We Are Not to be Blamed for Their Blood

Pláč svatého Šebestiána

A historical film with balladic features set in 1348, when Europe was struggling with the greatest plague epidemic to date. The film strives to portray the Middle Ages as authentically as possible and to create a specific symbolic space in which ideas, dreams, and cultural archetypes are as tangible as beings and objects.

Diary of a Chambermaid

Celestine has a new job as a chambermaid for the quirky M. Monteil, his wife and her father. When the father dies, Celestine decides to quit her job and leave, but when a young girl is raped and murdered, Celestine believes that the Monteils' groundskeeper, Joseph, is guilty, and stays on in order to prove it. She uses her sexuality and the promise of marriage to get Joseph to confess -- but things do not go as planned.

Love One Another

A look at various lives, one of which is Jewish girl Hanne Liebe, as she grows up and experiences the pains of living as a Jew in Russia, leading to a revolution.

Reach for Glory

During World War II, teenage boys in a small English town are consumed with jingoism and brutal war games, hoping dearly that the war won't end before they can fight in it.

Dark Night, October 17, 1961

Parisian authorities clash with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in director Alain Tasma’s recounting of one of the darkest moments of the Algerian War of Independence. As the war wound to a close and violence persisted in the streets of Paris, the FLN and its supporters adopted the tactic of murdering French policemen in hopes of forcing a withdrawal. When French law enforcement retaliated by brutalizing Algerians and imposing a strict curfew, the FLN organizes a peaceful demonstration that drew over 11,000 supporters, resulting in an order from the Paris police chief to take brutal countermeasures. Told through the eyes of both French policemen as well as Algerian protestors, Tasma’s film attempts to get to the root of the tragedy by presenting both sides of the story.

St. Louis

Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.

Fiddler on the Roof

In a pre-revolutionary Russia, a poor Jewish milkman struggles with the challenges of a changing world as his daughters fall in love and antisemitism grows.

Toyland

On a winter morning, a mother goes to waken her son Heinrich; his bed is empty. She leaves her flat to find him. The neighbors' door, with a Star of David painted on it, is ajar, the furnishings in disarray, the family gone. She asks passersby, runs to the police then on to the rail yard. Flashbacks show that Heinrich and the neighbors' son Paul are six years old and best friends. Paul's family's deportation is expected soon; Heinrich's mother tells her son that they're going to Toyland. Heinrich wants to go with them, has a bag packed, and listens for their departure. His mother realizes he's joined them, and her resolve becomes more urgent. Will she arrive in time to save Heinrich?

Gentleman's Agreement

A magazine writer poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism.

Pressure Point

An African-American prison psychiatrist finds the boundaries of his professionalism sorely tested when he must counsel a disturbed inmate with bigoted Nazi tendencies.

Threads of Destiny

Ivan Mussak, the head of the Russian secret police, is responsible for the murders of thousands of Jews and the forced exile of thousands more. Isaac Gruenstein and his infant daughter Miriam are the only members of his family to survive one of Mussak's massacres, and Isaac is exiled to Siberia. Miriam, however, becomes Mussak's ward and is raised by nuns in a convent. Eighteen years later Isaac dies in Siberia, but before he does he writes a note to his daughter and gives it to fellow prisoner Rachel Shapiro, who manages to escape and, by chance, finds Miriam. However, circumstances have changed in the past 18 years--and Miriam is now Mussak's mistress.

Focus

In the waning months of World War II, a man and his wife are mistakenly identified as Jews by their anti-Semitic Brooklyn neighbors. Suddenly the victims of religious and racial persecution, they find themselves aligned with a local Jewish immigrant in a struggle for dignity and survival.

Swing Kids

The story of a close-knit group of young kids in Nazi Germany who listen to banned swing music from the US. Soon dancing and fun leads to more difficult choices as the Nazis begin tightening the grip on Germany. Each member of the group is forced to face some tough choices about right, wrong, and survival.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

13-year-old Rynn Jacobs lives in a New England beach town. Whenever the landlady inquires after Rynn's father, she claims that he's not available. But when the landlady's son, Frank, won't leave Rynn alone, she teams up with a neighbor Mario to maintain the dark family secret that she's been keeping to herself.

Liberty Heights

This semi-autobiographical film by Barry Levinson follows various members of the Kurtzman clan, a Jewish family living in suburban Baltimore during the 1950s. As teenaged Ben completes high school, he falls for Sylvia, a black classmate, creating inevitable tensions. Meanwhile, Ben's brother, Van, attends college and becomes smitten with a mysterious woman while their father tries to maintain his burlesque business.

School Ties

When David Greene receives a football scholarship to a prestigious prep school in the 1950s, he feels pressure to hide the fact that he is Jewish from his classmates and teachers, fearing that they may be anti-Semitic. He quickly becomes the big man on campus thanks to his football skills, but when his Jewish background is discovered, his worst fears are realized and his friends turn on him with violent threats and public ridicule.

Homicide

While investigating the ruthless murder of an elderly woman, a Jewish police detective unravels a bizarre conspiracy involving a Zionist organization.

The Rothschilds

Biopic about the Rothschilds, a Jewish family whose members rose to the top of the European banking community during the Napoleonic era.

Pogrom

God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore

After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.