Click the photos below to view excerpts from our collaborations with Jewish institutions.
ORANGE titles denote collaborations with a teen-mentorship component.
AS OLD AS OUR EYES
A documentary triptych about and co-directed by millenial immigrants from Eastern Europe. Klaira, Yelena and Gary grew up in San Francisco’s Russian-Jewish community, a foggy passageway between the Old World and the New. On the brink of adulthood, they interview their own families and ask themselves what will happen on the other side. Broadcast on video i, a nationally distributed program of public television affiliate KTEH San Jose.
Click the thumbnail to view a playlist of excerpts from this series.
BALANCING ACTS: A JEWISH THEATER IN SOVIET UNION
Part of a multimedia collaboration between Citizen Film and the Jewish Museum NY, this documentary explores the life and times of Yiddish theatre director Solomon Mikhoels, for the exhibition “Chagall and the Artists of Russian-Jewish Theatre,” curated by Susan Goodman. “Film sequences in the exhibit, including five minutes of GOSET’s King Lear and a brief, incisive documentary by Sam Ball, suggest that Mikhoels merits billing equal to Chagall…” -The Forward. Media from this exhibit was also presented in October 2015 at Paris’ Musée de la Musique for an exhibition about Chagall’s artistic collaborations.
BRIDGE OF BOOKS
Designed for in-gallery presentation at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, this documentary short chronicles the adventures of Aaron Lansky, an enterprising 23-year-old who set out to rescue the world’s Yiddish books. The film, broadcast on public television in 2001, is still the main introductory display in the Yiddish Book Center gallery on Hampshire College Campus, where it is viewed by many thousands of visitors annually. It aired on public television when it was first produced, as part of an hour-long program Citizen Film produced with KTEH.
FOUR SHORT FILMS ABOUT LOVE
Produced by Citizen Film in collaboration with the Jewish Film Institute, These four short films, co-directed by nine Jewish teenagers, led by Director Sam Ball, was part of the Tribeca Film Institute’s Project Reframe and won a Golden Gate Award at the 2004 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Click the thumbnail to view a playlist of excerpts from this series.
HALF-REMEMBERED STORIES
On the way to creating a new future, the New Jewish Filmmaking Project is rediscovering the past. 11 young storytellers, ages 15-25, collaborated with Citizen Film’s team of documentary professionals to create a multimedia exhibit for the Jewish Film Institute. These 11 multimedia works offer a set of signposts for what Jewish identity has been and is becoming.
HALF-REMEMBERED STORIES MULTIMEDIA EXAMPLES
Note: The following project samples are best viewed on a computer:
» Memory Paths by Zoe Pollack
» Leap of Fate by Klaira Markenzon
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT! T-SHIRTS & THE CURATION OF IDENTITY
This short film is part of a sculptural multimedia installation created collaboratively by Citizen Film, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), and Stanford University professor Ari Kelman, exploring T-shirts as canvasses for meditation on contemporary identities. 14 videos were projected onto sculptural display of t-shirts shirts, “airing out the laundry” of Jewish identity, and examining how it is manufactured and marketed.
HOLIDAZE
This tryptic of stories, co-directed by nine Jewish teens, and produced by Citizen Film for the Jewish Film Institute delivers candid, funny observations of do-it-yourself holiday ritual as the teen filmmakers consider the mysterious relevance of ritual in secular, multicultural lives.
Click the thumbnail to view a playlist of excerpts from this series.
IN THE MAZE OF OUR OWN LIVES
This live multimedia event – made possible by a Hewlett and Gerbode Film Collaboration grant awarded to the Jewish Theater SF, playwright Corey Fischer and documentarian Sam Ball – portrays the rise and fall of the Group Theatre in 1930s New York, with “terrific archival projections by Citizen Film.” -San Francisco Chronicle
JOANN SFAR DRAWS FROM MEMORY
One of two Citizen Film/Les Films du Poisson co-productions – for American public television and for Franco-German public television (ARTE) – this documentary profiles best-selling graphic novelist Joann Sfar, who grapples with his mixed European and North African Jewish heritage and transmutes his family heritage into deeply expressive picture stories. Joann Sfar Draws From Memory was telecast on PBS affiliates across the US in 2012.
LALO’S JERUSALEM
This short film was produced by Citizen Film for the Jewish Film Institute: it is one of a series of first-person stories, co-directed by teens, about their relationship with their grandparents.
NEW MEDIA IN JEWISH STUDIES
With partners ranging from Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, we’re making imaginative use of ubiquitous digital storytelling tools to make sense of archival materials and creatively explore Jewish themes. From multimedia essays about 20th Century New York photographers and their legacies, to digital stories about Jewish life in the Pacific Northwest, Citizen Film is working closely with Jewish Studies luminaries to invent new modes of storytelling and scholarship, engaging students and general audiences alike.
PLEASURES OF URBAN DECAY
This film explores the Yiddish-inflected world of MacArthur Genius award winner Ben Katchor. It premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and was subsequently selected by several of the world’s most prestigious documentary film festivals (Cinema du Réel, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, etc.) before screening widely at museums in the US and Europe as part of a graphic novel exhibition curated by the Musée de l’Art et de l’Histoire du Judaîsme in Paris.
POUMY
A selection of MoMA-New York’s Documentary Fortnight in 2005, this documentary tells the story of a young mother in the French Resistance. It was distributed to classrooms by Alexander Street Press and –thanks to support from the Koret Foundation – was viewed by more than 20,000 high school and middle school students.
REMEMBERING YOSL MLOTEK
This short memorial film was produced for a National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene multimedia event at Frederick Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in 2012.
THE RIFLEMAN’S VIOLIN
“The Rifleman’s Violin” revisits an extraordinary intersection of history and music that took place at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. The short documentary is one of several assets in an ongoing collaboration between Citizen Film and the Hoover Institution Archive. The story of private first class Stuart Canin, who played for Stalin, Churchill and Truman, has already reached nearly 1 million people thanks to a combination of online, radio and live, in–person programming at venues ranging from New York’s Lincoln Center to San Francisco’s New Mission Theatre.
WENDY MACNAUGHTON DRAWS CASTRO COMMONS
This is one of several dialogue-free visual poems produced by Citizen Film for a 2012 “digital sukkah” installation in the JCC San Francisco atrium. The exhibition, “We are not permanent but we are not temporary” -a collaboration between filmmakers, visual artists and educators- was designed to poetically explore Sukkot’s core themes.