East Side

Based her grandfather’s boyhood in St. Louis, Yasmin Gorenberg tells a story of the pain passed from refugee parents to their children and the hope that can overcome it. “40 Nickels” captures the image of a generation of immigrants to the United States in the 1920’s and 1930’s and through that spotlights the effects of the 1919 pogroms in Eastern Europe. This is a film about parents and children: how trauma never leaves a family, and how hope and resilience is also passed down. It asks the question: Can a new generation look at the world with wonder rather than fear?

Set in Berlin and New York's Lower East Side, The Great Yiddish Love stars the self-exiled Marlene Dietrich and her Nazi-endorsed replacement, Zarah Leander. It is a melodrama of love, emigration, and betrayal reassembled from Hollywood, German Ufa and Yiddish films from the 1930s and 40s.

While saying goodbye to his son and grandchildren who are leaving Israel, Yackov remembers when, as a child, he also said goodbye to his family in Poland in 1937, not realizing that he would never see them again.

A man searches for his childhood best friend, a Polish violin prodigy orphaned in the Holocaust, who vanished decades before on the night of his first public performance.

Every family has its own fictions: why are they invented, what social values do they reflect and how do later generations interpret them? How is political identity formed - passed down, integrated or rejected - within one family? The tale traverses the Pale, the New World and back to the Old World.

An impulsive millennial mensch who gets possessed by the spirit of his dead Yiddish grandma.

Only a handful of Yiddish poets remain alive. Chava Alberstein sets out to interview those last writers of Yiddish poetry, to hear their poems and stories. Along the way, she sings a collection of Yiddish folk songs.

This film is the story of a man’s lifelong search for authentic Yiddish folk music and of his unique archive, which was presumed to be lost forever. Moyshe Beregovsky, a musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history in order to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His work began in the 1920’s and led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of those he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were shot by the Nazis and tossed into countless mass graves. Ultimately, Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the Living Voice of his people from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life. With this introduction, Yelena Yakovich one of the leading Russian documentary film-makers, begins her latest work, Song Searcher.

Though he has managed to become a professor at an early age, a supposedly liberal young man has neglected developing his relationship skills. Even though he forms an attachment to a young woman whom he had been helping with the task of finding work and even marries her, he is appalled to learn that she is pregnant with another man's child. At the same time, his political convictions have been put to the test, and he has effectively shown that he was not as serious about them as he (and others) thought he was. Disappointed in himself and in his life, he leaves his new bride and attempts to find consolation in an affair.

This somber drama follows the troubles of a rural family who moves to the big city to have a better life. Although the family is poor, they provide lodging for an old beggar while the unemployed husband searches for work. The youngest girl steals birdseed from a parrot, while the eldest girl is close to trading sex for food. The wife believes the beggar is hiding something and finds a bag of rice in his room. The beggar dies, and the wife cooks the rice for her family. Although she has provided for her family, her feelings of guilt about the old man prevent her from keeping her food down.

A gritty political thriller set at the backdrop of the violent Naxalite movement in 70’s Calcutta.

Based on Bengali story “Ghar Bari” by Dibyendu Palit, a former revolutionary who has deserted the movement lives in fear of running into old colleagues. Meanwhile he pushes his wife into modelling, and later seamier projects, with tragic consequences.

Luisa Wagner is a successful event manager. At the same time she also manages to look after her two children, Krista and Jakob, the housework, her husband Michael and her father. When Luisa's twin sister Jenny also turns up and hardly lifts a finger to help, Luisa sees red. On an impulse, she takes over her sister's role and goes on tour with her theatre troupe in Italy. Meanwhile, Jenny assumes Luisa's chores in the home and her job, thereby experiencing not only the hurdles a mother is confronted with, but also falls madly in love with her sister's boss, Felix. Everyone is relieved when Luisa returns home after hearing of her father's breakdown. Especially Michael, who has learned to appreciate his wife anew.

When her scientist-employer is murdered, a female legal immigrant suddenly finds herself being deported via a train full of criminal aliens, g-men, reporters - and foreign agents trying to smuggle her off and into the hands of the murderous gang.

Vivian loves sex and pursues her unusual preferences in excessive affairs. Everything changes when she gets involved with the Senator for Justice Ertel, because here the boundaries between sex play and rape become blurred. She goes to court. In her lawyer Maria, she finds an understanding supporter who, like Vivian, enjoyed her freedom in her youth...