JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival

The highly-anticipated JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival is returning to Illinois Holocaust Museum to host four film screenings with audience discussions. This year, attendees can gather together in the Museum’s auditorium or watch from the comfort of home. Learn more about this year’s slate of films below!

Please contact cjff@jccchicago.org or 847.763.3507 with any questions.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening

10:15 am – 12:00 pm (1 hour 12 minutes film + live Q&A)

An official selection for SXSW and lauded in The New York Times, Three Minutes is built from a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland. The three minutes of footage, mostly in color, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, Three Minutes unravels the stories hidden in the celluloid, imaginatively editing the footage to create a film that lasts more than an hour. Polish, German, Yiddish with English subtitles.

Live Q&A with director Bianca Stigter.

The Seven Boxes

12:30 – 2:15 pm (1 hour 22 minutes film + live Q&A)

Spanish pharmacist Dory Sontheimer’s life took a sudden turn in 2002 when her mother died and she discovered seven boxes perfectly marked and neatly lined up inside a closet. Full of photographs, letters and family memories, the boxes seemed to form part of a puzzle set up deliberately so that as she opened them she would rebuild her origins.

LIVE Q&A: 2:00 pm (CST) with: D. Joshua Taylor, MA, MLS, a nationally known and recognized speaker and author on genealogy and family history. The live Q&A is included with the purchase of your ticket to view the film.

If you are streaming the film from home, a Zoom link will be provided in your email receipt to join.

If you are attending the in-person screening, you will be able to join the virtual discussion. A link to the Q&A will be provided with your email receipt.

Letters From Brno (Chicago Premiere)

2:25 – 5:00 pm (1 hour 44 minutes film + live Q&A)

Documentary Letters From Brno showcases a powerful personal story of parental love and unspeakable tragedy. The story begins when Karen Kruger first learned that her mother, Erika Stefanie Neumann, was Jewish. Erika refused to speak about her past, so Karen began searching for pieces of the puzzle surrounding what had happened to her mother and her family. The film uses interviews, along with archival footage, photographs, documents, and letters from Karen’s grandparents Herta and Armin Turkl, who serve as eyewitnesses to putting their children on a kindertransport to England and their attempts at escaping Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

LIVE Q&A: 4:30 pm (CST) with: Karen Kruger and Jeffrey Gary, the subject and filmmaker of Letters From Brno. The live Q&A is included with the purchase of your ticket to view the film.

If you are streaming the film from home, a Zoom link will be provided in your email receipt to join.

If you are attending the in-person screening, you will be able to join the virtual discussion. A link to the Q&A will be provided with your email receipt.

Plan A (Chicago Premiere)

5:30 – 7:45 pm (1 hour 49 minutes film + live Q&A)

Based on the true story documented in Israeli historian Dina Porat’s Vengeance and Retribution Are Mine, the thriller/drama Plan A is set in 1945 Germany. It follows Max, a Holocaust Survivor who meets a group of Jewish vigilantes in the midst of a bold secret operation. Together, they develop a plan to take monstrous revenge against the German people for the Holocaust.

Online streaming is restricted to viewers with an IL or NW Indiana internet IP address.