CATEGORY: FEATURE LENGTH DOCUMENTARY
Program Length: 56:40 MINUTES
Country of Origin: USA
Language: English (minimal Hebrew and Arabic- w/ English subtitles)
Date Completed: June 1999
Producer / Director: Mark Landsman
Youth Producers: Yaron Avni, Reut Elkouby, Bushra Jawabri, Amer Kamal, Sivan Ranon, Hazem El Zanoun, Yossi Zilberman
Executive Producer: Susan Siegel, Global Action Project
Editor: George O’Donnell
Music: Craig Hillelson, Mike Kelley, Makia Matsumura
Broadcasts: Nightline, WABC-TV (1/00,and 5/01) ,Channel 9 Australia, TVE Spain, Mico Channel NHK Japan, KQED San Francisco PBS local, Free Speech TV, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Paper Tiger/Access Orbit, NPR Radio "Connections"

Coexistence Through the Eyes of Palestinian and Israeli Teens
From 1997-1999, seven Palestinian and Israeli teenagers were each given their own video camera to document two years of their lives in Israel, the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority. Using cameras as video diaries, the youth turned the lens on themselves, their families, friends and communities, revealing the internal and external challenges each one of them faces as peace seekers in a fiercely divided conflict.

This film is an intimate portrait of a conflict rarely seen from a youth perspective. The story centers around the youths’ efforts to listen, learn and visit each other in their homes, amidst bombings and volatile peace talks that threaten their security. They met at a camp called Seeds of Peace, in the idyllic woods of Maine. This film chronicles what happens when they return to their homes, to their segregated communities, amidst fear, mistrust and hatred of the other side.

Quotes about Peace of Mind:
What you will care about when all is said and done is the bitter sweetness of this film we are about to show you, It is the sweetness of hope highlighted against the stark bitterness of expectation. They are passionate… they are fearful…they are realistic…they are determined…they are idealistic… Tonight …Palestinian and Israeli youngsters working for peace.
Ted Koppel
ABC News NIghtline

Peace of Mind broke through the curtain of fear and disinformation that has existed for so long between Israelis and Palestinians. By bypassing the usual suspects- politicians and media personalities – we were given a fresh and uncensored view of the conflict. The innocence and honesty that is portrayed by the Palestinian and Israeli youth make this film very special…
Those interested in the future of the peace process must take a serious look at what the fruits of peace will be once the seeds of peace mature and flourish.
Daoud Kuttab
Director of the Institute of Modern Media

"An enlightening and moving experience…poses searching questions and undermines preconceptions."
The Jerusalem Post
"Strong images that reflect harsh realities…really moving…reflects the future without denying the past."
Hala Taweel, President, University of the Middle East

"An extraordinary documentary…promotes coexistence and understanding of realities, anxieties, fears and hopes."
Dr. Reinhardt Freiberg, Former Director of Communications,
UNICEF and UNESCO

"Powerful…expresses the desire of youth to develop brave friendships…after years of conflict, suspicion and violence."
Ha’Aretz

Festivals: Partial List: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa Cinemateques in Israel; The Hamptons International Film Festival, Sundance, Human Rights Watch, Canyonlands, Northhampton, Jewish festivals in: Montreal, Palm Beach, Denver, San Francisco, Jewish Festivals in: Boston, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento, Tucson, North Carolina, St. Louis, Hartford, Rochester, Seattle, Denver
Additional screenings; Yerba Buena Cultural Center in San Francisco, Margaret Mead High school screening program, Interfaith Center, Makor, Lincoln Center, Universities: Brandeis, American, Harvard, Brown, Santa Cruz, New Mexico, Ohio,NYU

Showing Sunday March 3 at 3:00pm at the Minneapolis JCC.
Includes lecture by Eric Black, Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter on the topic “Parallel Realities.”
Moderated by Rabbi Harold Kravitz, Senior Rabbi Adath Jeshurun Congregation.
Reception following the film.
This film will be repeated Monday March 4 at 7:30pm at the Minneapolis JCC.

YEAR: 1999
DIR/PROD: Joan Stein
COUNTRY: USA/Hungary
LANGUAGE: Hungarian w/English Subtitles
TIME: 25
SOURCE: Director

MINNESOTA PREMIER
Budapest, October 15, 1944. The Hungarian Arrow Cross is growing in power as the Germans lose the war and Allies and Soviets gain ground. A young mother (Theresa, formerly Sarah) poses as a Christian to protect her son, Peter (formerly Benjamin). But then her husband brings home a Jewish boy he saved from execution. Bravery and anger fuel this intensely moving story of moral responsibility and simple humanity in a horrific world.

Screened at New Directors/MOMA, March 2000, Film Society of Lincoln Center;  SFJFF Summer 2000. Made in homage to the director’s grandmother who saved three of her five children, and her uncle who was killed at age 6 in Budapest.

PRIZES: Winner of a 1999 Ralph Lauren Polo Development Fund grant.

YEAR: 1999
DIR/PROD: Matej Miná
COUNTRY: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland
LANGUAGE: Czech with English subtitles
TIME: 93 minutes
SOURCE: Northern Arts Entertainment 
MINNESOTA PREMIER

All My Loved Ones was inspired by the real life experiences of English stockbroker Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of Czech Jewish children from the Nazis in 1939.
Set in the cultured and peaceful city of Prague in 1938, before the war, All My Loved Ones follows the stories of five brothers, the Silbersteins, and how their lives gradually change with the changes in theoutside world, the rise of Nazi Germany. The film focuses on David Silberstein, a child, whose whose  parents are tormented by the slowly building terror approaching, and face the unendurable dilemma of whether to send David away to England on one of the transports organized by the real-life Nicholas Winston. The fictional Silberstein brothers represent different facets of Jewish life, and watching the diminution of their separate worlds and destinies, the transition from joyous and colorful family life to the horror of the Nazis' arrival in Prague, the viewer is left with the overwhelming sense of all that was finally lost.

Prizes: Czech Lion 1999 - Best Actor in a Supporting Role; Festróia -Tróia International Film Festival 2000 - Special Mention; Film Festival Finale Plzen - Audience Award, Prize IGRIC -Best Photography and Best Editing.

A grandson creates a loving portrait of his elderly grandparents, Tsipa and Volf Gamburg. Over a period of six years, San Francisco filmmaker Daniel Gamburg lets them tell their own story of love, loss and love again. Screened at the 2001 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. 

Released on September 14, 1939, two weeks after the German blitzkrieg over Poland, this film opened to packed audiences at the Belmont Theater in New York. Hailed by the New York Times as one of the best Yiddish films to reach America, A Letter to Mother was the highest grossing Yiddish film of its time.

A Letter to Mother was director Joe Green's last film and his "favorite from among his own films... may convey something of the flavor of Green's childhood." J.Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds

Winner of the 1987 Academy Award for documentary subject, this is an especially endearing film about a widow and widower, both artists, who meet in their eighties, court and marry.  It is a joyous, moving, amusing and delightful film that reinforces the positive and creative.

Showing at 1 pm Wednesday,  March 13, at the Minneapolis JCC.

YEAR: 2001
DIR/PROD: Caterina Klusemann
COUNTRY: USA
LANGUAGE: English
TIME: 27 minutes
SOURCE: Director

Student film (Columbia). Four women trying to free themselves of a secret that has lasted 50 years.
The director writes: Matrilineal is the story of my grandmother, mother, sister, and me. After my father's death the four of us lived tightly bound in our villa in Tuscany My sister and I had Italian friends, and played Italian games. But within their home, a foreign world reigned. Spanish, Polish and German were spoken. And my grandmother cooked the strangest dishes, that she called borsht and kasha, and in the mornings, she's even eaten herring with raw onions. I, raised on pasta, could not understand. There was no other family. My mother was like a helpless child, bound inextricably to my ice-hard and iron-strong grandmother. I studied my other and my grandmother's Venezuelan passports and wondered what it meant that my mother was born in Lvov, Poland in 1940.  Why were the names on the documents and papers never twice written the same way? I was afraid to ask and afraid of the answers I would get and never dared to speak if the camera was not protecting my heart. Thus was the material for this film gathered. The camera follows my quest and my fears, jerks back from my grandmother's rage and looks away from my mother's pain, and yet it is always looking back, determined to ask for answers, to find the truth of the past.
The film was shot over the past four years. Her hard and strong grandmother is shown as the keeper of the secrets. She is the beautiful center of the family's lives. The film challenges the notion that trauma must be inherited through the generations and show hoe, when the silence is finally broken, a family is brought together.
Caterina currently resides in Berlin.

Prizes: Awarded the Zuruckgeben, Stiftung fur Judische Frauen in Kunst und Wissenschaft. Received the New Line outstanding filmmaking award.

Description from Washington Jewish Film Festival:

All her life, filmmaker Caterina Klusemann believed she was of Venezuelan-Polish Catholic ancestry. Unbeknownst to her, both her grandmother and mother were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Matrilineal is her intensely personal documentary that follows these three generations of women after this truth is revealed. Knit together from home movie footage, the film challenges the notion that trauma must be inherited and shows how, when the silence is finally broken, a family can be brought together.

Showing with Mamadrama Wednesday March 13 at 7:30 at the Minneapolis JCC