Gold for Fools

An immigrant worker at a pickle factory is accidentally preserved for 100 years and wakes up in modern day Brooklyn. He learns his only surviving relative is his great grandson, a computer coder who he can’t connect with.

Motel, a poor laborer, loving husband and new father, leads cloakmakers in a strike for better working conditions. When he is severely injured by strikebreakers, his wife, Esther, and infant son are left destitute. Desperate to save her starving child, Esther gives him up for adoption to a wealthy couple, and then commits suicide. The richly-rendered beautiful Yiddish songs by Sholem Secunda featuring Cantor Leibele Waldman and Joel Feig's famous choir are a good example of the bittersweet melodrama in the finest tradition of the Yiddish theater.

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.

The Man Without a World is credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director, Yevgeny Antinov. But the film is anything but old. In fact, Antinov himself is the creation of contemporary filmmaker Eleanor Antin. Her film is a moving, comic melodrama set in a typical shtetl (village) in Poland. The Jews’ struggle against poverty and racial hatred is complicated by their own division into hostile political factions of the religious orthodoxy, assimilationists, socialists, Zionists, anarchists and survivors. While the Jews of the shtetl pursue their loves, politics, religion, business and dreams for the future, the Angel of Death is ever near...

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?

Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.

An upbeat, witty, and timely exploration of a global community of artists creating innovative work in their quest to rediscover and revitalise the endangered Yiddish language. From behind-the-scenes with an acclaimed Yiddish-language version of Yentl in Melbourne, to enjoyably transgressive punk-Klezmer musicians, and Barrie Kosky’s latest trailblazing production in Berlin – the endangered Yiddish language is alive and well in this rousing documentary. The language originated amongst the Jewish community in Eastern Europe, but almost disappeared when more than half of the world’s Yiddish speakers were murdered during the Holocaust. Most of the artists and performers (aka Yiddishists) in the film didn’t grow up speaking Yiddish, but all have found solace, identity, and inspiration in its rich traditions and culture. Ros Horin has mapped a fascinating cultural history.

Elliott Gould narrates this affectionate look at life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. "It's unreal that all this could have just disappeared," says Polish native Mariem Adler Stok, one of the seniors whose memories of this "Yiddish world" give this documentary its life. The hour traces Jewish history in Europe and explores Jews' focus on education, their religious customs, clothing, food, music and theater.

A bissele Glik

The questioning of Jewish heritage and identity via the portrait of a diversed family, across Belgium and the United States.

A hitman quits the killing business when a hit goes right but at the same time produces unfortunate results. Soon, he is forced to return in order to save his wife from the clutches of his boss who won't spare her unless some targets are executed within the limited time period.

Comedy - A woman is on the verge of giving her heart to a man; however, when she finds out about a bet between him and his friends, she refuses to marry any of them. - Rekha, Mahima Chaudhry, Vasundhara Das

The congenial Vojta is bashful and his family is batty. His short-tempered father, who once failed to swim the English Channel, wants him to be a competing swimmer and his loving mother, a former child ice revue star, sees a talented pianist in her son. But Vojta has completely different priorities - most of all his red-haired classmate Ela, an enchanting synchronized swimmer who is leaving for Paris in November. If Vojta doesn't do something radical, and fast, Ela will disappear behind the Iron Curtain forever. The year is 1989.

Five retired ex-military men attempt the unthinkable and dust off their old uniforms for one last explosive mission. The team quickly discovers that they are up against an enemy from their past. This time, The Dependables mission is personal. With guns blazing, the group puts their lives on the line to defeat their arch nemesis and save their grandchildren.

Daniel Bone is aiming for success. A Brooklyn gunsmith by trade, he figures the place to be is where the guns are. So off he goes into the West and becomes the foe of the notorious Pecos Kid, the captive of Paiutes, the target in a saloon showdown, and the lone source of the whereabouts of a fabulous gold strike.

25 year-old John, his teenage brother Erbol, and their sickly 12 year-old sister Aliya, are forced to leave their house in the Kazakh city of Almaty. By luck their mother left them a house in a remote village, where they plan to prepare their comeback. But the house appears to be on the wish list of the District Officer’s alcoholic brother, who has lived there illegally for 10 years.