Down to the Bone

Last year's Sundance Film Festival honored DOWN TO THE BONE with two highprofile, prestigious and extremely competitive awards: Best Director and A Special Jury Prize for acting. A stellar entry in the Dramatic Competition, writer/director Debra Granik, in her feature film debut, and actress Vera Farmiga became the talk of the Festival and the indie film community.

In DOWN TO THE BONE, Irene (Vera Farmiga) is a working class mother living in upstate New York. She struggles to keep her marriage together and raise two sons while keeping her cocaine addiction a secret. After a series of nea...

Cautiva

Cautiva (in Spanish, with English subtitles) is written, produced and directed by Gastón Biraben in a dazzling debut. The film tells the story of Cristina, a typical Argentine teenager. Her life is suddenly uprooted when she is plucked out of class at the summons of a judge and the couple she knows as her parents are revealed to not be so. In the early 80s, her biological parents were "disappeared" for criticizing the military junta which had taken power in a coup. Surviving relatives of her biological parents, including Cristina's grandmother, have spent years trying to track down the child. ...

Strike

Volker Schlöndorff, the Academy Award winner director of The Tin Drum, returns to North American screens with Strike (“Strajk – Die Heldin von Danzig”). Based on actual events, Strike is based on the true story of a remarkable and little known figure who was integral in beginning the Solidarity movement and setting Poland on the course to democracy. It is a touching tribute to a true overlooked hero, a woman who undergoes an important awakening – the realization of an ordinary person who simply looks around her and distinguishes right from wrong. Just as the simple ...

The First Basket

David Vyorst’s documentary The First Basket explores the impact that basketball had on modern Jewish history, as well as the profound influence that unsung Jewish pioneers had on the evolution of basketball, as it grew from a game played with ash-cans on tenement steps to the second most popular sport in the world.

Though basketball was invented by Dr. James Naismith in Massachusetts, the game spread like wildfire through turn-of-the-century New York settlement houses and proved a perfect fit for urban Jewish kids. By the 1920s, basketball had become a staple of life in American Jewish...