Actress and fillmakers Ronit Elkabetz will receive the ASF Pomegranate Award at the fifteenth New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 10-16, $10-$12 (opening night $25-$125, closing night $20-$25, festival pass $80-$95)
212-294-8301
www.sephardicfilmfest.org
www.cjh.org
Sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History, the fifteenth annual New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival opens Thursday night with a VIP tribute to actress and filmmaker Ronit Elkabetz and the New York premiere of Alexandre Arcady’s Five Brothers (Comme les cinq doigts de la main), a thriller about five Algerian brothers living in France who get caught up in a web of intrigue. Elkabetz, who will be receiving the ASF Pomegranate Award, can be seen March 13 at 5:30 starring in Nir Bergman’s 2010 documentary Ronit Elkabetz: A Stranger in Paris (screening with Haim Shiran’s Zohra Elfassia), and Elkabetz’s 2004 directorial debut, To Take a Wife, will be shown March 14 at 8:00. Many of the screenings will be followed by discussions with the filmmakers or related representatives and experts, including Tezeta Germay’s I Had a Dream, Rabbi Josy Eisenberg’s In the Beginning Was a School…, Milos S. Silber’s Jubanos: The Jews of Cuba, Alejo Moreno’s The Fig Tree (La Higuera), Jonas Parienté and Mathias Mangin’s Next Year in Bombay, and Dan Wolman’s Yolande: An Unsung Heroine. If you buy a ticket to any program, you can get in free to the March 13 noon screening of Shiran’s Baghdad — Jerusalem — Fez, about Iraqi Jewish musician Yair Dalal. The festival concludes on March 16 with Craig Teper’s Vidal Sassoon the Movie, a documentary on the life of the famous fashion designer, from his days in a Jewish orphanage in London to the present; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and a dessert reception. (Encore screenings of some films will also take place at the JCC in Manhattan.)