National Center for Jewish Film Festival

Join us for a vibrant program of new film premieres and rare archive treasures best experienced on the big screen! All screenings will be in person.

Highlights include new films from Israel, Germany,  Australia and Italy. And the New England premiere of our Center’s 35mm restoration of the Yiddish feature film Mothers of Today starring Esther Field, the 1930s radio personality known as the “Yiddishe Mama.”

Schedule:

1:00pm - Mothers of Today

This essentially unknown 1939 Yiddish film stars Esther Field, the 1930s radio personality known as the “Yiddishe Mama,” in one of her only appearances on film. Field plays an immigrant Jewish widow in New York who suffers the gradual deterioration of her family and Jewish tradition at the hands of neighborhood criminals and the realities of assimilation. This soapy, over-the-top drama - with cantors and gangsters, Yiddish songs, liturgical singing and comedy interludes - is surprisingly moving in its authentic emotional directness.

Mothers of Today is a surviving example of the era’s shund genre: proudly sentimental, low-budget and low-brow films, books, and theater. Shund films were particularly popular with working-class Jewish immigrant audiences, who recognized and enjoyed seeing their own daily lives reflected on the big screen, especially the central role women played in Jewish family life. Mothers of Today is a fun ride, a time capsule, and a rescued piece of Jewish and cinema history. Bring a hanky for the tsuris, and a few insults to yell at the no-goodniks.

4:00pm - Kidnapped

The latest by legendary Italian director Marco Bellocchio is a grand, historical fresco depicting the scandalous true story of a young Jewish child who, in mid-19th century Bologna, was abducted from his family by the church under direct orders from the Pope.

In 1858, in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take seven-year-old Edgardo (Enea Sala). Allegedly, the child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and papal law dictates that he receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s distraught parents (played by Barbara Ronchi and Fausto Russo Alesi) battle the Vatican to have their son returned. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly takes on a political dimension, all against the backdrop of the riveting true events that shook the world. 

Awash in painterly chiaroscuro evoking the masterworks of Caravaggio and Delacroix, Kidnapped uses light and shadow to convey the baroque drama of the events. Kidnapped is at once a personal, human-scale narrative of a family in crisis who will do anything to retrieve their child from the clutches of a ruthless theocratic government, and a wide-scope portrait of a country on the cusp of revolution.

Date: May 12-21, 2024