“I don’t know of many cultures or countries where people were able to live together as they did in Egypt after the Second World War,” says filmmaker Ruggero Gabbai. It was a rare golden age of tolerance and prosperity. Gabbai’s impressive documentary chronicles the many Jewish families who flourished in this rich environment, as proudly Egyptian as their Muslim and Christian neighbors. Sadly, their lives changed irreversibly following the 1952 Egyptian revolution. Told with intimate interviews from Jews who had lived and prospered in Egypt, and interwoven with rich personal photographs and archival footage, Gabbai’s film frames their stories of resilience in historical context.

Preceded by Terefu and Her Children

Lowell Handler. 2016. 17 m. NR. US/Israel. Hebrew/English.

Just months after Operation Solomon, a 1991 Israeli airlift that rescued 14,325 Ethiopian Jews from religious and ethnic persecution, Lowell Handler documented a family as they settled in their new land. Twenty-three years later, he reunites with one mother, Terefu, and her extended family in the suburbs outside Tel Aviv.