East Side

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.

In one continuous shot, SHTTL shows the lives, loves, and inner conflicts within a Yiddish speaking shtetl on the border between Ukraine and Poland - one day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

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.

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.

Scott Gerber, an unlikely mix of Yiddish and cowboy cultures, learned Yiddish and progressive songs from his mother and grandmother. A descendant of the left wing Petaluma chicken ranchers, Scott carries on the Yiddish and ranching traditions and proudly works in agriculture today.

Forty years after leaving his ultra-Orthodox roots, journalist Tuvia Tenenbom returns to Jerusalem's Mea Shearim. With rare access, he uncovers a world that remains a mystery to outsiders.

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.

The action takes place during the January Uprising. A Russian commander imposed a tribute on a town inhabited by Jews; the money was appropriated by an adjutant, and eleven hostages faced court martial for allegedly failing to pay tribute and forging the commander's signature. A legend is woven into the plot: the sacred number 36 indicates thirty-six righteous. Nameless, unknown to anyone, they live as paupers or simpletons, carrying the burden of the world's sins on their shoulders. A good deed or a miracle that averts misfortune betrays them; however, the perpetrator of the miracle must die. The film has not survived to this day.

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.

French Canadian trapper Victor Raoul returns to the trading post at St. Ignace to find a rival for the affections of Yvonne, his business partner's daughter, in the Marquis Courtière, Parisian representative of the fur company. Raoul quarrels with Fontaine over the visitor's business dealings and his attentions to Yvonne.

The Alarm

The story of a bride and groom who were engaged in childhood, met by chance at a resort and fell in love. The film has not survived.

A comical story of a swindler, disguised as a priest, pretending to offer exorcisms for money. A fake priest solicits help from a needy immigrant and they travel the countryside taking advantage of anyone they can find. Eventually, the priest realizes he can make more money by taking his scam to a church. He finds a small local church to offer his services and encounters a woman whom he has conned before. What will he do to not be discovered as a fraud?

Before the U.S. Civil War rebel leader Luke Darcy sees himself as leader of a new independent Republic of Kansas but the military governor sends an ex-raider to capture Darcy.

Gustav Hartmann is in trouble. Because of the new taxis he doesn't get many passengers in his horse-drawn carriage. To prove what he and his horse are capable of, he starts a trip from Berlin to Paris.

A lab accident gives a beagle named Shoeshine some serious superpowers -- a secret that the dog eventually shares with the young boy who becomes his owner and friend.