The Avner Shalev Yad Vashem Chairman’s Award, endowed for the fifth year with the generosity of Michaela and Leon Constantiner, NY, was granted this year to Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir, for her filmCabaret-Berlin, la scène sauvage (France- Germany, 2010). The jury described their choice: “By artistically combining audio and visual archival materials, the filmmaker focussed on the Berlin cabaret "scene" during the 1920's, where creative individuals, including many Jews, brought into being an incisively satirical world of words and music concerning events in Germany after the First World War. Interesting, contemporary and unconventional cinema make “Cabaret Berlin - The Wild Scene” worthy of the Avner Shalev Yad Vashem Chairman's Award".
An Honorable Mention was granted this year to the renwoned director Claude Lanzmann for his film “The Karski Report”. The jury concluded: “The focus on one man and on the way he describes his fateful meetings at a critical point in time, by means of a cinematic method that places at the core of the film a unique testimony, that reveals the inability of the free world to comprehend what happened in Europe, "The Karski Report" merits an Honorable Mention within the framework of the Jewish Experience and the Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Cinema.”
The Members of the Jury for the 27th Jerusalem Film Festival “Jewish Experience Competition” were: Dr. Reuven Garber, author and lecturer in Jewish philosophy at David Yellin and Levinsky Colleges; Prof. Richard (Yerachmiel) Cohen , Chair in French Jewry Studies at Hebrew University, art historian and exhibition curator ; and Ms. Adva Magal, film scholar, curator and lecturer.
The nominees for this year's “Avner Shalev Yad Vashem Chairman's Award” were: Cabaret Berlin – The Wild Scene (Germany – France, Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir), A Jewish Girl in Shangahi (China, Wang Tianyun), The Karski Report (France, Claude Lanzmann), The Round Up (France-Germany-Hungary, Rose Bosch).
Together with the Jerusalem Cinematheque and as part of the "Jewish Experience" category at the festival, we hosted a special screening of the 1949 film Nuremberg –Its Lesson for Today. This was the official U.S. government’s film on the Nuremburg trials, directed by Marine Corps Sgt. Stuart Schulberg, who served with the OSS War Crimes film team, headed by Hollywood director John Ford. The film It was never screened in the U.S., and was distributed on a limited basis in Germany. Sixty years later, Schulberg's daughter Sandra, together with Josh Waletsky and executive producer Leon Constantiner, embarked on a meticulous restoration of the film, which was screened for the first time in Israel at the Festival, followed by a special discussion on the Nuremberg trials and the political atmosphere in the US after the war , by Prof. Shlomo Aronson, Dr. Boaz Cohen and Ms. Sandra Schulberg.