News Releases @ TCC

13th Annual Virginia Festival of Jewish Film to light up the Silver Screen
Jan. 21-28 at TCC’s Roper Performing Arts Center

An image from Gloomy Sunday

HAMPTON ROADS, Va. – Jan. 5, 2006) – Cultural events are one hallmark of a thriving society, showcasing human joy, tragedy and the diverse fabric of everyday life. And in Hampton Roads, the area’s cultural renaissance continues with the 13th Annual Virginia Festival of Jewish Film - this year in partnership with the second largest community college in the state - to feature such acclaimed films as Paperclips.

The Marilyn and Marvin Simon Jewish Community Center is pleased to partner with Tidewater Community College in bringing this year’s Virginia Festival of Jewish Film to the Hampton Roads community. With each passing year, the Festival has grown and matured, leaving its unique footprint on the Hampton Roads’ cultural community and providing a cinematic feast for moviegoers.

Now in its 13th year, the eight-day festival will take place for the very first time at the TCC Roper Performing Arts Center, at 340 Granby Street in downtown Norfolk, Jan. 21-28. Built in 1926, the Roper Performing Arts Center was renovated and restored by TCC, reopening its doors in 2000. It will now serve as the silver screen for the Jewish Film Festival, sponsored by The Old Point National Bank.

This year’s Festival will feature a wide variety of films, appealing to a cross-section of tastes and viewpoints. The line-up features a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning films, including:

• “Festival opener,” Live and Become , tells the story of a young Ethiopian boy's struggle to maintain a false identity in order to save his life and keep his promises;
• Paper Clips (which recently aired on HBO) documents the lessons learned by the children of Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee, as they sought to understand the magnitude of the horrors of the Holocaust;
• Award-winning Ushpizin reveals a world of wonder in the Jerusalem courtyards of pious, orthodox Jews;
• All My Loved Ones shows the life of a small-town doctor in pre-War Czechoslovakia who grapples with the difficult decision of sending his only son away to safety via the Kindertransport;
• Go For Zucker uses a roguish mix of slapstick humor, social satire and a heavy dose of political incorrectness to tell the story of two brothers separated by more than the vestiges of the Berlin Wall;
• Fateless (based on 2002 Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz' novel) tells the story of a young Hungarian child's experiences in German concentration camps and his attempt to deal with those experiences after the war;
• Gloomy Sunday relates the story of a tragic love-triangle set against the backdrop of WWII Budapest;