2021 White Mountain Jewish Film Festival
INTRODUCING WMJFF’s FILM FORUM!!
Enjoy great Classic Jewish American and International Films
And hear from our guest speakers online
Although the doors of Bethlehem’s Colonial Theatre must remain closed during this time of social distancing.
The show must go on! “On-line”, that is!
BHC will offer the White Mountain Film Forum, a live discussion of classic Jewish American and international films led by guest speakers on line via Zoom. Here is what BHC’s White Mountain Jewish Film Festival will look like.:
Watch the Movie. You can find all of our films this season on Amazon Video. The cost of renting each film varies from $2.00 to $4.00 on Amazon, less than half the cost of a movie ticket, and can be viewed over the Internet on your computer, tablet, phone or Smart TV.
Sign up for WMJFF Film Forum to meet film directors, writers, critics and educators who can add their professional insights about each film.
Join the Conversation Live on Zoom. It’s Free!
Sign up! It’s Free!! For all the info you need, contact WMJFF at
whitemountainjewishfilm@gmail.com
Thursday, July 15, 2021 at 7:30 PM
Sarah’s Key
“… a poignant tale of two females confronted by the madness of history.” Kirk Honeycutt – Hollywood Reporter
“Sarah's Key”, based on the New York Times best-selling novel by Tatiana De Rosnay, starts in Paris, 1942, where ten-year old Sarah is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families as part of the Vel’d’Hiv Roundup. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard – their secret hiding place – and promises to come back for him, but she and her parents are dragged from their home forever.
Sixty-seven years later Sarah’s story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own future
Language French/English - 110 Minutes
Based on Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
Directed by Gilles PAQUET-BRENNER
Screenplay by Serge JONCOUR & Gilles PAQUET-BRENNER Based on the novel by Tatiana DE ROSNAY
Cast:
Kristin SCOTT THOMAS: Julia Jarmond,
Mélusine MAYANCE: Sarah,
Niels ARESTRUP: Jules Dufaure
WATCH IT First ON: Netflix, Amazon Prime, I-tunes, Apple TV
Guest Speaker: Sarah R. Horowitz
Sara R. Horowitz
Our Speaker
Sara R. Horowitz, American holocaust literary scholar; Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Golds Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University; member of the advisory board of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
American Pastoral
July 29, 2021 | Based on author Phillip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. A Jewish-American businessman watches his life unravel after his daughter commits a terrorist act in protest of the Vietnam War.
Director: Ewan McGregor
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning, Peter Riegert, Rupert Evans
Production year: 2016 Rating: R Studio: Lions Gate Films, Inc. Runtime: 108 minutes
WATCH IT First ON: Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTubes
Benjamin Taylor
American Pastoral: Guest Speaker
Benjamin Taylor (born 1952) is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series
Recent writing:
Non-fiction
The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered (2017)
Debriefing: Collected Stories of Susan Sontag, Editor (2017)
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth (2020)
Fiction
The Book of Getting Even (2008)
On the Basis of Sex
August 5, 2021 Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg launches her career fighting for gender equality by proving discrimination "on the basis of sex" is unconstitutional.
Director: Mimi Leder
Production year: 2018
Rating: PG-13
Studio: Focus Features
Runtime: 120 minutes
Cast: Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Kathy Bates, Sam Waterston
WATCH IT First ON: Showtime, Amazon Prime, Youtube ($13.99)
Hillary Schneller
Senior Staff Attorney
Hillary Schneller joined the Center for Reproductive Rights in 2014 as a legal fellow and became a senior staff attorney in 2019. She litigates reproductive rights cases across the United States, including an ongoing challenge to a Montana law that prohibits advanced practice registered nurses from providing abortion care in the state. Hillary is also part of the legal teams challenging abortion restrictions in Arkansas, Kansas, and Mississippi, among others.
This autumn, Ms. Schneller will be one of a team of attorneys representing the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, arguing the case in Supreme Court that will determine the constitutionality of Mississippi’s extreme ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy when fetus viability outside the womb is medically impossible.
Last year Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the 15-week ban. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who supported abortion rights, died just before the court’s new term began in October. Her Trump-appointed successor, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is the most open opponent of abortion rights to join the court in decades.
Before joining the Center, Hillary was an Equal Justice Works fellow at the National Women’s Law Center, where her work focused on addressing gender discrimination in health care. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she participated in the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic and received the Allan Morrow Sexuality and Gender Law Prize. During law school, she interned at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. She received her B.A. in English from Barnard College.
An Act of Defiance
August 19, 2021
A gutsy lawyer risks career and family to defend Nelson Mandela and his inner circle, in AN ACT OF DEFIANCE, a historical thriller set in South Africa’s incendiary segregation era.
Mandela and nine other defendants, including Jewish anti-Apartheid fighters, faced a possible death sentence after their arrest during a summer 1963 raid. Sympathetic white Afrikaner lawyer Bram Fischer defends the activists against charges of conspiracy to commit sabotage and treason. As he fights to expose South Africa’s corrupt, unjust system, Fischer attempts to hide his own ties to the resistance.
This riveting drama expertly combines nail-biting political and courtroom intrigue to explore South Africa’s seminal struggle against racism, and the little-known Jewish figures who sought to end entrenched discrimination in their country.
Film Details: Running Time 123 minutes
Directors:Jean van de Velde
Year: 2018
Language: English and Afrikaans (with Subtitles)
Watch it First on Amazon Prime or Apple TV ($4.99)
An Act of Defiance: Guest Speaker: Stephen Clingman
Stephen Clingman is Distinguished Professor of English and former Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute. He received his BA Hons. from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts since 1989, and was Chair of the English Department from 1994-2000.
His research and teaching fields include South African literature and politics, postcolonial fiction, transnational fiction, and twentieth-century and contemporary British fiction. Besides his literary critical work, he has also published a biography and memoir, and has written reviews for the New York Times and Boston Globe.
Books:
Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (1998), a biography of the white Afrikaner who led Nelson Mandela's legal defense at the Rivonia Trial
Birthmark, a memoir (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015; Amherst: U of Massachusetts Press, 2016).
AWARDS AND ACCOLADES
1999 Alan Paton Award for Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary; South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction.
2012 Distinguished Faculty Lecturer and Chancellor’s Medal, University of Massachusetts
2014 Jackie M. Pritzen Lecture, Five College Consortium2016 Birthmark longlisted for Alan Paton Award
WFJFF BONUS TRACKS
MANDELA: A LIFE’S JOURNEY BY ARTIST JOHN MEYER
To honour #MandelaDay celebrations on Sunday 18 July, RMB’s collaboration with artist John Meyer and Everard Read/Circa gallery has facilitated a virtual tour of Meyer’s poignantly magnificent exhibition, Mandela: A life’s journey. (approx 11 min)
Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture 2019
Professor Stephen Clingman, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and Bram Fischer's biographer spoke at our memorial lecture. His lecture was titled 'Bram Fischer in our Times'. This lecture was live streamed to Johannesburg for the first time. (approx 90 min)
Tel Aviv on Fire
August 26, 2021
A comedy about Israel-Palestine? Well, Here it is:
Salam, an inexperienced young Palestinian man, becomes a writer on a popular soap opera show after a chance meeting with an Israeli soldier. His creative career is on the rise until the soldier and the show’s financial backers disagree about how the show should end, and Salaam is caught in the middle!
Comedy, 97 minutes
Director: Sameh Zoabi
Hebrew with English subtitles
Watch it First on Amazon Prime, Youtube, Google Play
Guest Speaker: Susan S. Lanser
Professor Emerita of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature Brandeis University
Susan S. Lanser & Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Israeli–Palestinian narratives and the politics of form: reading Side by Side
As the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable than the oppositions of content might suggest.
Thou Shalt Not Hate
September 2, 2021
Live at the Colonial Theater, Bethlehem, NH
6PM Patio Party with refreshments
7 PM Film begins
Admission $10 Cash or Charge sold at the Colonial Ticket booth beginning at 5:30 PM on the day of the event
In this tense drama, a split-second decision at a traffic accident triggers repercussions for a Jewish surgeon and a neo-Nazi’s daughter, in this gripping, potent drama. Simone (Alessandro Gassmann), a Holocaust survivor’s son, rushes to the scene of a hit-and-run. But when he sees a swastika tattoo on the victim’s chest, he leaves the gravely wounded man to his fate. Wracked with guilt, the anguished doctor confronts the ethics of his choice, and bonds with the victim’s daughter Marcia (Sara Serraiocco), embroiling himself in greater conflict. Posing profound questions about redemption and the paradoxes of the human soul in the face of hate, this provocative parable was winner of the Best Italian Film and Best Actor awards at the Venice International Film Festival.
Our Speaker: Award-winning Chilean author, poet, and professor.
Marjorie Agosín was raised in Chile, the daughter of Jewish parents who fled Europe. The family moved to the United states to escape the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s Socialist government.
In both her scholarship and her creative work, Professor Agosin focuses on social justice, feminism, and remembrance and has received numerous honors and awards for her writing and work as a human rights activist, including a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights and a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights. The Chilean government honored her with a Gabriela Mistral Medal for Lifetime Achievement. Agosín is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American studies and a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Wellesley College.
As an author, she writes in many forms. Among her many books of poetry are AT THE THRESHOLD OF MEMORY (White Pine, 2003), AN ABSENCE OF SHADOWS (White Pine, 1998), and STARRY NIGHT (White Pine, 1996) , winner of the Letras de Oro Prize for poetry from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Her most recent books of prose are WRITING TOWARDS HOPE: THE LITERATURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN LATIN AMERICA (Yale, 2006), SECRETS IN THE SAND: THE YOUNG WOMEN OF CIUDAD JUAREZ (White Pine,2006) and CARTOGRAPHIES: MEDITATIONS ON TRAVEL (Georgia, 2004), introduce by Isabel Allende.
Marjorie is an activist and spokesperson for women's rights in Third World countries. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts, the Letras de Oro Prize for Poetry, and the Latino Literature Prize. Massachusetts.
Other Film Series
We have saved our past film series logs for your knowledge base. If you need assistance finding a past film or have suggestions for future seasons, please email Artistic Director Dorothy Goldstone: dorothygoldstone@gmail.com