Summer Film Series
Wednesdays, 1:00 pm
at the Levis JCC
Summer Film Series Pass - All 13 films for $100
$12 per film, Gold & Gold Plus Members: $10,
Free for all Platinum Members and Film Festival Patrons
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May 8: Left Alone Rhapsody
This film chronicles John’s amazing life journey from four-year-old Texas musical prodigy, playing the organ in his small-town Southern Baptist church, to his courageous journey ‘back’ from post-stroke paralysis. What might be called his life’s ‘second act.’ The question is: Can he have a ‘third?’ As neurologists discuss his brain, rabbis his Jewish conversion, and Yamaha’s representatives their amazing life-changing, state-of-the-art Disklavier piano technology, which might just allow John to play again with ‘two hands,’ John Bayless learns to become not just a one-handed pianist sounding like he’s using two, but also a storyteller. His determination for more life and more art begins a journey to share his music and his story through a brand new one-man show about his life—all in the hope that John can manifest a creative and successful ‘third act’ in his life. But will he?
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May 15: Between the Stone and the Flower
Between the Stone and the Flower: The Duality of the Conversos covers the incredible journey of Genie Milgrom and her decades long quest for her Jewish lineage. Genie, a close friend of Shavei Israel, was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Miami with a full Roman Catholic schooling from grade school through university level. She was always burdened with a deep-rooted feeling of not belonging in her Spanish Catholic environment. Her story follows many twists and turns as she makes the difficult decision to convert to Judaism from the midst of a traditional Catholic family from Spain and chooses an Orthodox route for her future. Her family and friends are shaken to the core while Genie becomes more and more convinced that her family was Jewish in the Iberian Peninsula, centuries before. Her chase for the “breadcrumbs” that were dropped by her ancestors led her to Medieval Archives and several countries in Europe to untangle the web of secrecy that her ancestors had created to protect themselves during very dark times in Europe. Together with her husband Michael, an Ashkenazi of Romanian origins, she finally reaches the truth of her family in an engaging film that is not to be missed!
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May 22: The Key from Spain (part of the Fascinating Sephardim Film Series)
Uplifting account of survival and continuation from renowned Ladino singer and her Bosnian heritage.
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June 5: The Matchmaker
Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarves in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni's cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women's rights, free love and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik's life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever.
June 26: Holy Fire
The Old City of Jerusalem is in the heart of the Middle East conflict. Measuring just a single square kilometer, people from three of the world’s great religions rub shoulders in four distinct quarters, and houses built on top of each other nestle against some of the holiest sites in the world. There, of all places, tense co-existence is maintained. In the churches, leaders of the feuding sects stake their religious and territorial claims as they prepare for Easter Sabt an-Nur, the most sacred ceremony of the year. On top of the Temple Mount (al-Haram to Muslims) a group of Palestinian children practice throwing stones, while beneath them an orthodox Jew plans to replace the landmark mosques with a rebuilt Jewish Temple. Presiding over this is the Chief of the Old City Police, who serves more as an arbitrator than as a law officer.
July 10: The Squid and the Whale
Based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother, The Squid and the Whale tells the touching story of two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s.
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July 17: Margot at the Wedding
Margot Zeller is a short story writer with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue. On the eve of her estranged sister Pauline's wedding to unemployed musician/artist/depressive Malcolm at the family seaside home, Margot shows up unexpectedly to rekindle the sisterly bond and offer her own brand of support. What ensues is a nakedly honest and subversively funny look at family dynamics.
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July 24: Frances Ha
An aspiring dancer moves to New York City and becomes caught up in a whirlwind of flighty fair-weather friends, diminishing fortunes and career setbacks.
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July 31: Mistress America
Tracy, a lonely college freshman in New York, is rescued from her solitude by her soon-to-be stepsister Brooke, an adventurous gal about town who entangles her in alluringly mad schemes.
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August 7: The Light of Hope
When the Vichy authorities close the Elna Maternity Hospital, which welcomes pregnant women from the concentration camps, its director, Elisabeth, and Victoria, will sacrifice themselves to save it. Television film written by Margarita Melgar and directed by Sílvia Quer (' 'Velvet' ', (' 'Gran Hotel' '), set in northern Catalonia during the summer of 1942. The film is based on real events and narrates the prowess of Elisabeth Eidenbenz, founder of Elna's Maternity, which along with her collaborators restored dignity to pregnant women in the Argelers and Ribesaltes internment camps in Vichy France Motherhood welcomed hundreds of women and saved 597 babies from certain death.
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August 14: Wet Dog
Based on a provocative autobiography, this story — set in a largely Muslim neighborhood in Berlin — follows a teenage gang member who is caught between hiding his Jewish identity and saving his life.
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August 21: Crescendo
When world-famous conductor Eduard Sporck accepts the job to create an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, he is quickly drawn into a tempest of sheer unsolvable problems.
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August 28: Fig Tree
14 year old Jewish Mina, is trying to navigate between a surreal routine dictated by the civil war in Ethiopia and her last days of youth with her Christian boyfriend Eli. When she discovers that her family is planning to immigrate to Israel and escape the war, she weaves an alternate plan in order to save Eli. But in times of war, plans tend to go wrong. Marsha's coming of age film debut film is based on her childhood memories of a civil-war-torn Ethiopia.
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