Cinema Chats: "Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas"
*The event has already taken place on this date: Mon, 11/25/2024
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Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas (2017), an offbeat, irreverent documentary, explores the relationship between the most joyous of Christian holidays and the Jewish composers who provided its modern-day soundtrack. The film profiles a number of Jewish musicians, including Irving Berlin, Mel Tormé, Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, Gloria Shayne Baker, and Johnny Marks, who made a mark on contemporary culture by writing many of the most beloved Christmas music standards. It focuses, in particular, on the way these songwriters helped to create the 20th-century shift from traditional liturgical Christmas music toward contemporary pop songs that address Christmas through universal themes of love, joy, peace, family, and the winter season rather than explicitly religious imagery.
We recommend you watch the film in advance of this lecture. Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas can be streamed on PBS.
Please see the Zoom link in your order confirmation email. This program is entirely virtual.
Larry Weinstein has been called “one of the world’s pre-eminent directors of films on musical subjects.” His 40 films range from composer portraits, to operas conceived for film, to verité documentaries, to scripted dramas. In addition to an Oscar nomination for his debut, Making Overtures, he’s won dozens of international awards including three International Emmys and several Geminis and Canadian Screen Awards.
Most recent films include Emmy-nominated Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, and The Impossible Swim, co-directed with his daughter, Ali Weinstein. His latest film is titled Beethoven’s Nine: Ode To Humanity.
Screened throughout the world, he’s been honored with retrospectives including Hot Docs (Toronto), MOFFOM (Prague), DocAviv (Tel Aviv), Look of Sound (Bremen), Impara l’Arte Festival (Padua), The Havana Film Festival, and The Jakarta Film Festival. At Cannes' MIPDOC 2007, he was named “International Trailblazer” for his “creativity, originality and risk-taking and pushing the genre of documentary forward.”
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