Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-50 of 300
- A documentary on Steven Spielberg, filmmaker. Includes interviews with relatives, film critics, peers and people who have worked with him.
- When a young woman investigates her town's Nazi past, the community turns against her.
- Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders.
- A slapstick comedy lampooning bureaucracy and the madness of everyday life in Israel centers on an escaped lunatic who digs up the streets of Tel-Aviv with a drill.
- Historian Klaus Müller interviews survivors of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals because of the German Penal Code of 1871, Paragraph 175.
- A gripping documentary about the courage and determination of a young English stockbroker who saved the lives of 669 children. Between March 13 and August 2, 1939, Nicholas Winton organized 8 transports to take children from Prague to new homes in Great Britain, and kept quiet about it until his wife discovered a scrapbook documenting his unique mission in 1988. Winton was a successful 29-year-old stockbroker in London who "had an intuition" about the fate of the Jews when he visited Prague in 1939. He quietly but decisively got down to the business of saving lives. We learn how only two countries, Sweden and Britain, answered his call to harbor the young refugees; how documents had to be forged and how once foster parents signed for the children on delivery, that was the last he saw of them.
- Alma Mahler's affair with the young architect Walter Gropius sets in motion a marital drama that forces her husband Gustav Mahler to seek advice from Sigmund Freud.
- A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
- A documentary on the remarkable life of Ruth Gruber. At 97 years old, Brooklyn-born Ruth still has that same sharp intellect and moxie that propelled her to become the world's youngest PhD at age 20. At age 24, she became a New York Herald Tribune reporter and photographer and the same year was the first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic. A trusted member of the Roosevelt Administration during WWII, she was given a dangerous secret mission. A feminist before feminism, Ruth was never just an observer, she was a participant in the making of history. Ruth covered the turbulent Middle East throughout the 1940's, and the film combines verité footage of Ruth traveling back to Israel, with interviews and archival material.
- The mystical love story between Chonen, a poor Talmud student, and Lea, a girl from a wealthy family, depicts the traditional folk culture of Polish Jews before WW2.
- This chilling, vitally important documentary was produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The film contains unedited, previously unavailable film footage of Auschwitz shot by the Soviet military forces between January 27 and February 28, 1945 and includes an interview with Alexander Voronsov, the cameraman who shot the footage. The horrifying images include: survivors; camp visit by Soviet investigation commission; criminal experiments; forced laborers; evacuation of ill and weak prisoners with the aid of Russian and Polish volunteers; aerial photos of the IG Farben Works in Monowitz; and pictures of local people cleaning up the camp under Soviet supervision.
- Actual trial footage, emotional recollections of trial witnesses and other key participants provide insight and contrasting perspectives of the Eichmann legacy.
- In the spring of 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus embarked on a risky and unlikely mission. Traveling into the heart of Nazi Germany, they rescued 50 Jewish children from Vienna and brought them to the United States.
- Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated the Nazi extermination camps: the survivors, the conditions, and the evidence of mass murder. The film includes accounts of the economic aspects of the camps' operation, the interrogation of captured camp personnel, and the enforced visits of the inhabitants of neighboring towns, who, along with the rest of their compatriots, are blamed for complicity in the Nazi crimes - one of the few such condemnations in the Allied war records.
- One of Israel's most beloved films, this film centers around the policeman Azulai, who is as kind as he as inept.
- The deportation of 4000 Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz in July 1944, as told by George Tabori, and how the narrator's mother escaped it, owing to coincidence, courage and some help from where you'd least expect it.
- Nazi propaganda film depicting the notorious Theresienstadt concentration camp as a sort of idyllic rest stop, in an attempt to convince world opinion that there was no such thing as Nazi death camps.
- The original, non-musical film version of the book which inspired "Fiddler on the Roof".
- The life and career of Hank Greenberg, the first major Jewish baseball star in the Major Leagues.
- Mamele embraces the entire gamut of interwar Jewish life in Lodz - tenements and unemployed Jews, nightclubs and gangsters, religious Jews celebrating Sukkot - but the film belongs to Molly Picon who romps undaunted through her dutiful daughter role saving siblings, keeping the family intact, singing and acting her way through the stages of a woman's life from childhood to old age.
- The story of Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, his crimes against humanity, how he escaped justice, who protects him and why.
- Montreal 1948. On Rosh Hashanah, Chaim (a Yiddish writer) is forced to think of his religion when he's asked to be the tenth in a minyan. As he sits in the park, he suddenly sees an old friend whom he hasn't seen since they quarrelled when they were yeshiva students together. Hersh, a rabbi, survived Auschwitz and his faith was strengthened by his ordeal, while Chaim escaped the Nazis, but had lost his faith long before. The two walk together, reminisce, and argue passionately about themselves, their actions, their lives, their religion, their old quarrel, and their friendship.
- The summerly adventures of Kurt (Tucholsky) and girl friend staying in a Swedish castle whilst the political changes in Germany in the thirties.
- Jewish Luck revolves around Menakhem Mendl (one of Sholem Aleichem's characters), a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Despite Jewish oppression in Tsarist Russia, Mendl continues to pursue his dreams and his continued persistence transforms him from schlemiel to hero.
- On 22 June 1941, Germany and Romania attack Soviet Russia. Several days later, Curzio Malaparte, the Italian writer who would one day pen the novel « Kaputt », a war correspondent for « Corriere de la Sera », arrives in Iasi, in the north of Moldova, on his way to the front, which is nearby. He is incapacitated by a severe allergy and his only chance of recovery is to find a Jewish doctor, an allergologist who had studied in Florence, called Josef Gruber. All his attempts to find him are unsuccessful. While looking for him, Curzio discovers that in Iasi, several days prior to his arrival, a violent anti-Semitic pogrom took place and that a large number of the Jewish citizens of Iasi were deported by train and that Dr Gruber may be among them. In order to find him, Curzio, aided by Guido Sartori, the Italian consul in Iasi, tries to obtain an official warrant to bring Josef Gruber back. He confronts indifference, rudeness and the desire by the Romanian authorities to hide something relating to the deportation of the Iasi Jews. His journeys between the garrison of Iasi and its commandant, Colonel Niculescu-Coca, and chief of police Stavarache, are fruitless. After a confrontation with Niculescu-Coca, Curzio and Sartori leave in search of the Jews who, after several nights - during which many of them were shot in the yard of the police station were boarded onto goods wagon and sent to a station 20 kilometres from Iasi. Arriving there, Curzio and Sartori find a number of locked wagons from which moans and whimpers of people in agony are heard. Wanting to open a wagon, Curzio is stopped at gunpoint by a corporal. The two learn from the corporal that the Jews who had died of thirst in the train have already been unloaded and are being buried in a nearby cemetery. Arriving there, before a mass grave where bodies covered in quicklime can be made out, Curzio learns that the man he is looking for, Josef Gruber, is among the dead. The next day, back at the hotel, Curzio receives a visit from Colonel Niculescu-Coca, who, apologizing for the previous days altercation, has some unexpected news for Curzio
- The ship St. Louis left Nazi Germany on May 13, 1939, with 937 German Jews bound for Cuba. Most had sold all their belongings to book passage, pay off corrupt German officials, and buy visas to Cuba. Hope turned to despair when Havana suddenly barred their entry. For thirty excruciating days, the St. Louis wandered the seas and was refused haven by every country in the Americas. Finally, they returned to Europe, where the refugees were accepted by Holland, France, Belgium, and England. Four months later, World War II began and many of the passengers died in Nazi death camps. Includes archival footage, photographs, interviews with nine survivors, and readings from the diary of the ship's captain.
- Arriving in France from Israel in 1968, the Maimons join scores of other Algerian and Tunisian Jewish families in Paris' burgeoning Belleville district. Good-hearted Felix (Gad Elmaleh) reluctantly begins a life of crime to provide for his wife Mireille (Yael Abecassis) and sons, until he meets Sephardi gangster Serge (Richard Berry), from the same village as Mireille. Serge treats the Maïmons as kin, but has bigger plans for Felix's criminal career.
- Mothers of Today includes the sole motion picture performance of radio star Esther Field, who was well known on the airwaves of the 1930s as the 'Yiddishe Mama.' The film exemplifies the Yiddish film genre of shund, a brand of popular entertainment which appealed to working-class Jewish-American immigrant audiences with broadly-drawn, sentimental stories that reflected the daily life and culture of a distinctively American Yiddish community. While the shund films were invariably low-budget (and low-brow) affairs, these humble productions formed an important part of life in the United States for their audience. For actresses such as Field or Celia Adler (star of Where is My Child?, also directed by Lynn in 1939), shund offered one of the few opportunities to play strong leading roles. In retrospect, Mothers of Today is an important cultural artifact expressing the anxieties of Jewish immigrant families faced with the younger generation's increasing assimilation into mainstream American society. Shund often dealt with the plight of the Jewish mother, recognizing the important role women played in Jewish family life during the difficult period of immigration. Such is the case with Mothers of Today, in which Field plays a mother coping with her children's troubles resulting from their straying from Jewish tradition. In one subplot, a cantor's son led astray by a woman of "questionable morality" becomes involved with gangsters and ends up stealing the deed to his mother's store. On March 14, 1939, Film Daily reviewed Mothers of Today as follows: "Heavy tragedy, which seems to be an essential basis of all Yiddish dramas, is done to a turn in this new film and it should please the dyed in the wool Yiddish fans. Produced on a small budget with a hurried shooting schedule, the film has considerable merit. Cast members, with the exception of the talented Esther Field, were recruited from the stage for their initial appearance on the screen, and they give Miss Field adequate support. Henry Lynn directs the film feelingly. The story deals with the tragedies which beset Miss Field as her children get in trouble."
- Jewish life in Poland before World War II. The Vladimir Medem Sanatorium stood as the embodiment of health and enlightenment in striking contrast to the grim images of urban Polish-Jewish poverty.
- A jewish cantor is seduced by the allure of opera when introduced to it by two attractive young Poles.
- A good-natured but incorrigible layabout becomes embroiled in a plot to rob the Israeli lottery, all the while indulging in his boundless zeal for mischief and romance.
- This film tells the story of the men and women who formed the Jewish partisan movement in Vilna, Lithuania, during World War II.
- In 1941, nearly 800 Romanian Jewish refugees, packed like sardines aboard the Struma, a 46-meter boat bound for Palestine, found themselves stranded when the boat's engine failed. Limping along the Struma manages to reach Istanbul Harbor, where it waits while Turkey, trying to stay "neutral" in the war, deliberates the passengers' fate. Britain, enforcing its policy of limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, puts heavy pressure on the Turks not to let the ship pass through their territorial waters. On 23 February 1942 the Turks tow the disabled Struma out into the Black Sea. 12 hours later a Russian submarine locks on the boat and a single torpedo is fired. 24 hours later, Turkish fishermen go out to the site and find only one survivor. In 2000, using information provided by the sole survivor and the grandson of two Struma passengers, an international team of elite divers to find the watery grave of the Struma passengers. Immediately, a Turkish dive club claims to have found the wreck and with Turkish government support, attempts to obstruct the search for the Struma. Suddenly, contemporary politics mirror events of the early 1940's and the divers find themselves entangled in a 60-year-old cover-up.
- Paul Mazursky journeys to a small town in Ukraine to witness and participate in a three-day celebration by over 25,000 singing, dancing, praying, and emotionally elevated Chassidic Jews.
- Leo is a holocaust survivor who suffers from total amnesia; he comes to the U.S. and works as a hotel desk clerk. One night while a comedian, who owns a bar in the hotel, gives him a drink, he breaks out in song and discovers a great voice. Under a psychiatrist's treatment, and because of a blow to the head by some hoodlums, he realizes his name is David and that he was the son of a great Jewish Cantor, and gradually recovers his memory of losing his parents. He gives up a promising career singing in nightclubs to return to the synagogue.
- The story of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, consul to Lithuania during World War II, who defied Tokyo authorities and wrote transit visas allowing Jewish families to flee Europe to Japan and other countries.
- The story of a holocaust survivor, young teacher and psychologist, Lena Kuchler, who, at her early 30's established, single-handed, a home for surviving children from eastern Poland. Kuchler's children's house functioned both as a school and a clinic for physical and mental injuries. Her unique approach, which was inspired by Janush Korchack, was extremely progressive and highly experimental for its time, because the horrors it had to deal with had no precedent. Due to violent anti-Semitic attacks on the house, Lena had to flee with her 100 children out of Poland, with false passports and great danger. She crossed Europe with them, until they found a safe shore in France. She nursed the children to rehabilitation, until the founding of new state of Israel # where she resettled the children as citizens. In 1959 Lena Kuchler published "My Hundred Children", the first of her Best-seller books, that was translated into 14 languages. Her books had tremendous influence on the next generations. Lena's only child, Shira Toren testa, and eight of the 100 Children, reconstruct the dramatic and exiting story, in the real locations of the events.
- Nat Silver has been engaged 7 times already. This time, his 8th, he's really going to get married. But a visitor shows up, Shirley's old boyfriend. With a gun ! He'll kill himself unless he can have Shirley back, and Nat graciously gives in. According to Nat's mother, his Uncle Shya was unlucky at love but lucky as a matchmaker, and Nat is just like Shya. Nat tells his family he's going to Italy. But he remains in New York and sets himself up with a new name and new business, Nat Gold, Advisor in Human Relations...
- According to Hulu's offering, this documentary (from 1966) is "a Powerful account of an astonishing slice of Holocaust history, told with poignant intimacy by the daughter of a survivor. On the eve of WWII, Jewish children boarded trains taking them to refuge in London, many never to see their parents again.
- A young woman posing as a man in a group of klezmer musicians in Poland.
- Family drama and historical truth collide in this film about the painful legacy cast by Hanns Ludin, a prominent Nazi executed for war crimes in 1947. In this documentary, Hanns Ludin's son, filmmaker Malte Ludin, breaks 60 years of silence and repression, investigating his father's dark deeds and interviewing his still-denying sisters. The film is an intimate look at the descendants of a Nazi perpetrator, most of whom refuse to accept the history of their family and of Nazi Germany more generally.
- In this fiction film, a small girl in an urban slum seeks aid for her sick and starving mother. Trying to pawn her doll, she attracts the attention of the shop's owner old Isaacs, who later stops the men trying to evict the sick woman.
- This documentary examines the dozens of Yiddish-language talking films made in the United States and Europe between the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
- Getsel, a wandering Purim player, comes to a Galica village and gets a job with Reb Nuchem, the shoemaker. He falls in love with Esther, the shoemaker's daughter, but knows she is in love with a wandering circus player. However, Getzel is content in his work and dreams. Esther's father inherits a fortune and attempts to marry her to a man of his choice, but she flees with Getzel to Warsaw, where he meets and marries the circus player. Getzel returns to the village and is blamed for Esther's disappearance until she shows up and explains what happened. Getzel shoulders his pack and wanders on to another village.
- Wealthy, powerful sweatshop owner falls in love with employee's teenage daughter, who feels obligated to marry him after he shares his wealth with her parents, though she actually loves a young Marxist unionizer.
- Interweaving docu-drama sequences with archival material, this film follows Israel and Frania Rubinek on their emotional return journey to Poland to reunite with the woman who, with her husband and son, saved their lives 40 years earlier.
- Set in Kiev, Russia, on 29 September 1941, this feature chronicles the last 24 hours in the lives of a Jewish tailor and his family just prior to their deportation and execution at Babi Yar.
- Written by Israel Becker, this is the first feature film to represent the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective. Shot on location at Landsberg, the largest DP camp in U.S.-occupied Germany, and mixing neorealist and expressionist styles, the film follows a Polish Jew and his family from pre-war Warsaw through Auschwitz and the DP camps.
- This film traces the story of the German-Jewish Auerbach family of Oppingen, Germany, from 1933 through 1945. The film begins with home movies in the 1930s and follows Inge Auerbach from her hometown to her deportation to Theresienstadt, where she suffered for 3 1/2 years and was among the 100 children who survived. Rare footage is accompanied by on-camera interviews of Inge and her mother on a return visit to their town, and to Theresienstadt, where an amazing amount of photographs and documents were saved. Interviews with former Nazi Party members, townspeople, and the switchboard operator from Theresienstadt are conducted by German high school students and exposes German citizens who attempt to deny and conceal their involvement in the Holocaust.