Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 10, 2021

Hellenic Film Society USA (HFS) is streaming two Jewish-themed Greek films throughout the month of January to mark Holocaust Remembrance. The films are available to global audiences and are streaming on-demand, via the organizations website.

The drama, Cloudy Sunday, and documentary, My Sweet Canary, began streaming worldwide on Sunday, January 3 and will remain available for viewing through Saturday, February 6.

Cloudy Sunday (Ouzeri Tsitsanis is the films Greek title), directed by Manoussos Manousakis, is a drama set in the Nazi-occupied Greek city of Thessaloniki in 1943, when during an alarming escalation of Jewish persecution, a young Christian resistance fighter falls in love with a Jewish woman.

Traditional Sephardic music and the melodies of Vasilis Tsitsanis add to the poignancy of this enthralling drama about love and the horrors of war. The Forward calls it a powerful, melancholy text that has important implications for contemporary struggles.

My Sweet Canary, a Greek/Israeli co-production written and directed by Roy Sher, is a rousing documentary about the life of legendary Greek singer Roza Eskenazy, a Sephardic Jew who is widely credited with popularizing the musical genre of rebetika, considered a form of Greek blues, during a 50-year career that began in the 1920s. Both films will be shown with English subtitles.

The Hellenic Film Society is proud to recognize, during Holocaust Remembrance, Jewish contributions to Greek culture, and to pay tribute to the tens of thousands lost in concentration camps, says Jimmy DeMetro, president of the Hellenic Film Society.

The moving films weve selected capture the joys as well as the horrors of that time and will resonate with todays audiences. Nearly 60,000 Greek Jews died in the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II.

The two films are presented as part of the Hellenic Film Societys Always on Sunday on Demand film series, an outgrowth of the Always on Sunday film series which began at the prestigious Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY in 2018.

The monthly online series follows the successful virtual Greek film festival that HFS presented in July after the pandemic forced movie theaters to close indefinitely, precluding the presentation of the New York Greek Film Expo, the Societys annual spring film festival in theaters around the New York metropolitan area.

Januarys programming is made possible by a generous donation from the Koslosky Family Foundation.

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Excerpt from:

My Sweet Canary and Cloudy Sunday Streaming Globally in Commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance - The Pappas Post

Category: Sephardic
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