1st block of short films

Women migrant workers from Mexico stand by the roadside and hope to find some work, the same way crowds of unemployed Americans used to stand during the Great Depression. One of them, Fernanda, gets lucky - she is hired into a Hasidic family. There Nechama, a young mother who becomes suspicious that Fernanda is lazy, discovers that a chauvinistic Jew from the recruiting agency doesn’t pay the cleaning lady. Fernanda explains herself in broken English, and even though she and her new friend might not be able to obtain any justice, they at least will be capable of revenge. Mutual understanding will prove to be stronger than the class division of society, as is right and proper. Isn’t this the kind of reconciliation across genders and cultures that the United States, and subsequently the entire world, are hoping for?

This intentionally short animation film looks like it was sketched in a notebook with a pencil on the run, like the blurry touristic photos of Tel Aviv snapped on the way from one nightclub to another. After seeing the city in passing for the first time, twenty-six-year-old Samuel Patthey (a Berliner who spent six months in Tel Aviv; the film is his graduation project) managed to capture the essence of the second largest city in Israel. He shows how the entire city with its tiny figures of cars and people in perpetual motion suddenly freezes for several seconds after hearing the terrible sound of sirens from afar. The forest of the ravers’ legs on a dance-floor of a techno party rhymes with legs that wear a uniform and belong to the military men in gas masks, while the gunshots firing in the distance rhyme with fireworks exploding at a wedding. These images are living, even if drawn with just a couple of precise pencil strokes, and they show a city that is young and energetic, that never forgets about its past and the war in its present: the people are never allowed to forget it, after all. 

The absurdist comedy-drama is centred around a Shmelky puppet (something like a Jewish version of the Muppet Show heroes), which experiences an identity crisis traditional for comedy actors: he thinks of himself as a grand dramatic artist and doesn’t want to sing songs about Shabbat and Mitzvahs in a children’s show anymore. Instead, he wants to perform in a hideous one-man show that he wrote. After his attempts to get rid of the role he is stuck in fail, Shmelky falls into despair - until the entire country, brought up on his simple shows, 

says to him: “In our complicated world the Chosen People very much need a purple puppet who tells them about Mitzvahs.”

This minimalist French retro-drama shows a beautiful summer day that one family spends in a sunlit park. And even though no word is spoken on screen (except for a song in Yiddish that the father and the daughter are learning), it becomes clear from watching the mother silently sew six-pointed stars on their clothes that this film is filled with a premonition of the Shoah catastrophe – even before we see an old black and white family photograph during the film credits.

Oma, dir. Daniella Rabbani

A nonconforming granddaughter (with shaved temples and piercing) comes to a retirement house to film a documentary about her boisterous grandmother who survived the Holocaust and Auschwitz. They are divided by more than half a century, they are united by their uncompromising attitude, but they are able to find a common language. This chamber conversational drama about dialogue across two generations states that as long as you argue, as long as you disagree, as long as you can raise your voice - you are alive. The granddaughter is played by the film’s director Daniella Rabbani (who also appeared in minor parts in The Americans and Ocean), and to her, Oma is an adaptation of a personal experience. “When I was a child, my grandparents didn’t tell me about how they survived the Holocaust. My grandfather made attempts to open up, but I would always change the subject. I had no idea about the cleansing effect that such conversations could have. Now that I’ve grown up, I talk with my 94-year-old grandmother, and I have learnt so much from her.”

In present-day New York, Maya marries the first man she has ever dated. The entire film is their heartfelt conversation about how Maya had no time to learn who she really is. It is a conversation about diversity and unpredictability of human sexuality and about the place of queer and LGBT identities within the traditional Jewish worldview.

The Offspring, dir. Shirly Sasson-Ezer, Dana Keidar-Levin
Israel, 2018, 19 min
A 32-year-old woman from an Israeli Sephardic community is childless but under constant pressure from her relatives demanding offsprings.  She and her grandmother accidentally find themselves at the circumcision of a little child, and there someone tells her about a tradition quite strange to the outsiders: if a woman who cannot get pregnant eats the foreskin of a baby, life will take a turn for the better. Israeli director Shirley Sasson-Ezer shows intergenerational relationships that are full of love and are devoid of aggression and yet are still complicated by the insurmountable obstacles of differences in worldviews.