Film Review | The Anguish of Losing Faith
Set in an Italian villa, “Where Life Begins” is the story of a young Haredi woman and a divorced farmer who both long to break free.
14
Sep
19
Mar
Tango Shalom | The Dancing Rabbi of Crown Heights
Tango Shalom
Released February 11, 2021
1 hour 55 minutes
Directed by Gabriel Bologna
Convivencia Forever Films
Comedy, Family, Dance: English
Hasidic rabbi Moshe Yehuda is a father of five whose Hebrew school is on the verge of bankruptcy. His brother, Rahamim, is entangled in a scam while simultaneously begging for help to pay for his upcoming wedding to, oy, a progressive woman. This disastrous state of affairs is exacerbated by their mother’s antipathy toward Rahamim’s fiancée, Marina Zlotkin, as well as her son’s future mother-in-law, Leah. Rabbi Yehuda, a talented amateur hora dancer in his spare time, tramps across Brooklyn in search of paid employment. With no end in sight to his mounting tsuris, he and his family face disastrous financial and emotional ruin.
But then one day, while waiting at a bus stop, Moshe hears music coming from a Latin...
03
Sep
ChaiFlicks: Jewish TV and Film on Demand
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Seemingly out of nowhere, the pandemic lockdown has fueled the unprecedented popularity of Jewish-themed streaming series, some with unexpected crossover appeal to broader audiences.
Think Unorthodox, Shtisel, The Spy, Fauda and HBO’s The Plot Against America.
So it’s only natural that a boutique streaming service has emerged to try to catch this wave, providing engaging, smaller, independent alternatives to the big- and mid-budget blockbuster limited series.
ChaiFlicks, a Santa Monica-based service that acquires and distributes content focused on Jewish culture, launched August 12.
The new service costs $5.99 per month, roughly what the BBC-overflow Acorn...
30
Jun
Homage to a Master Drama Teacher
This film is an insightful view into the life of a little-known luminary, replete with wonderful archival footage (not only of pre-state Jerusalem but also of his and his wife’s mime performances), whose legacy would otherwise be unknown to almost all of us.
01
Aug
Moment staff picks: Jewish Movies to Watch on a Rainy Day
For pure cheesy pleasure, I’d go with The Ten Commandments, which frightened me so much as a child that I was actually taken out of the movie theater. I’m tougher now and, besides ever since taking my own kids on the Paramount Pictures tour that explained how the filmmakers used pre-CGI techniques to part the Red Sea, I’ve wanted to watch the thing through properly with lots of use of the pause button.
15
Dec
A Cemetery Story
A documentary about a cemetery: It may not sound like much of a crowd-pleaser, but the German film In Heaven, Underground, directed by Britta Wauer and tracking the 131-year history of Europe's second-largest Jewish cemetery, has been garnering some high praise. Last month, the New York Times called the movie, about the Jewish Weissensee Cemetery in Berlin, "poetic and exquisite." Wauer spoke with Moment's Sala Levin about the past and present of Berlin's Jewish residents.
What inspired the film?
It was not my idea—five years ago a program director from a Berlin television station asked me to make a film about this cemetery. I knew the cemetery and found it very special, but I felt that it wasn’t a good idea to make a film about it. You can walk in there and look around, and you...