- The National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University
- Green Fields, codirected by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1937, screens from 35-millimeter on Sunday at 7 PM.
On Sunday at 7 PM Doc Films kicks off the season’s most esoteric retrospective, a ten-film series of Yiddish-language films made between 1937 and 1940. Wittily titled “Schmaltzywood,” the series focuses exclusively on U.S. productions, although Yiddish-language films were made in about a half-dozen countries, including Russia, Germany, and Poland. (The Dybbuk, one of the most popular Yiddish films in the years covered by the Doc series, was a Polish production.) These films generally have more in common with each other than they do with other films from the countries where they were produced, as they drew on the much of the same source material. In fact several of the movies playing in “Schmaltzywood” take place in countries other than the U.S. Green Fields, screening this Sunday, is set in an eastern European farming community, and Overture to Glory, which concludes the series on December 7, takes place in Warsaw. Like the Yiddish-language theater that directly preceded it, Yiddish cinema might be described a national art movement without a nation.
