01/30/2023
Dear Friends of the Greater Altoona Jewish Film Festival,
We are excited to announce the return of the four Thursday Jewish Film Festival on February 16th, 23rd and March 2nd and 9th.
In our 24th year, our Annual International Jewish Film Festival will feature four excellent films.
We are leading with SHARED LEGACIES, a documentary that recounts the crucial historical lessons of Black-Jewish cooperation during the Civil Rights movement. This potent, inspiring story of unity, empathy and partnership validates the ubiquity of the human experience, and how freedom and equality for all can be achieved only when people come together.
NEIGHBOURS tells the story of a young boy faced with a new teacher who arrives with the goal of making strapping Panarabic comrades out of Kurdish children and orders the veneration of Assad and preaches hate of the Zionist enemy, the Jews. With a fine sense of humor and satire, the film depicts a childhood which manages to find light moments between dictatorship and dark drama.
"THE RITCHIE BOYS" is the untold story of a group of young men who fled N**i Germany and returned to Europe as soldiers in US uniforms. At Camp Ritchie, Maryland, they were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare. Not always courageous, but determined, bright, and inventive they fought their own kind of war. They saved lives. They were victors, not victims.
Our final film, FAREWELL MR. HAFFMANN masterfully guides the viewer through the world of Vichy France, where lives are irrevocably shaped by the twin scourges of war and the black market. Rich in moral complexity and empathy, with several twists too good to spoil, this is grand, big-screen adult entertainment at its finest.
Please join us for as many films as possible, I believe you will be educated, inspired, challenged and, of course, entertained. I will see you, at the movies.
