The 17th Annual New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival

The Festival presents two Spanish Films: ‘Stolen Documents? Franco and the Holocaust’ and ‘The Stigma?’

A banquet for filmgoers, this year’s festival will feature productions from France, Israel, Greece, Austria, and Spain. Rarely seen in the United States, the 16 films will share unforgettable stories of Bukhari, Iraqi, Iranian, Moroccan, Algerian, and Spanish Jews, along with a timely spotlight on the bifurcated lives of Jews displaced from their ruptured Arab homelands.

Stolen Documents? Franco and the Holocaust

• With the outbreak of WWII, Jews from all over Europe looked to Spain as a possible refuge or as the only possible transit route to safety in the Americas. How did the Franco regime treat Eastern European Jews and the Sephardim trying to escape Europe by crossing the Pyrenees? What was the role of Spanish consuls in Paris, Berlin, or Budapest, as deportations to concentration camps accelerated? Why have thousands of documents having to do with Franco’s policy regarding the Jews during WWII disappeared? Was Franco, the Spanish dictator who admired Hitler and Mussolini, a defender of the Jewish people during the Holocaust or was a myth created with a clear purpose in mind? The film attempts to answer these questions with testimonies of Jewish families, people who helped save them, and historians. Included are fragments of a unique film shot in Sephardic communities of Greece at the beginning of the 20th century.
• On March 19 at 6:30 pm. U.S. Premiere. Directed by Yolanda Villaluenga. Spain, 2012, 53 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. 
• Post-screening discussion with the filmmaker.

The Stigma?

• The Stigma? grew out of its director’s practically expiatory need to take a second look at his own prejudices. Focused on Spain, and more specifically, on Catalonia, the film unravels the history and mutations of Judeophobia, from the Christian accusations of “deicide” to the appearance of the modern State of Israel. It exposes the widespread ignorance that exists in many quarters regarding things Jewish and discusses the anti-Israel slant of a part of the Spanish press.
• On March 19 at 8 pm. U.S. Premiere. Directed by Martí Sans. Spain, 2012, 73 minutes. In Catalan, Spanish and Hebrew with English subtitles.
• Post-screening discussion with the filmmaker. View trailer.

A wine reception follows the films.