New in the Digital Film Collection

The Visual Center acquired collections from two independent American distributors

Udy Epstein’s Seventh Art Releasing, which distributes quality independent films, donated ten films in honor of Avigdor Scharf, and in memory of Eliezer, Rashe, Natan and other members of the Scharf family who perished in the Holocaust. Prominent films in the collection include Dariusz Jablonski’s Photographer, in which Dr. Arnold Mostowicz’s testimony and rare color slides of the Lodz ghetto shed light on chillingly laconic Nazi documents from the ghetto; and Paolo Poloni’s Salonica, the story of hundreds of years of history and culture in the vibrant Jewish community of Salonika, and its tragic end.

Direct Cinema, an American distributor committed to human rights, deposited 16 documentaries, including Debbie Goodstein’s Voices From the Attic, one of the first films in the “personal journey” genre; and Nina Rosenblum’s Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in WWII, the powerful story of the 761st Tank Battalion’s African-American servicemen, who fought not only against the Axis powers, but also confronted the racism rampant in the US armed forces as well as in American society at the time.