3-day festival will feature
movies about Jewish life

A 2004 documentary film about a peace camp bringing Israeli and Arab teenagers to common ground and mutual respect will be shown next weekend at the Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival.

The three-day festival will open Friday at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture auditorium. It is sponsored by Temple Emanu-El and named for Cashmere, a Hawaii civil rights attorney who died in 2002.

Rabbi Avi Magid will conduct a Shabbat service at 7 p.m. Friday. Israeli food will be served at a reception following the opening show.

Marlene Booth, an independent filmmaker who has produced several documentaries about Jewish life and issues shown on the Public Broadcasting System and in classrooms, will be a guest speaker. Booth, now a Honolulu resident, will describe her filmmaking experiences after her 1989 documentary "The Forward" is shown Jan. 30.

Tickets at $6, or $25 for a five-film pass, are available at Temple Emanu-El or at the door. Parking at the Architecture building, accessible from University Avenue two blocks mauka of Dole Street, will be $3.

The schedule is:

Friday

>> 7:30 p.m., "Nina's Tragedies," a 2004 Israeli film about a shy boy in a histrionic family and his hopeless crush on his aunt.

Next Saturday

>> Noon, "Wondrous Oblivion," a 2004 British story about a Jewish boy befriending Jamaican immigrants in 1960s England.

>> 2:30 p.m., "Seeds," a 2004 American documentary about an international camp in Maine for teenagers from Israel, Palestinian territory, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.

>> 5 p.m., "Almost Peaceful," made in France in 2003, about Parisian Jews who try to restart their lives immediately after World War II.

>> 7:30 p.m., "Rosenstrasse," a 2003 German dramatization of a little-known episode in which non-Jewish spouses and families of Jewish Germans staged a protest when Nazis began to round up Jews for forced labor camps.

Jan. 30

>> Noon, "Almost Peaceful."

>> 2:30 p.m., "Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi," a 2003 Israeli family comedy about a boy discovering his potential talent as a chef.

>> 5 p.m., "The Forward: From Immigrants to Americans," a documentary about a flourishing Yiddish newspaper that helped Yiddish-speaking immigrants assimilate into the American mainstream.

>> 7:30 p.m., "Wondrous Oblivion."