40 Nickels

The Paper Brigade

2018 · ★ 6

Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.

SHTTL

2023 · ★ 6.6

In one continuous shot, SHTTL shows the lives, loves, and inner conflicts within a Yiddish speaking shtetl on the border between Ukraine and Poland - one day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Man Without a World

1991 · ★ 3.7

The Man Without a World is credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director, Yevgeny Antinov. But the film is anything but old. In fact, Antinov himself is the creation of contemporary filmmaker Eleanor Antin. Her film is a moving, comic melodrama set in a typical shtetl (village) in Poland. The Jews’ struggle against poverty and racial hatred is complicated by their own division into hostile political factions of the religious orthodoxy, assimilationists, socialists, Zionists, anarchists and survivors. While the Jews of the shtetl pursue their loves, politics, religion, business and dreams for the future, the Angel of Death is ever near...

An American Pickle

2020 · ★ 5.8

An immigrant worker at a pickle factory is accidentally preserved for 100 years and wakes up in modern day Brooklyn. He learns his only surviving relative is his great grandson, a computer coder who he can’t connect with.

The Night Trotsky Came to Dinner

2006

Every family has its own fictions: why are they invented, what social values do they reflect and how do later generations interpret them? How is political identity formed - passed down, integrated or rejected - within one family? The tale traverses the Pale, the New World and back to the Old World.

The Great Yiddish Love

2002

Set in Berlin and New York's Lower East Side, The Great Yiddish Love stars the self-exiled Marlene Dietrich and her Nazi-endorsed replacement, Zarah Leander. It is a melodrama of love, emigration, and betrayal reassembled from Hollywood, German Ufa and Yiddish films from the 1930s and 40s.

Motel the Operator

1940 · ★ 10

Motel, a poor laborer, loving husband and new father, leads cloakmakers in a strike for better working conditions. When he is severely injured by strikebreakers, his wife, Esther, and infant son are left destitute. Desperate to save her starving child, Esther gives him up for adoption to a wealthy couple, and then commits suicide. The richly-rendered beautiful Yiddish songs by Sholem Secunda featuring Cantor Leibele Waldman and Joel Feig's famous choir are a good example of the bittersweet melodrama in the finest tradition of the Yiddish theater.

Gold for Fools

Raised in rural isolation by an extremist Hasidic sect, Chaim is torn between his devotion to his grandmother, an aging Holocaust survivor, and his attraction to a sexy blond in a Liberty car insurance ad.

East Side

2020

East Side is a brand new yiddish DVD written and directed by Ari Abramowitz. Thrilling, exciting, dramatic and emotional, perfect for the entire family.

The Song of Names

2019 · ★ 6.7

A man searches for his childhood best friend, a Polish violin prodigy orphaned in the Holocaust, who vanished decades before on the night of his first public performance.

4th Dementia

2024 · ★ 7

In this multiverse comedy about Alzheimer's, Nellie travels through alternate dimensions in search of her husband.

Nifradnu Kach

1991 · ★ 9

While saying goodbye to his son and grandchildren who are leaving Israel, Yackov remembers when, as a child, he also said goodbye to his family in Poland in 1937, not realizing that he would never see them again.