SEPTEMBER 10, 2009 ISSUE
Remember the Past, Build the Future
Jewish Film Festival Begins Sunday
The Jewish Film Festival, a benefit for the Temple of the High Country—which will be built on West King Street in downtown Boone—takes place from Sunday to Wednesday, September 13 to 16, at the Hayes Center in Blowing Rock.
The film festival is a co-production between The Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Academy Award-winning Moriah Films, Westglow Resort & Spa and the Hayes Center.
“It’s such a thrill to have Academy-Award winner Moriah Films be a part of this film festival,” said Jamie Schaefer, co-owner of Westglow Resort & Spa.
Rabbi Aron Hier, director of iACT/Campus Outreach at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, partnered with the Schaefers to show a film about the Holocaust last year at ASU, he said.
“This time, we’re showing both films on the Holocaust and on the issues dealing with the state of Israel as well,” he said.
The Holocaust was one of the worst expressions of anti-Semitism in history, he said, and the formation of the state of Israel and its triumphs and struggles since all bear historical significance for people of any ethnic or religious heritage.
Eight films will be shown over the course of the festival, with a film beginning at 2:00 p.m. and a Moriah film beginning at 7:00 p.m. each day. Hier will speak prior to several films, which as of press time remain to be determined.
The films will serve to expand people’s concern out of their daily nine-to-five routines, Hier said.
The film festival “should engender both Jew and non-Jew alike with a broader sense of purpose, a better grasp on life and its challenges and to come to terms with their own identity,” Hier said. “Seeing what apathetic people did not do and what great heroes did do can transform lives. History is one of the greatest ways to awaken people [and to] help them lock onto a healthy compass bearing.”
While raising funds with which to lay the foundation of the temple, the film festival is building a more solid sense of identity.
“My vision is to allow people to tap into their own historical Jewish roots,” Hier said. “I’m good friends with the Schaefers, and I believe they are true builders in every sense,” he continued. “What a great way to do it by broadening everyone’s vistas and horizons and taking them through a historical tour-de-force, which is what these films are.
“People will cry, hopefully they will laugh, [and] it will broaden and sensitize them. The goal is to take people out of a local frame of mind into a much broader arena.”
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.
For more information about the Simon Weisenthal Center, click to www.wiesenthal.com.
Tickets for the Jewish Film Festival are $5 for each film, but Paper Clips is free for children 18 and under. Only 348 tickets will be sold and they will not be available online.
Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the Hayes Center box office at 828-295-9627.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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