Annette Insdorf
By Annette Insdorf
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Culture Travels in Poland and Israel, Between Old Wars and New
As I travel through Poland and Israel, watching, discussing and writing about films, I find myself tracing the continuities, as well as the tensions, of Jewish identity. The only child of Polish Holocaust survivors, I am returning to Poland for the first time in 25 years, exploring what Judaism means there now. My mother, who…
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Culture More Than a ‘Footnote’ From Cannes
The Cannes International Film Festival is known for selections that push the envelope, whether in terms of story, cinematic form or ideological vision. For example, Amos Gitai has been a Cannes favorite in the past with films like “Kippur” and “Free Zone,” often exploring political tensions with stylistic verve. This year, the prestigious competition selected…
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News Sidney Lumet, 86, Prolific Director of Gritty, Realist Films That Captured the City
APPRECIATION Just after Sidney Lumet passed away, I received numerous e-mails from film students who fondly recalled his visits with them at Columbia University. A few remembered the emotional wallop of seeing “The Pawnbroker” for the first time, in my American film history course. Others praised Lumet’s humility and candor after a preview of “Night…
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News Arts & Letters; Documenting Identity As One Film Explores the Insularity of the Orthodox, Another Embraces Polish Expansiveness
In 1990, Oren Rudavsky and Yale Strom co-directed “At the Crossroads: Jews in Eastern Europe Today,” a wonderfully poignant and hopeful documentary about a rather complicated subject. It followed Strom, a klezmer musician, speaking Yiddish to elderly Jews in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and English to young Jews trying to shape a new identity there….
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News From Polanski and Costa-Gavras, A Reckoning With the Holocaust
When I embarked upon writing the first edition of “Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust” in 1979, there were only a few dozen films on the subject to warrant critical attention. Ten years later, about 50 more had to be added to the second edition. By 2001, the number of Holocaust-related films had grown to…
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