King of the Jews 18min, 16mm, 2000
Prayer 3 min, video, 2002
Director: Jay Rosenblatt (USA)

King of the Jews is a film about fear and transcendence. Utilizing Hollywood movies, 1950's educational films, personal home movies and religious films spanning the history of cinema, the filmmaker depicts his childhood fear of Jesus Christ. These childhood recollections are a point of departure for larger issues, including the roots of Christian anti-Semitism and the need for forgiveness and healing.

"(A) gem ... a deft found-footage construction. Mixing personal voiceover, home movies, educational filmstrips, and Hollywood clips, Rosenblatt examines conceptions of Christ. In King of the Jews, documentary’s two wires cross and ignite: form and content, story and storytelling. It goes to show that good things can come in small packages."– Patricia Thomson, IndieWire.com, Park City 2000"

"A highly emotional personal essay on Christian anti-Semitism that weaves together history, autobiography and snippets of Hollywood films depicting the life of Jesus."–Stephen Holden, The New York Times

PRAYER is my contribution to the omnibus film “Underground Zero” which is a collection of shorts related to the events of September 11th. PRAYER presents a different side of Islam than we have been bombarded with by the media. It is also an attempt to show the connection between faith and fear. Today, more than ever, there is a need for diverse voices to be heard.

Jay Rosenblatt has been making films since 1980. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship. His films have won many awards and have screened throughout the world. A selection of his films had one-week theatrical runs at the Film Forum in New York and at theaters in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Boston. Articles about his work have appeared in the Sunday NY Times Arts & Leisure section, the LA Times, the NY Times, Filmmaker magazine, the Village Voice, and The Independent. Jay Rosenblatt's films explore our emotional and psychological cores. They are personal in their content yet universal in their appeal.

The Last Words of Dutch Schultz 23min, 35mm, 2003
Director: Gerrit van Dijk (Netherlands)

Award-winning Dutch director Gerrit van Dijk used the refined technique of rotoscope to create this remarkable animated film about gangster Dutch Schultz (nee Arthur Flegenheimer). The last words of the gangster Dutch Schultz form the starting point for this animated documentary. The FBI noted these words down on Schultz' deathbed, in the hope he would betray his colleagues. Here, spoken by Rutger Hauer, they accompany the sober, pencil drawn animation based on traced (film) images from Schultz' time: the late 1920s, early 1930s

Gerrit van Dijk has made animation films since 1971 that have won prizes world-wide. In 1984 he won a Golden Calf with A Good Turn Daily.

Perhaps/We 11min, 16mm, 2003
Director: Solomon Nagler (Canada)

Within the mystic spaces of a Judaic self doubt falls a dreaming painter from the fallen Polish city of Lodz. A million murdered spirits bring to him into a world of faded photographs and stone angels, whose petrified teardrops forever scar the widowed landscape of Poland.

 

 

The Nuclear Physicist Gives His Son a Haircut 6min, video, 2003
Director: Hanan Harchol (USA/ Israel)

An amusing and disturbing animation in which "The Nuclear Physicist" discusses his cheating girlfriend, hormones, and Viagra as he cuts his son ‘s hair.

Hanan Harchol was born in Kibbutz Kinneret, Israel in 1970, and moved to New Jersey at the age of two. He received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from The Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, where he was a four-year Merit Scholar and graduated with Highest Honors. In 1998, he won a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and exhibited in the Jersey City Museum as part of the Fellowship Recipient Exhibit. Harchol received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2002. Harchol was recently awarded the 2004 Ronnie Heyman Prize, an annual grant given by The National Foundation for Jewish Culture

The Yellow Butterfly 6min, video, 2004
Director: Cecille Manson (Sweden)

A 4-year-old Jewish girl and her mother escape the parade to the ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. During an encounter with a Nazi soldier, the girl has a dream that she plays with a yellow butterfly. Young Swedish director Cecille Manson directed this haunting black-and-white film.

The Zone 10min, 35mm, 2003
Director: Esaias Baitel (Sweden)

The Zone is a story about Rock 'n' Roll and dreams of Harley Davidsons. It is a story about Hells Angels and Nazi symbols, and about sex, drugs, hate and violence. Swedish photographer Esaias Baitel spent four years, 1977-1981, photographing racist and anti-semitic street gangs in the Paris suburbs. Little did the gang members know that the photographer paying attention to them was himself a child of Holocaust survivors.

Esaias Baitel is the author of six books. He has received numerous awards and his photographs, published in leading magazines such as Paris Match, Stern and New York Times Magazine, have been exhibited in major museums throughout the world.

 

 

Zyklon Portrait 20min, 16mm, 1998
Director: Elida Schogt (Canada)

A Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery, "Zyklon Portrait " combines archival instructional films with family snapshots, home movies, underwater photography, and hand-painted imagery for an expressive exploration of how history and memory are related to one family's loss. "...Elida Schogt's deeply moving portrait of her family's experience during the Holocaust...wisely privileges the subjective response over any attempts at historical objectivity. Beginning with a hypermeticulous analysis of Zyklon B, the gas used to kill millions in the concentration camps, the documentary approach quickly fractures into a necessarily personal one, underscoring the impossibility of making sense of the senseless. Skillfully weaving archival footage and the conventional documentary's dispassionate voice of authority with family photos and her mother's cautious words, Schogt creates a palpable tension between these irreconcilable elements. The commanding voice of the narrator continually dissolves into the reticent voice of her mother, whose insistence on the indescribable nature of these events resonates with an even greater legitimacy....The film is a fitting testament to the unspeakable nature of these horrors and to the courage of those who have to struggle to summon up the words to even begin to describe them."
Barbara Goslawski, Take One: Film & Television in Canada

Elida Schogt has an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York, where she studied film production and theory. Elida's deeply personal trilogy of short documentaries on Holocaust memory: "Zyklon Portrait" (1999), "The Walnut Tree" (2000) and "Silent Song" (2001) have been screened around the globe, garnering numerous awards - most notably for the début film: The Grand Prize at the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary & Short Film and Special Mention for Best Independent Canadian Film of Hot Docs: Canadian International Documentary Festival. Elida's films challenge standard categorization, combining documentary, narrative and experimental elements to reveal complex human experiences.