Film Festival
This year's Film Festival will feature over thirty rare and historically significant Jewish-themed films, shorts, and television programs spanning the very first films of the early 20th century to the modern era. Fiction, documentary, and experimental selections represent the breadth and diversity of the Jewish experience cutting across major themes of immigration, the Holocaust, and North American westward expansion. The Festival is being curated by Steve Carr, Director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Steve is the author of The Holocaust and Hollywood Studios at Home and Abroad, due out from Exeter University Press in July 2026.
Film Festival showings will take place in the Allen County Public Library Theater, which is on the lower level of the library. Due to licensing restrictions, complete information for every film cannot be posted on our public website, but will be available to Conference attendees in the Daily Planner and on the Mobile App.
Monday, August 11
9:30-10:45: Moving into the West
- The Great Train Robbery (Edison, 1903), 12m. A landmark in film storytelling, “The Great Train Robbery” was one of the earliest examples of narrative cross-cutting on action and became a defining moment for Hollywood told its stories. Broncho Billy Anderson, born Maxwell Henry Aronson in Little Rock Arkansas to Russian- and German-Jewish parents, performed multiple roles throughout the film, including as one of the bandits, as a dancing tenderfoot at a ball, and as one of the passengers shot by the bandits. Aronson grew up in a practicing Jewish household, and his extended family included several rabbis. He later became a major Western superstar in his own right, eventually co-founding Essanay Studios, one of the major film studios of the time. The restored hand-colored and tinted print is as close to the film audiences would have seen in a 1903 movie theater.
- They Don’t Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore (1975), 2m, courtesy of New West Records, by arrangement with Sugaroo! Recorded but never broadcast as part of the PBS television music series Austin City Limits, Kinky Friedman’s performance deftly used the country music genre to blend aspects of Jewish identity and social satire in a way that challenged anti-Semitic stereotypes at a time when popular media often marginalized or downplayed depictions of Jewishness.
- Bernice Bobs Her Hair (PBS,1976), 45m, courtesy of Bayview Entertainment. After the breakout independent hit Hester Street (1975), Joan Micklin Silver chose to direct this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story for the PBS series The American Short Story. Fitzgerald, whose later work reflected ambivalence toward Jewish identity, made for an interesting choice by one of the very few Jewish women directors working within the American film industry during the 1970s. While the short story ostensibly centered on Bernice’s mixed Native American heritage and her passing as white, the character played by Shelly Duvall spoke directly to themes of Jewish marginalized identities and the pressures of passing and assimilating in the early part of the 20th century.
11:00 -12:00 noon: The Holocaust
- V-E +1 (1945), 21m. Corporal Samuel Fuller was just 32 years old when he used his personal home movie camera to document American soldiers forcing local citizens of Falkenau to confront evidence of mass murder at a nearby concentration camp and to assist with the victims’ burial just a day after Victory in Europe Day. After the army, Fuller went on to pursue a thirty-year career in Hollywood as one of the industry’s most iconoclastic directors. That career culminated with The Big Red One (1980), a semi-autobiographical account of Fuller’s own experience with the 1st Infantry Division and the liberation of Falkenau. The U.S. Library of Congress named “V-E +1” to the National Film Registry in 2014. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, and by arrangement with Chrisam Films.
- 23rd Psalm Branch Part One (1966), 33m. (8mm, blown up to 16mm, B&W and color, silent.) Avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage confronted audiences by silently combining deeply personal images with footage of atrocities from both Vietnam and the Holocaust. The 23rd Psalm expressed trust in God to guide, protect, and care for people, especially during times of crisis. The film stands as a landmark of American experimental cinema, raising thorny questions about the persistence of violence, the limits of human cognition, and collective trauma and guilt. No mainstream Hollywood film of the time would have dared touch any of these topics in such a politicized way. This is a digital translation of a 16mm film.
1:45 -3:00: The Immigrant Experience
- Humoresque (Paramount, 1920), 1h. Set in New York’s Lower East Side, Humoresque launched a wave of Hollywood films seeking to depict Jewish immigrant family life in the ghetto. Novelist Fannie Hurst wrote the archetypal story of a Jewish mother who makes personal sacrifices to support her son’s dream of becoming a world-renowned violinist. Director Frank Borzage later went on to direct some of Hollywood’s most important an--Nazi films for MGM including Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940). The U.S. Library of Congress named the film to its National Film Registry in 2015.
3:30-4:30: Moving into the West and the Immigrant Experience
- Marshall Weiss will present on Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film epic The Ten Commandments. The film was one of Hollywood’s first biblical “sword and sandals” blockbusters. For 250 Orthodox Jews from Los Angeles, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe who didn't speak English, it was much more. They were among the extras DeMille brought for two weeks of filming on California's Nipomo Dunes. When these Jews of all ages played the Israelites departing Egypt and crossing the sea with Moses, the American dream and their heritage converged. Weiss will screen the film's prologue, the Exodus narrative, followed by presentation and discussion.
7:30-9:30: The Holocaust
- Among Neighbors (2024; 8 Above-Panorama, 2025), 1h 40m, courtesy of Panorama Films. Yoav Potash’s evocative blend of animation and documentary interviews investigates unresolved historical trauma through the eyes of the last Holocaust survivor of a Polish town and an elderly eyewitness who witnessed the murder of the town’s Jewish residents at the hands of their own neighbors. The film already has received many awards including the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Awards, and the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival.
Tuesday, August 12th
9:30-10:45: The Holocaust
- Siege (RKO, 1940), 10m. Photographer and filmmaker Julien Bryan was one of the very few American foreign correspondents in Warsaw when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. The film captured the plight of everyday Polish civilians and helped create a graphic language for American audiences to understand the persecution of European Jewry. The film received an Academy Award nomination and in 2006 the Library of Congress named it to the National Film Registry.
- You Nazty Spy! (Columbia, 1940), 18m. Known more for their slapstick gags than for bold political satire, The Three Stooges were among the first film comedians to openly ridicule Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Like the Marx Brothers’ 1933 Duck Soup, the film continued a throughline of Hollywood anti-fascist comedies. Unlike those previous comedies, it specifically named its targets almost a full year before Charles Chaplin released his landmark anti-Nazi comedy The Great Dictator (1940).
- Tulips Shall Grow (Paramount, 1942), 7m, courtesy of Paramount. Following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, animator George Pal used stop-motion and his Puppetoons to create an an--fascist allegory celebrating civilian resilience in the face of war atrocities. Nominated for an Academy Award, the Library of Congress later selected the film in 1997 for its National Film Registry.
- Belladonna (1989), 12m, courtesy of Kino Lorber. A key figure in both feminist experimental cinema and the avant garde No Wave movement of the late 1970s, Beth B collaborated with her mother and artist Ida Applebroog to produce this shocking confrontation of multi-generational violence and trauma from the perspectives of both victims and perpetrators. Using an array of disjointed video effects, the avant garde short created an unsettling collage of performers reading testimonies from multiple sources ranging from survivors of child abuse to Holocaust perpetrators. In the past few years Beth B’s overall work has begun to receive renewed attention with recent career retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Le Centre Pompidou, and a major exhibition in Berlin.
- A Fool There Was (Fox, 1915), 1h 7m. “I have the face of a vampire,” star Theda Bara once said shortly after the release of this film, “but the heart of a feminist.” Raised in Cincinnati by Jewish immigrant parents, Theodosia Goodman catapulted to stardom in her breakout role as a sexually voracious woman whose insatiable appetites destroy weak and vulnerable men. The film and its publicity introduced into the popular lexicon the term “vamp,” short for a female vampire. It set the template for later cinematic depictions of dangerous women over the next fifty years as femmes fatales. Publicity at the time promoted both Goodman’s stage name and her ethnic exoticism as an anagram for “Arab Death.” For its influence on Hollywood depictions of gender and its boldness in tackling female sexuality, the film earned a listing on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2015.
- Seven Chances (MGM, 1925), 56m, courtesy of Cohen Media. Known for his genius in staging elaborate visual gags and slapstick comedy, vaudeville comedian Buster Keaton adapted a 1916 Broadway play about 27 year old man who discovers he can inherit seven million dollars if he finds a woman to marry by the end of the day at 7 PM. A brief gag explicitly coding one of the seven women as Jewish coexisted among a range of racial and ethnic stereotypes including some scenes involving blackface. Today the film raises uncomfortable questions concerning how Keaton’s technical inventiveness and influence upon film comedy coexisted with how easily prejudice, racism, and misogyny circulated throughout American popular culture during the 1920s.
- Exile of the Musicians (7th Art, 2025), 1h 9m, courtesy of 7th Art Releasing. Between 1933 and 1945, more than one hundred Jewish musicians fleeing Germany and Austria took refuge in Argentina, where they resumed their careers in the country’s theaters, orchestras, radio stations, conservatories, tango venues, and film studios. The musicologist Silvia Glocer researches their lives, recovers their works, and interviews their descendants. Once she has gathered all the pieces of the puzzle, we see Glocer organize a grand concert in homage to these all-but-forgotten figures. (2025) Followed by a Q&A with Guillermo Blugerman.
- Hester Street (Midwest Films, 1975), 1h 29m, courtesy of Cohen Media. A highlight of the festival will feature a screening of the 4K restoration of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 Hester Street, celebrating the 50th anniversary of this landmark in feminist and American independent film-making.
Wednesday, August 13
9:30-10:30: The Holocaust
- One Small Miracle - a 45-minute film by award-winning documentary filmmaker, Laura SeltzerDuny, addresses the state of over 1200 abandoned Polish Jewish cemeteries. On-camera descendant interviews will review their challenges and successes: whether it’s dedicating an Information Signboard in a cemetery in Goniadz on September 1, 2024, raising 200 gravestones in Bialystok, or finding an ancestor’s gravestone and saying that name for the first time since their death, each is ‘One Small Miracle.’ Followed by a panel discussion.
11:00 - 12:00 noon: The Holocaust
- The Ice Cream Man (Big Picture, 2024), 33m, courtesy of Big Picture Entertainment. Shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, a popular Jewish ice cream parlor owner, Ernst Cahn, finds himself targeted by the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie. As his world crumbles, “The Ice Cream Man” must choose between resistance and death…a choice that will reverberate throughout the country. Based on actual events. (2024)
1:15-3:15: The Holocaust
- Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Neon, 2021), 1h 9m, courtesy of Neon Entertainment. Three minutes of home movie footage, mostly in color, shot by David Kurtz in 1938, are the only known moving images lee of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk, Poland, before the Holocaust. Filmmaker Glenn Kurtz examined those precious minutes to unravel the human stories hidden behind those images. Tracing the story of those three minutes begins with a family journey to discover more about a grandfather's film, ultimately leading to identifying people and places otherwise erased from history, and helping to connect a Holocaust Survivor with his lost childhood. Marsha Raimi will lead a panel discussion after the film featuring the filmmaker, children of a survivor who appeared in the home movie, and a current-day resident of the town advocating for Holocaust remembrance there.
3:30-4:30: The Holocaust
- Passenger (1963; Altura, 1970), 1h 2m, courtesy of WFDiF. Released posthumously after Polish New Wave director Andrzej Munk sudden death, this unfinished and incomplete film nonetheless serves as a landmark in Holocaust cinema, exploring the complex dynamics of memory and guilt that emerge from a chance encounter between perpetrator and survivor on an ocean liner. The film was one of the first fictional narratives to confront Holocaust memory and its aftermath. Even in its partial form, the film embodied the Polish art film’s synthesis of realism and symbolism, its moral probing, stylistic innovation, and social and political critique of national myths and the Polish identity.
7:30-9:30: Moving into the West
- A full-length film, 1h 57m. Attendees will receive further information.
Thursday, August 14th
9:30 - 10:45 a.m.: Moving into the West
- An episode from a television series (CBS, 1963), 1h, courtesy of Swank. Attendees will receive further information.
- The Beau Brummels (Warner Bros., 1928), 9m. Selected in 2016 by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, this early sound short illustrated a pivotal moment in the shift away from live vaudeville acts to sound film comedy. Al Shaw (born Albert Schutzman) and Sam Lee (born Samuel Levy) showcased a comedic style way ahead of its time in its surrealist humor, deadpan delivery, and minimalist staging.
- Pass the Gravy (MGM, 1928), 23m. Selected in 1998 by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, this late silent two-reel slapstick comedy helped pave the way for many later television situation comedies. Comedian Max Davidson was able to flesh out his archetypal persona as an Old World Jewish patriarch in a way that both traded and built on ethnic cultural stereotypes by humanizing them. Considered Davidson’s masterpiece, the film was able both to satirize and sympathize with its ethnic characters by situating them within their families.
- Tevye (Maymon, 1939), 17m excerpt. Selected in 1991 by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, Tevye was the first non-English language film included for preservation. The 17-minute excerpt seen here played an instrumental role in the film’s nomination and preservation. Produced at the outbreak of World War II, the Yiddish-language film exemplified a vibrant Jewish cinema that existed independently from Hollywood, fully exploring complex themes of faith, tradition, and cultural resilience amid inter-generational conflicts and an encroaching modernity. Responding to the cultural turmoil of the time, the film spoke defiantly to Jewish audiences both in the U.S. and abroad.
- The House I Live In (RKO, 1945), 11m Selected in 2007 by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, this postwar RKO short featuring Frank Sinatra tackled American anti-Semitism by situating it within a set of broader social problems involving prejudice and racial intolerance. Playing himself, the actor and singer speaks to a group of boys bullying a Jewish child. Sinatra’s impassioned speech characterized much of how both Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, two 1947 Hollywood features acclaimed for tackling anti-Semitism and approached the topic. The response held that anti-Semitism was un-American and that embracing both unity and ethnic and religious pluralism characterized the American experience by accepting ideals of equality and the inherent worth of the individual regardless of their race or religion. The film received an Honorary Academy Award in 1946.
- TV pilot (CBS, 1990), 1h. Attendees will receive further information.
- Television episode (NBC, 1979), 1h. Attendees will receive further information.