AUGUST 27, 2009 ISSUE
Jewish Film Festival September 13 to 16
The Jewish Film Festival, a benefit for the Temple of the High Country, will go on as scheduled despite the Hayes Center suspending operations, confirmed Rick Suyao, Hayes Center director of marketing.
An emotionally powerful and eloquent slate of award-winning films documenting the Jewish experience during the Holocaust is the focus of the Jewish Film Festival at the Hayes Performing Arts Center. The film festival runs from Sunday to Wednesday, September 13 to 16.
A co-production between The Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Academy Award-winning Moriah Films, Westglow Resort & Spa and the Hayes Center, the festival is a benefit for the Temple of the High Country, which is being built on King Street in downtown Boone.
“The Jewish People are an integrated community with a unique history/destiny that spans across time and space,” said Rabbi Aron Heir, director of iACT/Campus Outreach at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “[Westglow owners] Bonnie and Jamie Schaefer are true builders in every sense of the world. They are committed to empowering a true renaissance of Jewish life and identity by creating Jewish institutions in the beautiful windy cliffs of Blowing Rock.”
The festival, a mixture of six documentaries and two fact-based films, which are shown daily at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m., aims to support Moriah Films’ mission to fight anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, terrorism and hate around the world.
“It’s such a thrill to have Academy-Award winner Moriah Films be a part of this film festival to benefit the Temple of the High Country,” said Jamie Schaefer.
“We are proud to keep the Jewish Film Festival on schedule through this difficult time at the center,” Suyao said. “The Film Festival will be staffed and professionally managed to make this event as successful as possible and to recognize the efforts of the construction of the Temple of the High Country. We are honored to serve as the hosting venue for this incredible slate of films for such a fantastic endeavor as the Temple of the High Country.”
Tickets for the Jewish Film Festival are $5 for each film, but Paper Clips is free for children 18 and under. The Hayes Performing Arts Center is located at 152 Jamie Fort Road, off Highway 321 in Blowing Rock. For more information, click to www.HayesCenter.org or call 828-295-9627.
Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the Hayes Center box office at 828-295-9627. Only 348 tickets will be sold and they will not be available online.
Film Schedule
The Jewish Film Festival schedule is as follows.
Sunday, September 13
Paper Clips
2:00 p.m.
This award-winning documentary follows students of Tennessee’s Whitwell Middle School who collected paper clips from around the world to help visualize and represent the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The Paper Clip Project changed the lives of those who created it, and also touched Holocaust survivors and countless communities. The film is the winner of the Audience Award for Best Overall Film at the 2004 Rome International Film Festival.
“Oscar caliber” – Joel Siegel, Good Morning America
Genocide
7:00 p.m.
Narrated by Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor, Genocide traces the trajectory of the flourishing Jewish community in pre-war Europe to their grim fate through the ghettos, camps and prisons of the Nazi regime. Winner of the 1982 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.
“Unforgettable…an unabashed assault on the emotions.” – Newsweek
Monday, September 14
Blessed Is the Match: The Hannah Senesh Story
2:00 p.m.
Through writings and photographs, Blessed Is the Match spotlights Senesh, a WWII-era poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and modern-day Joan of Arc when, safe in Palestine in 1944, she joined a mission to rescue Hungary’s Jews—the only outside rescue mission for Jews during the Holocaust. Joan Allen narrates this multi-award-winning film.
Unlikely Heroes
7:00 p.m.
Academy Award-winner Sir Ben Kingsley narrates this film that chronicles the Jewish resistance and individual heroism of seven extraordinary men and women who exemplified the highest level of courage and human dignity during the most desperate days of the Holocaust.
“An eloquent triumph for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Moriah Films” – Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, September 15
One Day You’ll Understand
2:00 p.m.
In 1987, as French television broadcast the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi “Butcher of Lyon,” a man begins an obsessive inquiry into his family’s secret past and the fate of his maternal grandparents during the Holocaust. This film stars Jeanne Moreau and is in French with English subtitles.
Ever Again
7:00 p.m.
This chilling documentary narrated by Academy Award-winning actor and director Kevin Costner examines the upswing in anti-Semitic violence in Europe and what the filmmakers argue poses an even greater threat to the Jewish people: Islamic extremists. The film also covers what this all means for both the future of the Western world and the Middle East.
Wednesday, September 16
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
2:00 p.m.
A 1972 Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Language film, this adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 semiautobiographical novel chronicles the relationships between the narrator and the children of Italy’s aristocratic Finzi-Contini family amidst the shadows of creeping fascism.
“A hauntingly beautiful movie, brilliantly conceived and tenderly realized.” – Newsweek; “Quite marvelous! A beautiful surprise!" – The New Yorker
Against the Tide
7:00 p.m.
This compelling film examines the U.S. Administration, State Department and Establishment Jewish organizations, which used the pretext of winning the war against the Nazis to block any Jewish immigration to the U.S. Highlighting a young activist named Peter Bergson, the film juxtaposes the events in America with heart-wrenching heroic stories of doomed European Jews and the leaders of Polish Jewry who had faith that their powerful brothers and sisters in the United States would somehow be able to save them.
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