ABQ Jewish Film Festival: Jubanos

A Film from Cuba: The Albuquerque Film & Music Experience and the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque are proud to present:

Jubanos: Jews of Cuba
with Havana Curveball

Thursday June 4 ~ 7:10 pm

National Hispanic Cultural Center

Cuba is known for its revolutionary leaders, communism, cigars, and 50s cars. However, religion does not define this small island. When the Cuban Revolution hit in 1961, religion was banned, leaving the Cuban Jewish Community struggling to sustain itself for nearly three decades.

Jubanos: Jews of Cuba tells the humbling story of the 1500 Jews who remained in the country despite the difficulties. With exclusive interviews from members of the scattered Jewish community, this documentary explores how the new generation re-learned what so many had previously forgotten.

The journey to rediscovering and reviving Jewish life raises questions about faith, sustenance, strength, and the future, which the Cuban Jews continue to face up until today. (2010, 42 minutes; Spanish with English subtitles)

Purchase tickets here at Hold My Ticket. View the trailer here.

ABQ Jewish Film Festival: Havana Curveball

A Film from Cuba: The Albuquerque Film & Music Experience and the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque are proud to present:

Havana Curveball
with Jubanos: Jews of Cuba

Thursday June 4 ~ 6:00 pm

National Hispanic Cultural Center

Mica is a classic young teen. Enthusiastic. Idealistic. Dreaming baseball. At 13, he is studying for his Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ritual. He takes to heart his Rabbi’s requirement to help “heal the world.” Imagining himself a savior of sorts, he launches a grand plan to send baseball equipment to less fortunate kids in Cuba, the country that offered refuge to his beloved Austrian grandfather during WWII. Nearly 70 years later, Mica feels a need to repay the debt. Enthusiastically collecting bats, mitts and balls, he never considers that his good intentions might not be enough.

Havana Curveball observes Mica shift from high-pitched boy to broad-shouldered young man, as he squares off against the complexity of the adult world. After two years, he finally boards a plane to Havana with his family, 200 pounds of baseball gear, and all the rhetoric, expectations, and worries of family, friends, and history in tow. Imagining he is finally in the home stretch, his experience there is transformative. (2014, 60 minutes)

Purchase tickets here at Hold My Ticket. View the trailer here.

ABQ Jewish Film Festival: 24 Days

A Film from France: The Albuquerque Film & Music Experience and the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque are proud to present:

24 Days
The True Story of the Ilan Halimi Affair

Wednesday June 3 ~ 7:00 pm

National Hispanic Cultural Center

Winner of four U.S. Film Festival Audience Awards and the Lia Award - Jerusalem Film Festival, 24 Days is a gripping and carefully-plotted thriller that tells the true story of the 2006 kidnapping-for-ransom and torture of 23 year old Jewish Ilan Halimi in a Paris suburb by The Gang of Barbarians.

Backed by a top-notch cast, director Alexandre Arcady’s white-knuckle dramatization follows the massive police manhunt and the family’s nightmarish ordeal as they race the clock to find Ilan and his abductors.

24 Days compellingly pinpoints how France continues to deal with racial tensions and anti-Semitism almost a decade later. (2014, 110 minutes French with English subtitles).

Purchase tickets here at Hold My Ticket. View the trailer here.

ABQ Jewish Film Festival: Dancing in Jaffa

A Film from Israel: The Albuquerque Film & Music Experience and the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque are proud to present:

Dancing in Jaffa

Monday June 1 ~ 7:00 pm

National Hispanic Cultural Center

Ballroom dancing bridges gaps between Jewish and Palestinian children in Israel in Dancing in Jaffa, a surprising, well-crafted, award-winning  documentary about how the celebrated dancer Pierre Dulaine, founder of Dancing Classrooms, a tremendously successful inter-ethnic program in New York, returned to help his hometown of Jaffa, which he fled as a 4-year-old in 1948.

Starting with a seemingly impossible situation, marked by deep cultural restrictions and war-forged trauma, Hilla Medalia’s film traces a slow but inexorable process of change as spitting enemies learn to tango, rumba and meringue together.

Dancing in Jaffa offers an up-close-and-personal perspective of how the future might unfold if the art of movement and dance could triumph over the politics of history and geography (2013, 90 min)

Purchase tickets here at Hold My Ticket. View the trailer here.