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:

11:00am - Stella. A Life.

Stella, played by the magnetic Paula Beer (Never Look Away, Transit, Frantz), is a vivacious, talented young woman in Nazi Berlin working as a Jazz singer despite the repressive climate and the risk of passing as a non-Jew. When tides turn and she is forced into hiding with her parents, Stella begins working with a passport forger. Exposed and captured by the Gestapo, she faces the most dire and deadly of choices: face deportation to Auschwitz for herself and her parents or become an informant for the Gestapo identifying Jews hiding in Berlin. This provocative drama is based on the true story of Stella Goldschlag who, from September 1943 until the end of the war, delivered hundreds of fellow Jews to the Gestapo, and was put on trial after the war.

2:30pm - Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer

In this murder mystery documentary, three brothers in sunny Melbourne Australia engage the help of a decorated private detective and investigate a rumored family secret. Was their father Boris, a suburban watchmaker and family man, Holocaust survivor and Jewish WWII partisan leader, actually involved in revenge killings of Nazis in 1950s Australia.

After WWII, the largest number of Holocaust survivors who did not go to Israel, started life anew in Australia. So too did nearly 4,000 Nazis. Featuring never-before-seen archives, police reports, government files, and home movies, this newest documentary from award-winning director Danny Ben-Moshe opens up a secret history of Nazi fugitives, Cold War spies, covert Jewish vigilante intelligence networks, and high-level government conspiracies. What the brothers also encounter is the timeless question of whether we ever really know our parents. And the profound question of when - if ever - is it justified to take the law into your own hands.

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Date: May 12-21, 2024