JCC film fest to showcase eclectic range of topics, genres
OVER TWO dozen acclaimed films — including features, documentaries, comedies, and shorts — are on the schedule of JCC MetroWest’s New Jersey Jewish Film Festival (NJJFF). The 19th annual festival takes place March 27-April 7, with most programs at the JCC in West Orange.
The films offer insights into Jewish history, Israeli life, the Holocaust, American-Jewish culture, Arab-Israeli society, and women’s and transgender issues; they come from Israel, America, Hungary, France, Germany, Poland, and other countries.
Filmmakers and experts will offer post-screening discussions, and celebrated star Tovah Feldshuh will be there in person as the festival screens the film of her award-winning Broadway turn in “Golda’s Balcony” (Friday, April 5, 11:30 a.m.).
Opening night on Wednesday, March 27, will feature the award-winning “Promise at Dawn,” based on the epic memoir by Romain Gary, the French-Jewish novelist, diplomat, film director, aviator, and decorated World War II fighter pilot.
The closing night double feature on Sunday, April 7, will include a short, “The Outer Circle,” about the fraught gathering of an Iraqi-Jewish-English family, and “The Other Story,” by renowned filmmaker Avi Nesher, about a young Israeli woman fleeing secular hedonism and another seeking to transcend the limits of her strict religious upbringing.
“Who Will Write Our History” (Wednesday, April 3) — an award-winning documentary with dramatizations, and a New York Times “critics’ pick” — tells the wrenching story of the clandestine group, code name, Oyneg Shabes, led by Emanuel Ringelblum, who risked everything to record the truth of the Nazis’ genocidal brutality in the Warsaw Ghetto.
NJJFF committee members Caren and Herb Ford of Livingston founded the festival in 2000.
Ticket prices range from $11 to $13; sponsorships begin at $325 and include an all-festival pass. Contact festival director Sarah Diamond
at sdiamond@jccmetrowest.org or 973-530-3417 or visit jccmetrowest.org/njjff.
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