Awarded the first Moscow Jewish Film Festival

MOSCOW. The ceremonial award of the finalists and the closing ceremony of the first Moscow Jewish Film Festival (MEKF), uniting more than 20 Russian and foreign films, took place on June 17 at the Documentary Film Center.

The panel of judges, composed of the head of Roskino, Ekaterina Mtsituridze, the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Alexander Boroda, film directors, producers and screenwriters Konstantin Fam, Alexander Kott and Ruslan Sorokin, gave out screening prizes in three main categories.

Recall that the main program of MEKF included three categories, according to which the competition was held - this is “Briefly”, “Jews Today” and “Certificate”. The “Briefly” nomination collected short films containing in their plot a statement or a question about the Jewish world in any of its manifestations. The category “Jews Today” includes paintings reflecting the complexity and diversity of Jewish life in the modern world. The nomination “Certificate” was dedicated to documentary works that tell about real events.

The program director of the festival, Rusina Lekukh, said that genre-thematic nominations were designed so that the jury did not make a difficult choice within the framework of the best drama or the best direction: the paintings collected in the programs are of completely different style and scale. “Nevertheless, they still had to make a rather difficult choice between deeply touching, serious, sometimes jewelry-made work,” she said.

So, in the nomination “Briefly”, the winner was the short documentary work of the director of Nora Finscheldt “The End of the Boulevard”. The award “Certificate” for the best documentary was received by the film directed by Andre Singer, “Night Will Come”, created thanks to the materials of Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock. The German feature film "Somewhere Out There", directed by Esther Amrami, became the winner in the nomination "Jews Today."

The jury also awarded two special prizes. The jury received a special award from the film Regina, directed by Diana Groo, telling about the formation of the first female rabbi. The jury awarded the director Yakov Kaller the prize “For outstanding contribution to the development of Jewish cinema in Russia”. The painting he produced was “Jacob Crazer. Forgotten General ”(directed by Sergey Litovets) was also shown at the festival.

In just three festival days, more than 2 thousand people attended the film screenings and lectures of the ICEF at the Center for Documentary Films, the Jewish Museum, the GUM Cinema Hall and the Center for Tolerance. The cinema organizers said that due to the great interest of the public in Jewish cinema in Russia, they had already begun preparations for the next film festival and expressed hope that its annual holding would become a good tradition.

Svetlana Korableva © Gallerix.ru