the 2018 Israeli Academy Film and Television Awards including, winning Best Series, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor.

Golda’s Balcony with Tovah Feldshuh

Westchester Jewish Film Festival Kicks Off at Jacob Burns The festival centerpiece is Golda’s Balcony, the Film, a cinematic event about Golda Meier’s extraordinary life and legacy, featuring a stellar performance by Tovah Feldshuh, who will join in for a post-screening discussion via Skype on April 6. In 2007, Golda’s Balcony was the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. This biographical drama is an intimate look at the extraordinary woman whose life uncannily seemed to intersect with every major event of the Jewish people in the last century: the pogroms of Russia, emigration to America, Zionist fundraising in the ’20s and ’30s, Aliyah and Israeli government service, the Holocaust and its refugees, the founding of Israel and the wars of survival of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

A Tribute to Karl Reiner

There’s also a very special tribute to the iconic directing career of comedian Carl Reiner. The festival will showcase six of Reiner’s films at multiple screenings through the two weeks. First up is The Jerk, starring Steve Martin who plays the dimwitted Navin R. Johnson, the adopted white son of a family of black sharecroppers that will run on Thursday April 4 and Saturday April 13. Next up is Reiner’s Capra-esque Oh, God! with George Burns on Friday April 5. Reiner returns to Steve Martin in the neo-Noir comic mystery Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid on Saturday, April 6 and Monday April 8. Mr. Reiner will join in via Skype for a post-screening discussion on Saturday. The Reiner tribute continues with Where’s Poppa, the ultimate Jewish mother movie starring George Segal and Ruth Gordon on Thursday April 11 and Monday April 15 and The Man with Two Brains with Steve Martin as a brain surgeon on Sunday April 14. The festival concludes with The Comic, a dark comedy about a silent film comic starring Dick Van Dyke.

Don’t Miss These Documentaries

Other highlights of the festival include the documentary Carl Laemmle, about the German-Jewish immigrant who founded Universal Pictures and produced All Quite on the Western Front, the first talkie war film to win an Osca, on Friday April and Sunday April 7 and 14. Plus a four-part screening of the late Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Four Sisters, with stunning footage he couldn’t use in his epic 1985 masterpiece Shoah. Each of these four films features interviews with holocaust survivors from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Beginning with Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath about Ruth Elias, a 17 year old when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1938, on Sunday April 7; Four Sisters: Baluty provides an eye witness account of the Lodz Ghetto from Paula Biren, a member of the ghetto’s Jewish police force, on Monday April 8; Four Sisters: Noah’s Ark, Hanna Marton, one of 1684 Hungarian Jews who the Nazis deported while 450,000 of her countrymen died at Birkenau, on Tuesday April 9 and Sunday April 14; and Four Sisters: The Merry Flea, Ada Lichtman, one of only 50 survivors of 250,000 Jews killed at the Polish extermination camp at Sobibor, provides her eye-witness account of the German invasion of Poland, also on April 9 and 14.