For nearly a thousand years, klezmer music had been part of the celebration of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Immigrants brought it to America, where it intersected with the Yiddish theatre and jazz. Yet klezmer was virtually extinct by the 1970s when some young musicians went looking for their cultural origins in the vast American musical landscape. Tracking two groups of brilliant young musicians, Kapelye and the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and containing...

LEST WE FORGET gives the culture of remembrance a voice and a face. To make this possible, the photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano recorded more than 300 stories of survivors. Unique and very personal stories that are also told for those whose voices can no longer be heard. Stories we must never forget because “When we forget the past, we are damned to repeat it.”

OUTREMONT AND THE HASIDIM reveals the challenges of accommodating the “Hasidim” – or ultra-Orthodox Jews – in the affluent Montréal borough of Outremont. ​ Some 7,000 Hasidim live in or near this choice neighbourhood of Québec’s Francophone elite. After settling there more than 70 years ago, the Hasidim are a rapidly growing minority group which today represents about 23% of Outremont’s population. ​ Thanks to unprecedented access...

Amos Gitai (Rabin, The Last Day; Kadosh; Free Zone) returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary Field Diary with this portrait of the citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers, and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics...

Haunted by the past but driven by an unquenchable passion for living, an aging group of Holocaust survivors gather each summer at an idyllic hideaway in the Catskills, where they savor tightly bonded friendships, find new love and celebrate their survival. Directed by New York Times journalist Andrew Jacobs, and beautifully filmed by a team of cinematographers led by the legendary documentary pioneer Albert Maysles (*Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens*),...

Holocaust survivor Paula Biren from Lodz, Poland tells her story.

Holocaust survivor Hannah Marton from Cluj, Transylvania tells her story.

Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was a prolific Warsaw-based artist who painted scenes of the Polish-Jewish community until he was murdered at Majdanek. After the Holocaust, Moshe’s wife was only able to recover a small fraction of his work, but unbeknownst to the family, many other pieces survived. For more than a decade his great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Rynecki, has searched for the missing art, with remarkable and unexpected success. Spanning three...

In the dead of night, filmmaker Rana Abu Fraiha's family left their house in the Bedouin village, Tel Sheva, and moved, perhaps 'fled', to Omer, a nearby Jewish town. 20 years later Rana's mother became ill with breast cancer and expressed an unprecedented wish, to be buried as a Muslim in the town’s Jewish cemetery. Her wish tore the family apart and raised serious dilemmas, about identity, belonging, femininity and the meaning of home. Nominated...

In the small Polish town of Ivansk, one word ignites a nationwide controversy. Most of Ivansk’s Jews were killed by the Nazis, and the headstones in the Jewish cemetery were plundered for construction purposes. A group of descendants of Ivansk Jews restore the town’s cemetery, retrieving what headstones they can. When they commission a plaque that includes the word “collaborator,” a national scandal is unleashed. This eye-opening documentary...