3rd annual BR Jewish Film Festival comes to the Manship Theater

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By James Cohn

For the third year running, the Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge is presenting the Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival at the Manship Theatre on January 21- 25.

This year’s selections not only highlight Jews’ unique struggles, values, and traditions but promise to entertain as well as inform. According to organizer Harvey Hoffman, the mission of the festival is “to share and explore the diversity of the Jewish experience through film.”

Opening on Wednesday, the festival will start on a lighthearted note with the comedic animated shorts Circumcise Me, Advice and Dissent, and The Orthodox Way.

Thursday will include the festival’s most well known film, The Counterfeiters, which is the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history set up by the Nazis in 1936. This film has gained many awards throughout Europe and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2008.

Rounding out this Academy Award night will be a speech by Kenneth Hoffman of the National World War II Museum.

Also on Thursday, there will be a special showing of Nicholas Winton: The Power of Good for middle and high school students. It tells the true story of Nicholas Winton who saved hundreds of Czechoslovakian children from kindertrains on the eve of WWII.

After the film, special guest Maggie Furst will speak to the students about her experience being rescued from one of those very kindertrains. The film should resonate for adolescents and help them “understand what can result when people are persecuted for being different or believing differently.”

Saturday, the festival will be showing the film Unsettled, which presents the historic 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip through the eyes of six young people. The filmmaker, Adam Hootnick, will be speaking Saturday evening to answer questions and give special insight into the film.

Sunday will be the festival’s grand finale. In the afternoon, there will be a showing of the family film Arranged about two women – one Jewish, the other Muslim – who are facing arranged marriages. Sunday evening, the festival will close with a documentary entitled So Long Are You Young about Samuel Ullman, a pre-Civil War, German-Jewish immigrant who, posthumously, became a Japanese cultural icon.

If the past three years are any indication, the festival will be a hit and tickets will go fast, as three of the four evenings sold out last year. General admission for the festival is $8.50 while the special double feature on Sunday is $15. You can buy tickets by calling the Manship Theatre box office at 866-45 2787 or by visiting the theater box office at 100 Lafayette Street, Baton Rouge, LA

For more information on the 3rd Annual Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival go to brjff.com.

Originally Published: Issue 750 - January 14, 2009

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