The best episode of Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show “No Reservations” is probably “Beirut.” Bourdain and his crew were in Lebanon in 2006. They filmed two scenes and then the second Israel-Lebanon war started. Bourdain’s local fixers knew what was coming and the host had to reckon with what he was doing — the…
When I first heard about a new documentary, “Tacheles,” which follows a group of Germans designing a video game about the Holocaust, in which “Jews can defend themselves and Nazis can act humanely,” I thought it sounded like a recipe for disaster. At best, it seemed like a poorly thought-through attempt at catharsis; at worst,…
When I think of bridge, I think of my grandmother, who played regularly with her bridge club until she died. I associate the game with a sort of 1950s housewife aesthetic, and the elderly. The whole thing feels quaint. But according to “Dirty Tricks,” a documentary that premiered Thursday at the Hot Docs festival, bridge…
Yasser Arafat once insisted on cutting up Dennis Ross’s chicken during a dinner; Ross was then head of the American effort to arbitrate peace between Israel and Palestine. At the time, it seemed like a sign of hospitality and hope — Ross joked that Arafat had “a Jewish mother syndrome.” These days, after the Human…
Benjamin Rosloff, an aspiring Jewish filmmaker living with autism, was filming a bar mitzvah in Port Washington, NY. But the young boy getting bar mitzvahed didn’t say the prayers or read the Torah with his own voice. He also had autism, and relied on an augmentative speech device to communicate. “I couldn’t tell whether the…
In March of 1968, in the throes of the American Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the conservative movement’s annual Rabbinical Assembly convention in the Catskills to honor one of his closest friends and collaborators, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Upon arrival, King and Heschel were greeted by hundreds of rabbis lining the…
Can any one film begin to answer the question of what, exactly, Hitler means? That’s the goal of the new documentary “The Meaning of Hitler,” named for and based on the 1978 Sebastian Haffner book of the same name. From the outset, its ambition proves problematic: Directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker chronicle various talking…
Evgeny Afineevsky celebrated his 48th birthday with a very special person: Pope Francis, the most significant figure in the Catholic world. Afineevsky had just finished filming “Francesco,” a documentary on the pontiff’s teachings. Ahead of its premiere at the Rome Film Festival, Afineevsky brought some friends to a private meeting with the pope, who greeted…
100% of profits support our journalism
