The Washington Jewish Film Festival, now in its 30th year, is one of the largest and most respected Jewish film festivals in North America, celebrating the diversity of Jewish history, culture and experience through the moving image. The 2021 JxJ Festival is presented both outdoors, in person (drive-in screenings, concerts, and socially distanced events) and virtually on Eventive.
The ACF Washington was proud to once again partner with the Washington Jewish Film Festival this year and present the film LOVE IT WAS NOT, an Israeli-Austrian co-production, directed and written by Maya Sarfaty. The film was streamed through Eventive, from May 23, through May 31, 2021. In addition to the film, a pre-recorded conversation between the filmmaker, Maya Sarfaty and the Director of the ACFDC, Eva Schoefer, will be available.
When: Sunday, May 23, 2021 through Sunday, May 30, 2021
Where: online | Eventbrite
Ticket: available at jxjdc.org
Friends of the ACF can use this coupon code for a $2 discount: ACFxJ
ABOUT THE FILM
LOVE, IT WAS NOT
Directed by Maya Sarfaty
Austria - Israel, 2020
80 min, original languages with English subtitles
“Love it was not“ is a tragic love story between a prisoner and her captor. Flamboyant and full of life, Helena Citron is taken to Auschwitz as a young woman, and soon finds unlikely solace under the tutelage of Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer who falls in love with her and her magnetic singing voice. Risking a certain execution if caught, their forbidden relationship went on until her miraculous liberation.
But when a letter arrives from Wunsch’s wife, thirty years later, begging Helena to testify on Wunsch’s behalf, she’s faced with an impossible decision: will she help the man who brutalized so many lives, but saved hers along with some of the people closest to her?
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
MAYA SARFATY
Photo © Love it was not
Maya Sarfaty, born 1982 in Israel, is a film department graduate from Tel Aviv University and graduate of the leading acting school “Nissan Nativ Acting Studio Tel Aviv”. The native born Netanya has received several awards and was able to present her work in prominent venues worldwide. Among them La Biennale di Venezia, Busan International Film - Korea, Jerusalem Film Festival and many more. Her last short film “The Most Beautiful Woman'' has won a Student Academy Award for Best Foreign Documentary in Los Angeles.
ABOUT THE AUSTRIAN PRODUCER
KURT LANGBEIN
Photo © Langbein & Partner Media
Kurt Langbein, born in 1953, studied sociology in Vienna. From 1979 to 1989 he was a documentary filmmaker and magazine journalist for the Austrian broadcasting company ORF, from 1989 to 1992 head of the domestic department at the Austrian news magazine "Profil", since 1992 he is the managing director of "Langbein & Partner Media". He is the Producer and Director of numerous documentaries and TV reports such as “Eating differently – that Experiment "(2020)," Time for Utopias "(2018)," Land Grab "(2015)," Miracle Healing " (2012).
He is also a writer and author of several non-fiction books and received numerous prestigious awards such as the “Axel Corti Award for Outstanding Achievements in Media and TV” or the “Dr. Karl Renner Journalism Award for his Life Achievement”.