Films of art, drama, romance, comedy, animation, Jewish history, and even baseball and sumo wrestling, are among those selected for this year’s 9th Annual Nashville Jewish Film Festival (NJFF), scheduled for November 7 – 12, 2009, at the Belcourt Theater. Vanderbilt's Program in Jewish Studies is a sponsor of the event.

Films include:

Sunday, Nov. 1, at 3 p.m, Frist Auditorium
FREE pre-festival screening of Herb & Dorothy in the Frist Auditorium as part of the Frist’s Films at the Frist series on . Herb & Dorothy is a story about Herb and Dorothy Vogel, two of the most unassuming and the most remarkable collectors on the contemporary art scene who amassed over 4,000 pieces of minimalist and conceptual art.              

Saturday, Nov. 7, at 7:15 p.m., Belcourt
Seven Minutes in Heaven is a quietly powerful Israeli neo-noir thriller.  The story is full of drama and romance about a woman who spends the last year recovering from this terrorist bus bombing, and trying to piece the events surrounding the bombing in order to move forward with her life.

Mary and Max follows at 9 p.m. as the film festival’s first late-night screening. It is an animation by Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot and brought to life by the bravura voice work of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The story is a bittersweet tale of a friendship between two oddballs at their wits’ end with the world, but at peace with each other. This film was also the opening night selection for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Sunday, Nov. 8, noon, Belcourt
Blessed is the Match: The Life & Death of Hannah Senesh, a gripping story of a 22-year-old poet, resistance fighter and modern-day Joan of Arc who left the safety of Palestine to bravely join a rescue mission with a small band of Jewish volunteers to parachute into her native Hungary during World War II to save her mother and others.

Sixty-Six at at 4:45 p.m. is a hilarious, family-friendly, coming-of-age tale about a boy planning his long awaited bar mitzvah after living in the shadows of his charismatic older brother and discovering that his big event falls on the very same day as the World Cup Final.

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 7 p.m, Belcourt
As Seen Through These Eyes, a never-before-seen window into the surviving art and artists of the Holocaust,  narrated by renowned poet Maya Angelou and directed by Hilary Helstein, brings together artwork, archival footage and firsthand interviews.               

Thursday, Nov. 12, 4:30 p.m., Belcourt
At Home in Utopia, an epic documentary about the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a housing complex, commonly known as “the Coops,” created and populated 80 years ago by American Communists and their sympathizers.            

Following At Home in Utopia is A Matter of Size at 7 p.m., the Nashville Jewish Film Festival’s closing night film. A Matter of Size is a poignant comic drama, à la “The Full Monty,” about self-acceptance and determination of four overweight Israelis who start a Sumo wrestling club.

The Nashville Jewish Film Festival, founded in 2000 by The Temple – Congregation Ohabai Sholom, was established to educate, enrich and create a forum for the Nashville community to become acquainted with the complexities and realities of Jewish life, culture and history in the 20th and 21st centuries through a mix of documentaries, feature length films and shorts.

The public is invited to view all film screenings. Tickets are $9 each, and matinee films shown before 6 p.m. are $7. Discounted tickets are available at $6 each for students, seniors 65+ and groups of 10 or more. The All Festival Pass, good for tickets to all films and special events, is $125 each. The $45 Reel Deal Pass, for those 25 years of age or under, is good for tickets to all films.

New to the festival is the ability to purchase tickets online at www.nashvillejewishfilmfestival.org . Tickets also may be purchased at the Belcourt Theatre box office.  Parking is available behind the Belcourt Theatre. For a complete list of Nashville Jewish Film Festival’s films, show dates and times, please visit their web site.

For more information, call (615) 356-1322 or e-mail nashvillejewishfilmfest@gmail.com