Film Festival

This year's Film Festival will feature over thirty rare and historically significant Jewish-themed films, shorts, and television programs spanning the very first films of the early 20th century to the modern era. Fiction, documentary, and experimental selections represent the breadth and diversity of the Jewish experience cutting across major themes of immigration, the Holocaust, and North American westward expansion.  The Festival is being curated by Steve Carr, Director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Showings will take place in the Allen County Public Library Theater, which is on the lower level of the library.

Films

The full schedule of films is almost complete.   Meanwhile, here is a small taste of what will be offered.

Hester Street
A highlight of the festival will feature a screening of the 4K restoration of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 Hester Street, celebrating the 50th anniversary of this landmark in feminist and American independent film-making. 

• More information from Cohen Media
• Wikipedia
• Hester Street Trailer

Exile of the Musicians - Between 1933 and 1945, more than one hundred Jewish musicians fleeing Germany and Austria took refuge in Argentina, where they resumed their careers in the country’s theaters, orchestras, radio stations, conservatories, tango venues, and film studios. The musicologist Silvia Glocer researches their lives, recovers their works, and interviews their descendants. Once she has gathered all the pieces of the puzzle, we see Glocer organize a grand concert in homage to these all-but-forgotten figures. (2025)

One Small Miracle - a 45-minute film by award-winning documentary filmmaker, Laura SeltzerDuny, addresses the state of over 1200 abandoned Polish Jewish cemeteries. On-camera descendant interviews will review their challenges and successes: whether it’s dedicating an Information Signboard in a cemetery in Goniadz on September 1, 2024, raising 200 gravestones in Bialystok, or finding an ancestor’s gravestone and saying that name for the first time since their death, each is ‘One Small Miracle.’

The Ice Cream Man - Shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, a popular Jewish ice cream parlor owner, Ernst Cahn, finds himself targeted by the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie. As his world crumbles, “The Ice Cream Man” must choose between resistance and death…a choice that will reverberate throughout the country. Based on actual events. (2024)

Other films will include:

• A restored color print of The Great Train Robbery (1903)
• Kinky Friedman’s 1975 performance of They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore
• Humoresque (1920)
• Siege (1940)
• A Fool There Was (1915)
• Seven Chances (1925)
• The Beau Brummells (1928)
• Pass the Gravy (1928)
• Tevye excerpt
• The House I Live In (1945)
• Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1976)