25. JEWISH FILMFESTIVAL BERLIN & BRANDENBURG

The 25th Jewish Film Festival Berlin & Brandenburg will take place in numerous cinemas in Berlin, Potsdam, Königs Wusterhausen, and Brandenburg between the 8th-17th of September. The highlights of the program this year include a homage to Berlin film producer Arthur Brauner who passed away on July 7th this year. Brauner considered MORITURI from 1948 to be his most important film along with HITLERJUNGE SALOMON (1990). The JFBB will show a restored version of the story of a group of Jews who fled from a concentration camp, hid in the forest, and waited for the arrival of the Red Army.
The Middle East conflict plays an important role in the program, of course. In UNSETTLING, left-wing documentarian and activist Iris Zaki decides to spend several weeks in a settlement in the occupied territories of the West Bank. The film mostly consists of conversations with the hardliner citizens of the settlement.
The documentarian MAMBONIKS (USA 2019) by Lex Gillespie has a decidedly cheerier tone. The film about the mambo fever amongst American Jews in the 1950s is out at the same time as the anniversary of DIRTY DANCING. Hannah Pilarczyk, who wrote the book “I Had the Time of My Life“ about DIRTY DANCING a few years ago, is on the critic‘s jury of the festival. Moreover, there are films about the fight against sexual harrassment in the work place (WORKING WOMAN), homosexuals in Israel of the 60s and 70s (WE WERE THE OTHERS), a utopian kibbutz (THE OPTIMISTS), Jewish pensioners in Miami of the 70s (THE LAST RESORT), Jewish comics in New YORK (THE KOMEDIANT) and Moscow (THE HUMORIST), Ethiopian Jews during the Civil War (FIG TREE) and in Israel (NO PROMISED LAND), and much more.
8.-17. September, dates under jffb.de