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Film Type

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Cinegogue Sessions
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Filtered By: Eric Clear All

A Crime on the Bayou

"A Crime on the Bayou" is the story of Gary Duncan, a Black teenager from Plaquemines Parish, a swampy strip of land south of New Orleans. In 1966, Duncan tries to break up an argument between white and Black teenagers outside a newly integrated school. He gently lays his hand on a white boy’s arm. The boy recoils like a snake. That night, police burst into Duncan’s trailer and arrest him for assault on a minor. A young Jewish attorney, Richard Sobol, leaves his prestigious D.C. firm to volunteer in New Orleans. With his help, Duncan bravely stands up to the District Attorney, challenging his unfair arrest. Their fight goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and their lifelong friendship is forged.

Abe | Film & Feast

The Israeli-Jewish side of his family calls him Avram. The Palestinian-Muslim side Ibrahim. His first-generation American agnostic lawyer parents call him Abraham. But the 12-year-old kid from Brooklyn who loves food and cooking, prefers, well, Abe. Just Abe.

Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

The Adventures of Saul Bellow is the first-ever documentary film on Bellow, the man described by critic James Wood as the "greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century."

American Birthright

Who hasn’t asked themselves the question “why be in a relationship?” Sure enough, filming in between her 20s and 30s, American Birthright’s director and producer Becky Tahel Bordo, doesn’t take any answer for granted, and even complicates the question by making a documentary about it.

American Commune

American Commune chronicles the Farm, founded in 1971 by hippie holy man Stephen Gaskin and his wife Ina May, godmother of modern midwifery. Filmmaker sisters and former residents Nadine and Rena Mundo return to the Farm for the first time in 20 years. With a critical eye and empathy for the Farm’s efforts to reboot society, the Mundo sisters have created an engaging portrait of an unusual community and its legacy.

American Factory

In 2014, a Chinese billionaire opened a Fuyao factory in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio. For thousands of locals, the arrival of this multinational car-glass manufacturer meant regaining their jobs - and dignity - after the recession left them high and dry. American Factory takes us inside the facility to observe what happens when workers from profoundly different cultures collide.

An American Tail

This beautifully animated film, which will charm audiences of all ages, tells the story of Fievel Mouskewitz and his family of Jewish mice who escape from Russia in the late 1800s and immigrate to the United States. At the time of its release in 1986, it became the most successful non-Disney animated feature with a theme that is close to every American’s heart: immigrants trying to succeed despite the many hardships and obstacles.

The Armor of Light

In her breathtaking directorial debut, Abigail Disney follows evangelical minister Rob Schenck, an anti-abortion activist—and former Jew—as he examines whether it is possible to be pro-gun and pro-life. He teams with Lucy McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, an unarmed teenager murdered in Florida whose case has become a landmark in the fight against stand-your-ground laws. Disney artfully paces the story to show a polarized topic in a fresh light.

Bedlam

BEDLAM is a feature-length documentary that addresses the national crisis and criminalization of the mentally ill, its connection between hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans and our nation’s disastrous approach to caring for its psychiatric patients.

City of Joel

50 miles north of New York City lies the town of Monroe, where one of the fastest-growing Hasidic communities in the country thrives deep within the Hudson Valley. As the 25,000+ population within the village of Kiryas Joel looks to expand their city, the neighboring villages of non-Hasids see the encroaching community as a burgeoning power grab, leading to an increasingly tense standoff between locals. Shot over several years with seemingly boundless access, Emmy-winning director Jesse Sweet's documentary observes the simmering tensions that have come to define the community of Monroe, and the myriad ways in which the town's divide echoes the country's as well.

Judith Helfand: Freedom of Expression Award 2019 | COOKED: Survival by Zip Code

In July 1995, a heat wave overtook Chicago: high humidity and a layer of heat-retaining pollution drove the heat index up to more than 126 degrees. City roads buckled, rails warped, electric grids failed, thousands became ill and people began to die - by the hundreds. Cooked tells the story of this heat wave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 Chicago citizens died in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. Balancing serious and somber with her respectful, albeit ironic and and signature quirkly style, Peabody award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand explores this drama that, when peeled away, reveals the less newsworthy but long-term crisis of pernicious poverty, economic, and social isolation and racism. Cooked is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city.

Death Metal Grandma

97 year old Holocaust survivor Inge Ginsberg's wants to be recognized as a death metal singer.

Deli Man

Laugh your way through hilarious stories of American delicatessens while drooling over the wonderful Jewish food being prepared before your eyes.

The Devil We Know

Victims take on Dupont when they discover it has knowingly been using a toxic chemical.

Dolce Fine Giornata

Maria Linde, a free-spirited, Jewish Polish Nobel Prize winner, lives in Tuscany surrounded by warmth and chaos in her family's villa. A loving mother and grandmother, she also fosters a secret flirtation with the much younger Egyptian man who runs a nearby seaside inn. After a terrorist attack in Rome, Maria refuses to succumb to the hysterical fear and anti-immigrant sentiment that quickly emerge, deciding in her acceptance speech of a local honor to boldly decry Europe's eroding democracy-but she is unprepared for the public and personal havoc her comments wreak.

Everything is Illuminated

A young Jewish-American man obsessed with his family history, Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) decides to journey to the Ukraine to find out more about the life of his grandfather.

Forgiveness

A 20-year-old American Israeli decides to move back to Israel and reconnect with his roots, only to be institutionalized in a mental-health facility constructed on the grounds of a Palestinian village that was massacred by a Jewish militia back in 1948.

Give Me Liberty

When a riot breaks out in Milwaukee, America's most segregated city, medical transport driver Vic is torn between his promise to get a group of elderly Russians to a funeral and his desire to help Tracy, a young black woman with ALS.

Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream

About This Film

Humor Me

This heartfelt father-son comedy starring Elliott Gould, Jemaine Clement and Ingrid Michaelson follows a struggling playwright who is forced to move in with his joke-telling dad in a New Jersey retirement community and learns, as his father often says, "life's going to happen, whether you smile or not.”

I Have Never Forgotten You

After surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, architect Simon Wiesenthal dedicated the rest of his life to hunting down Nazis who escaped prosecution after the war. This documentary details his life and his work with the American War Crimes Unit, which tracked down more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals with his help.

In Search of Memory

"Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing," says neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on the physiology of the brain's storage of memories. As he explains, memory is the glue that binds our mental life together and provides a sense of continuity in our lives.

Intent to Destroy

One hundred years after 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire, Academy Award–nominated documentarian and this year’s Freedom of Expression Award recipient Joe Berlinger reveals the disturbing truth behind Turkey’s well-funded campaign of genocide denial, suppression and intimidation. Berlinger utilizes the filming of The Promise, a $100 million Hollywood film production ambitiously billed as the Armenian Schindler’s List, to explore this historical tragedy and its relevance to the barbaric genocides that followed.

Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story

Not particularly known in the United States for their athletic prowess, Jews have surprisingly excelled in the most American of sports: baseball. Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, celebrates the contributions of Jewish major leaguers and the special meaning baseball has had in the lives of American Jews. More than a film about sports, it is a story of immigration, assimilation, bigotry and the shattering of stereotypes.

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