This year, as is often the case, The Boston Jewish Film Festival will showcase a number of films by and about women. The latter part of the Festival contains many such films, especially as films will screen all day long on Veterans Day, November 11, a holiday for many. As noted below, film directors or subjects will often be present to discuss the work with audiences.

Director Danae Elon (daughter of Israeli intellectual Amos Elon) will introduce her documentary ANOTHER ROAD HOME, which chronicles her search for the Palestinian surrogate father who took care of her when she was a child. Her journey takes her to Paterson, New Jersey and illuminates the distance between the Obeidallah family and the left-leaning Elons as well as the distance between herself and her own father.

Judith Malina of The Living Theatre in a still from RESIST, directed by Dirk Szuszies.
Abir, one of the mothers in Adi Arbel's documentary LULLABY	Amit Drori as Uri and Lea Szlanger as Tamara in Keren Margalit's ALL I'VE GOT

RECUERDOS, by Mexican filmmaker Marcela Arteaga, creates a haunting kaleidoscope of remembrance in the biography of Luis Frank, a Lithuanian Jew who grew up in New York, fought in the Spanish Civil War, was captured by the Nazis in France, survived Auschwitz, and finally settled in Mexico.

Director Freke Vuijst will present her documentary KEEP ON WALKING: JOSHUA NELSON, THE JEWISH GOSPEL SINGER, followed by a concert by Joshua Nelson and his all-woman Jubilee Chorus. Nelson is a Jewish African American with a voice like Mahalia Jackson, to whom he annually pays musical tribute. Drawing on his cultural and religious background as well as his travels throughout Israel, Nelson has created a new kind of music that blends Jewish liturgical and African American spiritual styles. This concert is sure to have audiences clapping their hands.

Opera lovers will enjoy Paula Heil Fisher’s documentary FINDING ELEAZAR, which follows American tenor Neil Shicoff in his 1999 revival of the French opera LA JUIVE. This opera, created in 1835, was successful throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries until it was banned by the Nazis in 1936 and disappeared from the world stage. BSO director of program publications Marc Mandel will introduce.

In Keren Margalit’s romantic meditation on life, ALL I’VE GOT, a 72-year-old grandmother dies and is given the choice of being reunited with her first love, who died when she was 22, but relinquishing all memories of her subsequent marriage and children, or remaining a 72-year-old woman with all her life’s memories intact but never being reunited with her beloved.

The charismatic Judith Malina fled Germany with her family just before World War II. She and her husband, Jewish abstract expressionist painter Julian Eck, co founded The Living Theatre in 1947 in New York City. “The Living” thrived during the ‘60s and continues to be very much alive today. RESIST, by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies, offers a moving tribute to their legacy. Longtime Living Theatre member Tom Walker will be here to introduce the film and answer questions afterward.

Anat Halachmi’s CHANNELS OF RAGE, an explosive and dynamic documentary, features two popular rappers: Subliminal, a proud Zionist who is said to have “reinvented the Hebrew language,” and Tamer (TN), a charismatic Israeli Arab. Shot over a period of three years, the documentary charts the course of the rappers’ relationship and offers a unique commentary on the broader political conflicts within the Middle East.

Karen Cantor and Camilla Kjaerulff’s THE DANISH SOLUTION: THE RESCUE OF THE JEWS IN DENMARK features interviews with survivors, members of the resistance, and local citizens who helped because they saw a need, and separates the truth of the Danish resistance from the myths. Scholar and author Sissela Bok (LYING: MORE CHOICE IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE) will introduce the film.

Since the start of the second Intifada, more than sixty babies have been killed in Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories. In Adi Arbel’s LULLABY, eleven women - seven Israeli and four Palestinian - deliver monologues about losing a child to the conflict. The Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College sponsors this film. Children’s Hospital Chaplain Rabbi Susan Harris will lead a discussion about bereavement and loss after the film.

Yaron Zilberman will attend the screening of WATERMARKS, his documentary about seven swimming champions and members of Austria’s legendary Jewish sports club, Hakoah Vienna, which was shut down when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. The women fled the country and settled around the world. Zilberman interviewed these women and engineered a group swim in Vienna, their first reunion in sixty years. This movie is sponsored by the Jewish Women’s Archive. Greta Stanton, one of the swimmers featured in the movie, will also attend.

The full Festival schedule is available at www.bjff.org