Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival opens December 1
This year's guest of honor as festival is director Paul Mazursky, who will also receive lifetime achievements award from organizers
The festival's guest of honor this year is Jewish American director Paul Mazursky, who will present his first documentary, Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy, which follows the journey of Jewish hassidim to the Ukrainian town of Uman.
Mazursky, 75, will also receive an award for lifetime achievements from the festival's organizers.
As part of the its special events, the festival will mark 40 years since the launch of the struggle to free Soviet Jewry, with a world premiere of the movie Refusenik, the first retrospective documentary about the three-decade international movement to free Soviet Jews.
The movie's director Laura Bialis and former minister Natan Sharansky will attend the screening.
A panel on cinema as a "site of memory" will be held during the festival, in cooperation with the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. The panel will include the screening of rare Nazi propaganda movies, as well as a documentary on the commemoration of the Holocaust in Europe and the tourism industry that developed around it.
The festival will also feature Polish films on Jewish history in the country created after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
For the third consecutive year, the festival will dedicate a special event to the Ethiopian community, with the screening of a short movie on the life of an Ethiopian immigrant in Israel.
