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Documentary Films 2022

The Automat

Dir.: Lisa Hurwitz
| 79 minutes

This documentary tells the 100-year story of the iconic restaurant chain Horn & Hardart, where generations of Americans ate wholesome meals and drank coffee served from a vending machine in a communal-style eatery. The Automat is a fond remembrance of a vanished era.

From TGM to TGV - A Tunisian Story

Dir.: Ruggero Gabbai
| 83 minutes

The film traces the often shattered and moving destinies of three generations of Tunisian Jews, one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the history of the diaspora. The result is the reconstruction of a complex and multifaceted identity, divided between two deeply different countries: France and Tunisia.

Reckonings

Dir.: Roberta Grossman
| 74 minutes

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, German and Jewish leaders met in secret to grapple with the first reparations in history, but how could reparations be determined for the unprecedented destruction and suffering of a people? Reckonings recounts these tense negotiations.

Song Searcher - The Times and Toils of Moyshe Beregovsky

Dir.: Elena Yakovich
| 83 minutes

Moyshe Beregovsky, musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with a phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His vocation succeeded in saving the musical heritage of a centuries-old Yiddish civilization. 

The U.S. and the Holocaust: The Golden Door (Beginnings - 1938)

Dir.: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein
| 110 minutes

The series examines the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the context of global antisemitism and racism, the eugenics movement in the United States and race laws in the American south. In The Golden Door, Franklin Roosevelt and other world leaders are concerned by the growing refugee crisis but fail to coordinate a response.

We Made Matza Balls for the Revolution

Dir.: Kellie Wellborn
| 72 minutes

In 1975, a group of idealists opened history's only collectively run kosher restaurant. Influenced by social and political upheavals in the US and Israel's Kibbutz movement, the collective ran the restaurant based upon complete equality and service. This entertaining film is a fascinating lesson in history.

A Woman

Dir.: Jeanine Meerapfel
| 104 minutes

A Woman is a cinematic essay about identity, a search into the wounds of exile and reflection on the function of memory. It is a haunting and intimate portrait of the director’s own mother,  film about remembering and forgetting.