Jewish Film Fest in Southampton
The Southampton Cultural Center, in partnership with the Chabad Southampton Jewish Center, will present the first annual Southampton Jewish Film Festival, a series of 12 weekly screenings. The series starts on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with “Mamele,” a 1938 comedy-drama starring Molly Picon that captures the many facets of life between World Wars I and II in Lodz, Poland, where it was filmed.
June Gable, an award-winning actress who starred in “Picon Pie,” a musical that charted the life, times, loves, and songs of the Yiddish-American theater star, will be on hand to introduce the film and take questions after the screening.
Subsequent programs, all of which will take place Sundays at 7:30 p.m., will include “Orchestra of Exiles,” a 2013 documentary about Bronislaw Huberman, a violinist who helped save many of Europe’s prominent Jewish musicians from the Nazis (July 12); “Kol Nidre,” a 1939 Yiddish musical about a love triangle (July 19), and “Being Jewish in France,” a three-hour documentary from 2007 that covers the years from the 19th century to the present (Aug. 16).
The series, which will conclude Sept. 6 with “Exodus,” the 1960 Hollywood epic based on Leon Uris’s novel about the founding of Israel, was organized by Tina Silverman, a producer and a board member of the cultural center.
“In selecting the program,” Ms. Silverman said, “I tried to include areas of interest to the entire community. All of us have seen the horrors of the concentration camps. But we see little of what European Jewish life was like prior to the Holocaust — of individual lives and a rich culture that today many may know little about.”
Also on the program are “His Wife’s Lover” (1931), billed as the first Jewish musical comedy; “The Rape of Europa” (2006), an exploration of Nazi Germany’s looting of Europe’s great works of art; “The Cantor’s Son” (1937), which includes rare footage of the Lower East Side and the Second Avenue theater marquees of the period; “Buchenwald Ball” (2006), the story of 45 orphans who escaped the Holocaust and found their way to Australia, and “The Last Marranos” (1991), a documentary about the Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity in 1497 but continued to practice Judaism secretly.
“For those who have never had the opportunity to see Yiddish theater or film, they should not miss the films we have lined up,” said Ms. Silverman. “There are English subtitles, but it is fun to hear an English word interspersed in the Yiddish dialogue here and there, as well as Yiddish words that have become common American usage.”
Tickets are $15.