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Editor's Note:
To order these videos, contact us by email at info@lavavideo.org, by phone 212-243-4804, or by fax 212-243-2007. Our website, www.latinamericanvideo.org, allows for secure purchases by credit card.
Jews in Chile: Emigrants Through Time Get Details and Purchasing Info
Cristian Leighton
Documentary 52 minutes 2002
With English subtitles
This documentary provides a window into Chile’s Jewish community of some 20,000 by presenting in detail the lives and stories of three of its members. Presented in their everyday routines of work, family, friendship, and worship, the speakers express their attitudes toward religion and work, and reflect on their own stereotypes and the ones they are subjected to. The juxtaposition of the very different experiences of these speakers illustrates the complexity and richness of Jewish identity in Latin America. Kohava Ezra, an Israeli woman who came to Chile with her Chilean husband, speaks frankly of her feelings about Chile. Her new home is the place where she was able to become a successful entrepreneur, and where for the first time she could have friendships with people of Arab descent. Nonetheless, she criticizes the Chilean attitudes toward work and gender roles, and emphasizes her commitment to her homeland.Lía Weinberg, however, feels far more comfortable in Chile than when she visited Israel. A young Chilean-born woman, she has actively sought out her Jewish roots. She recounts how this search led her to her grandfather and his experience at the concentration camp at Treblinka. Together, they describe their visit to the camp. Her awareness of her grandfather’s story has made her sensitive to the constant threat of subtle prejudice in her daily life, even as she lives much like any other Chilean. Moishe Guzmán, also Chilean-born, narrates the history of Chile’s traditional Jewish community, into which he was born. His ties to Israel, where he lived for 10 years, are deep. He, his son, and his twin brother, who lost his life in the Yom Kippur war, all served in the Israeli army. Moishe eloquently debunks stereotypes about Jews and explains to the audience the fundamental traditions of Judaism and their meaning to him and his family. “To be a Jew,” Moishe says, “is a way of life: being, living, eating, and thinking as the Torah teaches.” And yet he never stops being a Chilean. In the interlacing of his story and the others, we see how Judaism remains vibrant in the Latin American setting.
Purchase Price: $ 200.00
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Jewish Diaspora in Argentina
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Waiting for the Messiah Get Details and Purchasing Info
Daniel Burman
Feature 93 minutes 2000
With English subtitles
Someone hits the wrong key in Hong Kong and a bank in Buenos Aires goes under. In an increasingly globalized world, a financial breakdown in the Far East instantly reverberates in the Third World, and modern-day Argentina is no exception. Some lose their savings, others their jobs. The film centers on the stories of Ariel, a young Jew proud of his origins but suffering an identity crisis; and of Santamaria, a bank employee whose dignity is at stake after losing his job, his house, and his wife. Ariel wants to discover the world, and Santamaria wants to get his back. 'Waiting for the Messiah' is an urban tale about the relationships between people who live in the small universes hidden within Buenos Aires.
Purchase Price: $ 150.00
Seven Days in Once Get Details and Purchasing Info
Daniel Burman
Documentary 42 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
Rich in local flavor and colorful characters, this documentary portrays daily life in the “Once” neighborhood of Buenos Aires where Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Middle East have settled since the early twentieth century. Today, they constitute one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in Latin America. By casual conversations with some of the neighborhood’s native sons and daughters, young and old, the film provides a folk history of the neighborhood, its residents, its institutions, and the effects of the 1994 terrorist attack on the Jewish community center in its heart.At the center of Once for its residents are its institutions, and the vibrant community life that has always surrounded them. The film describes Jewish restaurants and bakeries, schools, barbershops, butchers, and shops, Yiddish theater, two Jewish newspapers, bars, and cafés where each political party had its own table and where, as one narrator explained, people “sat down to fix the world.” Although changing demographics, Argentina’s economic crisis, and physical transformation have all altered Once and its community, its defining moment, for better or for worse, may have been the deadly bombing of the Jewish mutual aid society. Without stooping to sensationalism, the reflections of the protagonists on the repercussions that followed the attack speak to some of the central issues of the community. Have Argentina’s Jews been abandoned by the state? Are Jewish institutions the same as other institutions in Argentine society? At any rate, the continuation of daily Jewish life in Once proves that, in one speaker’s words, “Time proved that they couldn’t kill us. We were hurt, but our life went on.” The survival of Jewish institutions and daily life in Once speaks to the determination of its residents to preserve a space for Jewish institutions and Jewish culture within the social space of Argentina. The film and its lively subjects present the everyday aspects of these simultaneous processes of adaptation and preservation.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Legacy Get Details and Purchasing Info
Marcelo Trotta, Vivian Imar
Documentary 80 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
In August 1889, fleeing the pogroms and persecution of the Tsarist regime in Russia, the steamship Wesser docked in Argentina with the first group of Jewish immigrants. Their arrival in Argentina was like a second Exodus from bondage, and for the name of their first settlement they took the name of Moses. Legacy relates the heroic narrative of these immigrants, and those that would follow them, in building a vibrant Jewish community in the Argentine heartland. Arriving without money or acquaintances, the settlers found themselves at the mercy of exploitative loans and well-intentioned but poorly-managed philanthropy. Finally managing to obtain rough and undeveloped patches of farmland in the countryside, they had to fight plagues, droughts, locusts, frosts, and floods to clear the land and build their homes. In the words of one protagonist, they “ploughed with their nails, sowed with their breath, and irrigated with their tears”. From their Argentine neighbors, they learned to tame horses and rope cattle. From their own values of a hard work, collectivism and Jewish religiosity, they established several towns. They eventually established a vital network of civil institutions: synagogues, hospitals, community centers, lay and religious schools, libraries, newspapers, and even a farmers’ credit union and a hub of cultural centers that brought Yiddish theater productions and Jewish entertainers from the U.S. and Europe. Narrated in Spanish and Yiddish, the film recounts the family histories of those who were born in Argentina’s Jewish heartland. Some have stayed, and some have moved on, but all agree that wherever life has brought them, they carry their hometowns with them wherever they go, honoring the memory of the struggles by which their ancestors carved out a life and a community from the Argentine countryside.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Chrysanthemum Burst in Cincoesquinas, A Get Details and Purchasing Info
Daniel Burman
Feature 90 minutes 1996
With English subtitles
A period piece set amid a revolution at the turn of the century, 'A Chrysanthemum Burst' tells the story of Erasmo, a young man searching for El Zancudo, the provincial strongman responsible for the murder of the wetnurse who raised him after he was abandoned by his parents during the chaos of war. Along the way he meets Saul, an orthodox Jew lost among the colonies of the diaspora who is also searching for El Zancudo. Both men, one the epitome of reason, the other of impulse, unite through a common cause. A film with tones of magical realism, 'A Chrysanthemum Burst' is a true mosaic of Latin American imaginative iconography. Featured at the 1997 San Sebastian International Film Festival, 1998 Berlin International Film Festival, and 1998 Sundance Film Festival.
Purchase Price: $ 150.00
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