Movies 2008
Matzo & Mistletoe
Director: Kate Feiffer
U.S., 2007, 58 min.
Sunday, October 26, 6 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Kathy Neustadt Hankin
For many, a central part of the Jewish American experience seems to be the struggle to define Jewish identity. This film is a fascinating look at secular, non-affiliated Jews and their connection to Judaism. Many of them grew up in homes that had a Christmas tree as well as Chanukiahs. They often celebrate the rituals and observances of Christian holidays as well as Jewish ones. Are these assimilated Jews a vanishing species, or do they simply have a way of looking at their Judaism through a different lens?
Matzo & Mistletoe is a cinematic essay filled with heart, humor and Klezmer Christmas carols. Filmmaker Kate Feiffer asks and attempts to answer the question: “What does it mean to be a non–practicing Jew in America?” Does it mean celebrating Christmas instead of Chanukah and eating porkfried rice with your gentile spouse? Or does it mean acting as an unwitting accomplice in what has been called a “silent Holocaust?” In her search for answers Feiffer talks with family, friends, newsman Mike Wallace, Alan Dershowitz, who wrote The Vanishing American Jew, and Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, a leader in the Jewish continuity movement.
Panel discussion following the film with:
• Sarah Pessin, Ph.D. – Director of the Center for
Judaic Studies at the University of Denver
• Rabbi Brian Field – Judaism Your Way
• Stuart Raynor – JCC Executive Director
• Moderated by Dr. Steve Glickman – Director of
Education at Temple Sinai and Chair of the
Jewish Educator’s Council.
Amos Oz
Writer & Director:
Stelios Charalampopoulos
Greece, 2008, 52 min.
Thursday, October 30, 6 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Bob & Robyn Loup
Greek director Stelios Charalampopoulos has crafted an engaging and intimate portrait of the acclaimed Israeli iconoclastic and internationally celebrated author Amos Oz, nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Shot partly in Arad, Jerusalem, and in Salonica, Greece the film traces Oz’s personal background:
his childhood, his adolescence on kibbutz where he met his wife, the sole editor of his works, his family tragedies including his mother’s suicide and his resulting inclination to narrate family chronicles. This poignant piece allows the viewer to enter the world of one of Israel’s most fiercely eloquent proponents of co-existence and the Middle East peace process.
“Both in his fiction and his essays, Oz has proven himself one of our essential writers, laying out for our observation, in ever-increasing breadth and profundity, the mad landscape of our time and his place—always enlarging the scope of his questions while avoiding the temptation of dogmatic answers.”
— Alberto Manguel, The Washington Post
Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist<
Director: Andrew D. Cooke
U.S., 2007, 96 min.
Thursday, November 6, 6 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Ellen Beller
Arguably the most influential person in American comics, Will Eisner, as artist, businessman, innovator and visual storyteller, enjoyed a career that encompassed comic books from their early beginnings in the 1930s to their development as graphic novels in the 1990s. During his sixty-yearplus career, Eisner introduced the now-traditional mode of comic book production; championed mature, sophisticated storytelling; was an early advocate for using the medium as a tool for education; pioneered the now-popular “graphic novel”; and served as an inspiration for generations of artists. Without a doubt, Will Eisner was the godfather of the American comic book.
Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist is also the story of one man’s struggle against a culture often unwilling to see behind the paneled world of POW!, ZAP! and CRASH!, a man who devoted his entire career to taking a so-called child’s medium and infusing it with a unique vision of something so much more. Utilizing groundbreaking storytelling techniques, Will revolutionized the archetypal comic book format into a new medium, the graphic novel, which today reaches a more mature, arguably more literary, audience. To Eisner, the form was limitless, bursting with a potential stretching far beyond super heroes and villains, reaching into the depths of artistic expression, where both artist and writer, working hand-in-hand, can touch the very heart and soul of any reader.
