The Centre's film club is organised by Katja Stuerzenhofecker. It seeks to promote and co-sponsor films and discussion in the area of Jewish life and culture for the Greater Manchester region.

 

Current events 

British-Jewish Life on Film: Northern Premieres & Q&A

20 November 2023, 20:30, HOME Manchester 

Experience this Northern premiere together with seven brand new short films reflecting and celebrating British-Jewish life, commissioned by UK Jewish Film through its Pears Short Film Fund and Short Doc Fund.

Sponsored by the Department of Religions and Theology, and the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester. 

This screening is part of the UK Jewish Film Festival 2023.

 

Past events 

Holocaust Memorial Day 2023: Jews, Gay People and the Holocaust 

Online film series and live-streamed panel discussion with public Q&A, 2-8 February 2023. 

 

The recording of the live discussion (62 minutes) is freely available on YouTube. 

 

Chiming with the 25th anniversary of the release of the controversial landmark film Bent (UK / Japan 1997), the five films in this online series explore the predicaments of gay people and Jews during the Holocaust and its aftermath among the postwar generation. The concluding panel discussion with public Q&A brings together researchers with Jewish and LGBTQ community and cultural practitioners who will consider the distinct Holocaust histories and partly clashing cultural memories at hand.

 

Organized by Prof Cathy Gelbin, Department of Drama, and Dr Katja Stuerzenhofecker, Department of Religions and Theology, in collaboration with Manchester Reform Synagogue. 

 

On demand 

Great Freedom (Austria / Germany 2021), d. Sebastian Meise 

In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Over the decades, he develops an unlikely bond with his cellmate Viktor.

MUBI, Curzon Home, Amazon Prime (all subject to geoblocking; please check for your location)

 

Minyan (USA 2020), d. Eric Steele 

Young David comes out in a community of Russian-Jewish Holocaust survivors in 1980s New York at the onset of the AIDS crisis. As David experiences a sexual and spiritual awakening, he begins to confront his intersecting identities as immigrant, Jew, and gay man.

Peccadillo Pictures on Demand, Curzon Home, Amazon Prime (all subject to geoblocking; please check for your location)

 

2 February 2023, 18.00-20.00 BST

Aimée & Jaguar (Germany 1998), d. Max Färberböck

Felice, a young Jewish woman living undercover in war-time Berlin falls in love with Lilly, a devoted Nazi and mother of four. A glossy, highly melodramatic film with interspersed erotic scenes amidst unfolding tragedy.

 

6 February 2023, 18.00-20.00 BST

HaBuah (The Bubble, Israel 2006), d. Eytan Fox

In a group of young people living in contemporary Tel Aviv, the Israeli Jew Noam embarks on a troubled relationship with the Palestinian Arab Ashraf. The film’s exploration of ethnic strife and sexual difference in contemporary Israel climaxes when both men visit a theatrical performance of Martin Sherman’s play Bent.

 

8 February 2023, 18.00-20.00 BST

Bent (UK / Japan 1997), d. Sean Matthias

Max, a gay man from Berlin, is deported to Dachau concentration camp, where he hides his sexuality and instead poses as a Jew. Through his love for fellow inmate Horst, Max discovers the meaning of gay pride. 

 

8 February 2023, 20.00-21.00 BST

Jews, Gay People and the Holocaust: Panel discussion with public Q&A

Panelists: Rabbi Robyn Ashworth-Steen (Manchester Reform Synagogue and co-chair of Greater Manchester Citizens); Dr. Hannah Ewence (Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Chester); and Greg Thorpe (curator, writer and cultural producer; festival Director for GAZE, Ireland's inernational LGBTQ+ film festival. Moderation: Professor Cathy Gelbin (University of Manchester).

 

The recording of the live discussion (62 minutes) is freely available on YouTube.

 

The Brasch Family

9 - 13 June 2022 online

Dir. Annekatrin Hendel | Germany 2018 | 102 mins | German with English subtitles

Screening and live discussion (recording available here; 54 minutes).

Annekatrin Hendel’s documentary depicts three generations of the Braschs, a Jewish family whose first generation returned from exile from National Socialism to settle in East Germany. Whereas the first generation were ardent supporters of the German Democratic Republic, their three sons Thomas, Peter and Klaus – all of them artists – developed into critics of the system. Through interviews with surviving relatives, loved ones and friends, the film paints a social, political and cultural history of the GDR through the canvas of a family saga.

The discussion panel includes the film’s director, Annekatrin Hendel (Berlin); Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Film and Media Studies (Yale University), and the writer and political educator Juliette Brungs (Berlin). The panel will be moderated by Cathy Gelbin, who is Professor of Film and German Studies (University of Manchester).

Supported by the AHRC and the University of Manchester. In collaboration with UK Jewish Film.

 

The Commissar

Thursday 7 April 2022 17.45 BST, online.

Dir. Aleksandr Askoldov | Soviet Union 1967 | 110 mins

Screening and live discussion (recording available here). Russian with English subtitles.

Aleksandr Askoldov’s topical Soviet film The Commissar (1967) tells the story of a pregnant Red Army commissar, who stays with a Jewish family to give birth during the Russian civil war in Ukraine. Co-written by the Ukrainian Jewish writer Vassiliy Grossman, the film was among the rare productions of its era that featured Jewish protagonists and referenced the Holocaust in ways that subtly undermined the Soviet-state narrative of revolutionary heroism. The film and its director were immediately banned after completion and Commissar premiered internationally only at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, when late Soviet Glasnost policies had finally enabled the film’s release.

The discussion panel, which will discuss the film as an important document of Russian and Ukrainian histories leading into the present, includes Joe Andrew, Emeritus Professor of Literature and Culture at Keele University; Marat Grinberg, Associate Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, Portland; and Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish and Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto. The panel will be moderated by Cathy Gelbin, who is Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Manchester. 

Supported by the AHRC and the University of Manchester.

The film is available for free viewing on Alexander Street Press to members of subscribing institutions. Institutional username and password required. The recording of the live discussion (60 minutes) is freely available on YouTube.

 

Jacob the liar 

Wednesday 2 February 2022 18.30 GMT, online.

Dir. Frank Beyer | GDR 1974 | 97 mins

Screening and live discussion (recording available here; 58 minutes). German with English subtitles.

Frank Beyer’s 1974 East German-Czechoslovak coproduction Jakob the Liar was unique in Eastern Bloc film and the original to Peter Kassovitz’s Hollywood remake of 1999 with Robin Williams. In addition to receiving national and international accolades, it was the only East German film to be nominated for an Academy Award. Scripted by the East German Jewish writer Jurek Becker, a child survivor of the Łódź Ghetto, and the Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, the film saw several aborted attempts as the director fell into political disfavour and Eastern Bloc anti-Jewish campaigns reached new highs. In straddling political and aesthetic divides, such as Beyer’s and Becker’s socialist beliefs and their probing into alternative modes of Eastern Bloc Holocaust memory on the one hand, and the film’s fantastical elements against the dictate of socialist realism on the other, Beyer’s film and its remake exemplify the historical specificities of Holocaust memory nearly 50 years on.

The discussion panel includes Becker’s biographer Sander L. Gilman, who is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University; Sabine Hake, who is Professor and Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at The University of Texas at Austin; and the actor, director and author Blanche Kommerell, who shot to fame in her role as Rosa Frankfurter in Frank Beyer’s Jacob the Liar. The panel will be moderated by Cathy Gelbin, who is Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Manchester.

The film is available for free viewing on Kanopy to members of subscribing institutions. Institutional username and password required. The recording of the live discussion (58 minutes) is freely available on YouTube.

In collaboration with Manchester Reform Synagogue.

[Image credit: Herbert Kroiss; DEFA Stiftung]

 

The Black Book 

10 -13 November 2021, online.

Dir. Guillaume Ribot | France 2019 | 92 mins

Screening and free recorded discussion (41mins)

Synopsis: Drafted while the Second World War was still raging, the Black Book contained numerous testimonies of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews in the Soviet Union. The publication of the book, which was used by the prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, was supported at first by the Soviet authorities, but was ultimately banned by Stalin who also ordered the execution of most of its authors. Featuring a wealth of archival footage and told through the voices of the Jewish-Soviet intellectuals who gathered the testimonies, this important documentary sheds new light on the operations of two abhorrent totalitarian regimes, driven by blind hatred and prejudice. 

This film streaming is accompanied by a free recorded discussion (41mins) with Cathy Gelbin, Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Manchester, and Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish and Diaspora Studies, University of Toronto. The discussion is chaired by journalist and author Ben Judah.

This screening was part of the UK Jewish Film Festival 4-18 November 2021.

 

Wall with panel discussion 

2 – 12 July, online at UK Jewish Film

Dir. Moran Ifergan | Israel 2017 | 64 mins | Hebrew with English subtitles

 

Winner of Best Israeli Film Award at the 2017 Docaviv festival.

“You lack inner peace, I can see it in your eyes…” With this abrupt remark thrown at her by a woman visiting Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, filmmaker Moran Ifergan is reminded of the religion she left in her late teens, when she used to frequent this holy site. While her marriage falls apart, Moran takes us on an around-the-clock journey to the women’s side of the Wall; mixing between private and public, sound and image, God and His absence.

Director Moran Ifergan, who grew up ultra-Orthodox and is now secular, says she also inhabits a strange middle ground that has brought turbulence to her personal life, but depth and clarity to her filmmaking. Her film, “The Wall,” explores the spirituality surrounding Israel’s sacred Western Wall, known to many Jewish pilgrims as the Wailing Wall.

The film is available for free viewing on Academic Video Online by Alexander Street Press. University username and password required. There is a free recorded discussion (41 mins) with Robyn Ashworth-Steen, Principal Rabbi of Manchester Reform Synagogue, and Cathy Gelbin, Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Manchester. The discussion is chaired by Judy Ironside MBE, Founder and President of UK Jewish Film.

 

This screening is organized in collaboration with UK Jewish Film. Sponsored by the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester.

A collection of art and blood, the Goering catalogue 

Thursday 10 June 2021, 5.45pm (BST), online, register here

Dir. Laurence Thiriat | France 2020 | 90 mins

Screening followed by Q&A with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, co-writer of the documentary

French with English subtitles

Synopsis: During the war, Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man, set up for personal ends a gigantic business of spoliation of works of art belonging to thousands of Jewish families. These lootings were conscientiously noted in a catalogue, an archive that came out of oblivion in 2015. Carried out like a real police investigation, the film takes us to the four corners of the world to search for witnesses, archives and traces of a story that does not fade.

Son of Saul

Sunday 7 – Wednesday 10 February 2021, online

Dir. László Nemes | Hungary 2015 | 107 mins

German, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish with English subtitles

Son of Saul will be streamed online in collaboration with UK Jewish Film as part of this year’s Bogdanow Lecture in Holocaust Studies. Set among the Auschwitz special squads, the film follows the fictionalised attempts by one squad member to give a murdered child a traditional Jewish burial. The film’s stunning portrayals have received numerous critical accolades, including praise from Nobel Peace Prize winning survivors and writers Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész; iconic filmmakers such as Claude Lanzmann (Shoah, 1985) and Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, 1994), who have themselves approached the Holocaust in their films; and philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who considered the film ‘A necessary, coherent, beneficial, innocent monster.’

This online screening is part of the Bogdanow Lecture in Holocaust Studies taking place on 9 February 2021.

In collaboration with UK Jewish Film. Open to the public. The film can be purchased for rental at the discounted rate of £1, from Sun 7 Feb to Weds 10 Feb on the Curzon Home Cinema platform. Please enter the discount code SAUL21 when making the purchase. The discount applies to the first 500 rentals, all following rentals are at the regular rate of £3.99. Once you have purchased the film you have 48 hours to watch it. You can stop, rewind, fast forward and re-watch as many times as you like. Requires a free account on Curzon Home Cinema.

 

Transkids

Tuesday 17 November 2020, 7.30pm, online

Dir. Hilla Medalia | Israel 2019 | 103 mins

Hebrew with English subtitles

UK Premiere

Growing up is never easy, but experiencing adolescence as a transgender makes this time of rapid physical and psychological changes even harder. Emmy® nominated director and producer Hilla Medalia’s (The Oslo Diaries, Muhi: Generally Temporary) new moving and topical film follows four Israeli teenagers from different places and backgrounds in the process of transitioning and their supportive – if, at times, confused and hurting – families.

Sponsored by the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester.

Early booking is highly recommended. This screening is part of the UK Jewish Film Festival taking place on 5-19 November 2020. 

 

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles

Sunday 17 November 2019, 3.40pm, HOME

Dir. Max Lewkowicz | USA 2019 | 92 mins

The story of Broadway sensation, Fiddler on the Roof, and its phenomenal impact around the world. Join Sheldon Harnick, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Joel Grey and many others, as director Max Lewkowicz chronicles the play’s backstory, from its 1960s New York roots, when “tradition” was on the wane and civil rights were evolving. Most revealing is the story of the play’s global impact, where audiences all over the world for the last half-century have claimed Tevye’s story as their own, from suburban middle schools in Nebraska to grand state theatres in Japan.

Sponsored by the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester.

Early booking is highly recommended. This screening is part of the UK Jewish Film Festival taking place on 6-21 November 2019. Further information on the Manchester Screenings.

The Women’s Balcony

Tuesday 26 June 2019 7.30pm, University of Manchester

Dir. Emil Ben-Shimon | Israel 2016 | 96 mins

Screening followed by Q&A with Ma’ayan Nechama Atlas; chaired by Dr Katja Stuerzenhofecker.

A comedy/drama about community, old traditions and values and the power of women to keep all of these together in the face of modern extremism. An accident during a bar mitzvah celebration leads to a gender rift in a devout Orthodox community in Jerusalem, in this rousing, good-hearted tale about women speaking truth to patriarchal power.

Part of the Northern British Isles Jewish Studies Partnership’s Early Career and Postgraduate Research Training Event and Research Meeting, 25-27 June 2019.

 

Hitler versus Picasso and the others. The Nazi obsession for art

Tuesday 26 February 2019 6pm, HOME 

Dir. Claudio Poli | Italy 2017 | 90 mins

Screening followed by Q&A with Jean-Marc Dreyfus who appears in the film and Janet Wolff and will be chaired by David Berkley QC.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus is a reader at the University of Manchester. He is a specialist of economic and diplomatic aspects of the Holocaust and post-war reparations. He has written on looted art in the Holocaust and has edited several memoirs and Holocaust diary. He is also the author of TV documentaries. He has recently published the "Goering Catalogue“, the original inventory of Goering’s art collection in Carinhall (Paris, Flammarion, 2015). He currently researches the search and exhumation  of victims‘ corpses after the Holocaust. Janet Wolff is Professor Emerita at the University of Manchester. She is a sociologist and art historian, and has taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Rochester (New York) and Columbia University.  She has published a number of books on aesthetics and the sociology of art.  In her most recent book, Austerity Baby (published by Manchester University Press) she has turned from academic to more personal writing, combining memoir, family history and accounts of other lives and events.  Central to the book is the experience of her father and his family in Germany in the 1930s. David Berkley QC is an Israeli born barrister and art enthusiast, David Berkley has conducted interviews for UK Jewish Film and is prominent in Manchester Jewish communal life.

80 years have passed since the Nazi regime placed a definitive ban on so-called degenerate art considered 'cosmopolitan and communist'. In 1937 an exhibition was staged to publically brand and stigmatize it while holding, only a short distance away, an exhibition dedicated to pure Arian art.  At the same time, under the orders of Hitler and Goering, began the looting of classic works of art, those masterpieces that were to occupy an area the Führer planned to turn into the Louvre of Linz, a project that would remain on paper only. Goering too, himself a compulsive collector, compiled a list of artworks that were to appear in his residence at Carinhall, not far from Berlin.  The masterpieces of degenerate art would instead be sold at auction, the proceeds ending up in the state coffers, later used to buy the art that met with the regime’s approval. 

Artworks began to be confiscated from museums in occupied territories, seized from the homes of art collectors, particularly Jews. The looting would continue until the end of the war with the confiscation of the art heritage from those countries traversed by German troops. The accompanying narrative to the documentary is provided by Toni Servillo. Many of the stories told take their cue from four great exhibitions which, 80 years later, in 2017, sum up the situation as to what became of the treasures stolen by the Nazis and many of the people involved at the time. 

Sponsored by the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, in collaboration with the Centre for Jewish Studies.

Early booking is highly recommended. Bookings can be made here.

Inside the Mossad

Saturday 17 November 2018 8pm, Cineworld Didsbury 

Dir. Duki Dror | Israel, Germany 2018 | 80 mins

Screening will be followed by Q&A withdirector Duki Dror, Ram Ben-Barak and  Moshe Behar. 

Like the CIA and MI6, Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has spawned many myths since its foundation in 1950. The tales behind its top secret operations have been the basis for books and films that, in turn, have fed the imagination of fans of conspiracy theories the world over. In Inside The Mossad, former heads and agents break their silence and talk for the very first time about what it is like to work for one of the most enigmatic institutions in the world.

Part of UK Jewish Film Festival 2018. Booking opens on 26 September.

 

Wilfrid Israel: The Essential Link

Monday 13 November 2017 8.30pm, HOME

Dir. Yonatan Nir | Israel, 2016 | 71 mins

Screening will be followed by Q&A with Ruth Barnett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus

Despite saving the lives of thousands of Jews, taking an integral role in the Kindertransport and working in partnership with the British intelligence, Wilfrid Israel is, for the most part, a forgotten hero. As the wealthy owner of one of Berlin’s largest department stores and an avid art collector, Israel was a high profile yet deeply enigmatic figure. Wilfrid Israel: The Essential Link explores not only Israel’s remarkable rescue operations but also the reasons they had been kept secret for so long.

 

Remember Baghdad

Tuesday 21 November 2017 6.20pm, HOME

Dir. Fiona Murphy | Israel, 2016 | 71 mins

Screening will be followed by Q&A with Fiona Murphy and Moshe Behar

Seen as a site of ongoing fighting, modern-day Baghdad scarcely resembles the city it once was. Remember Baghdad is a fascinating exploration of the rich Jewish life and culture that had flourished in Iraq before the events of the 20th and early 21st centuries dramatically changed the course of the country – and the fate of its Jews. The film features prominent British-Iraqi Jews, including David Dangoor. Their life stories are woven into the history of their fellow Iraqi people, Jews and non-Jews alike.

 

Sacred Sperm 

Wednesday 5 July 2017 8.20pm, HOME

Dir. Ori Gruder | Israel, 2014 | 74 mins

Screening was followed by Q&A with Prof Philip Alexander and Dr Alana Vincent

An eye-opening documentary explores one of the biggest taboos in Judaism. It offers daring exposure of the way parents and rabbis within the Orthodox Jewish community educate their male children to avoid spilling their sperm.Throughout the film, the director seeks a proper way to explain to his teenage son why he should keep this commandment perceived by many as unreasonable and even impossible to fulfill.

 

Germans and Jews 

Wednesday 9 Nov 2016 8.30pm, HOME

Dir. Janina Quint | USA 2016 | 76 mins

Screening was followed by Q&A with Dr Cathy Gelbin

There are more than 200,000 Jews living in Germany today, including thousands of young Israelis who are based in Berlin. How has Germany progressed from the Nazis’ aim to obliterate Jewish life forever to being the country with the fastest growing Jewish community in Europe? Can Germans today accept Jews as merely fellow citizens rather than the children or grandchildren of victims? And why philosemitism is just as dangerous as anti-Semitism? Bringing together Germans and Jews, this fascinating documentary explores the dramatic changes in German-Jewish relations since liberation day in 1945.

The screening was part of the 20th UK Jewish Film Festival which takes place across the country between 5-20 November 2016. The date of the screening, the 9th of November, is selected for its commemorative symbolism for both Jewish and German history: the 1938 Reich Progrom or ‘Crystal Night’ and the 1989 falling of the Berlin Wall.

Zero Motivation 

Thursday 20 Oct 2016, 8.30pm, Cineworld Didsbury

Dir. Talya Lavie | Israel 2014 | 97 mins

Screening was followed by Q&A with Dr Moshe Behar chaired by Gita Conn

A zany, dark, & comedic portrait of everyday life for a unit of young, female Israeli soldiers. The Human Resources Office at a remote desert base serves as the setting for this cast of characters who bide their time pushing paper and battling in computer games, counting down the minutes until they can return to civilian life. Amidst their boredom and clashing personalities, issues of commitment - to friendship, love, and country - are handled with humor and sharp-edged wit.

Gett: The Trial of Vivianne Amsalem

Thurs 30 June 2016. Screening of 'Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem' followed by a Q&A panel with Bernard Jackson and Nechama Hadari. 8.10pm at HOME, Manchester. 

An Israeli woman (Ronit Elkabetz) fights for three years to obtain a divorce from her devout husband (Simon Abkarian), who refuses to grant his permission to dissolve the marriage.

Bernard Jackson was Alliance Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester from 1997-2009. From 2004 he directed the Centre's Agunah Research Unit, whose publications are available from the research unit's website, and drafted its Final Report, published as Agunah: The Manchester Analysis. He has also published extensively in early Jewish law and in modern legal philosophy.

Nechama Hadari gained her PhD in Religions and Theology from The University of Manchester in 2012. Her doctoral thesis – on the rabbinic understanding of the human will in the context of Jewish Divorce Law – was awarded the International Council of Jewish Women’s annual prize for academic research in 2013 and was published as a monograph “The Kosher Get: A Halakhic Story of Divorce”.

My Nazi Legacy

Wed 11 Nov 2015. Screening of 'My Nazi Legacy' followed by a Q&A panel, including Jean-Marc Dreyfus and the film's director, David Evans. 6.20pm at HOME, Manchester.

Internationally-renowned human rights barrister Philippe Sands QC goes on a road trip with two sons of SS officers to find out if they can admit to their fathers’ crimes. When they arrive in the Ukrainian town where Sands’ own family were killed, the three men are forced to confront history in a unique way. An intellectually-charged and deeply moving exploration of history, confrontation and family.

“Extraordinary… a bracingly rigorous examination of inherited guilt and pain.” (Screen International)