The Sephardic Jewish Film Festival also known as the Sephardic Film Festival, is an annual New York City Film festival sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation.
The festival showcases films about Jewish communities of the Mediterranean and Asia, including Morocco, Yemen, Ethiopia, Kurdistan, Iran/Persia and India, as well as the Sephardi descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain.
The films are part of a movement towards low-budget productions and first-person documentaries taking advantage of the freedom given by improvements in video cameras and associated digital hardware to pursue a more personal on-screen vision of what it means to be Jewish.
Famous quotes containing the words jewish, film and/or festival:
“Don: Why are they closed? They’re all closed, every one of them.
Pawnbroker: Sure they are. It’s Yom Kippur.
Don: It’s what?
Pawnbroker: It’s Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday.
Don: It is? So what about Kelly’s and Gallagher’s?
Pawnbroker: They’re closed, too. We’ve got an agreement. They keep closed on Yom Kippur and we don’t open on St. Patrick’s.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)
“Sabbath. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)