Tags: secret

Leah’s Train

When Ruth, a young doctor, skips her grandmother Leah's funeral, she ignites three generations of love and secrets. Her boyfriend walks out, her mother pays a devastating surprise visit, and Leah's harrowing childhood journey—a family legend—intertwines with Ruth's own. An ordinary train ride mysteriously takes Ruth through her Russian Jewish family's untold history, opening her to a fuller understanding of her mother, her grandmother, and herself.

Leipzig

Explores the journey of a three-member Catholic family whose matriarch descends into Alzheimer’s disease—and begins praying in Hebrew, unwittingly revealing her long held secret that she is Jewish and a child refugee of the Holocaust.

Letters to Sala

On the eve of heart surgery Sala suddenly presents her daughter, Ann Kirschner, with a priceless collection of 350 letters and photographs that she risked her life to preserve during five brutal years as a prisoner in seven different Nazi forced-labor camps, revealing a secret she has kept hidden from her family for nearly fifty years.

Mandate Memories

A stirring portrait of Israel’s tumultuous founding caused by the horrors of the Second World War, and revealed when Gustav Frolich, an eighty-year-old Israeli survivor of the death camps visits Jane Stirling, 62, in a small English town. Their mysterious connection forged during the post British Mandate for Palestine transition dramatically reveals a conflict and a secret that ties these two strangers closely together. This compelling and controversial story deals with memories of the struggles the Jewish people have endured, and atonement and the inability of the guilty to forgive themselves.

Night and Fog

A controversial play, whose initial production was, according to the playwright, threatened by neo-Nazis and the Jewish Defense League for its representation of a former SS officer hiding his past while living in the U.S. and the mysterious individual who forces him to face up to his role in the Holocaust.

Photo Opportunity

A presidential candidate and an elderly Jewish woman realize they have a shared secret that haunts her and threatens the candidate’s desired future. The inspiration for the play was Madeleine Albright’s story of her “discovery” of her Jewish grandparents murdered during the Holocaust.

Room for Doubt

A highly respected Professor of German Literature at a prominent American university is confronted by his past, which conceals a terrifying secret he has hidden for decades. Accused of murder as a Nazi official in the Warsaw Ghetto by the son of one of his victims, he is forced to reveal a secret that would change his life, his son’s, and, most of all, his accusers.

The Goldman Project

It is 1994 and Naomi Goldman, recently widowed, is living in an apartment in upper Manhattan. Her son Tony, separated from his wife, lives with her. When Tony's old college girlfriend Aviva contacts him with the ulterior motive of interviewing and videotaping his mother for a Holocaust memorial project, Tony is appalled. Naomi, reluctant at first, eventually agrees to the interview. Though appearing to be forthright in her story, Naomi clearly is hiding a devastating secret. When Aviva pushes her to admit the truth, the consequences are life changing. The Goldman Project is a play about family relations, the lingering legacy of the Holocaust and the catharsis of self-renewal.

The Revisionist

Jesse Eisenberg’s autobiographical play about David, a young American sci-fi writer, visiting Maria, an older cousin in Poland. The idea for the play came about while Eisenberg was visiting his own cousin in Poland, having made a promise to his 100-year-old aunt before leaving the U.S. that he would visit the town where she had grown up. Eisenberg's character, David, is suffering from writer’s block and hopes the change of scenery will help him to complete his book. When he arrives in Poland, he wants to be left alone, but his ageing cousin is desperate to connect with her distant American family. As their relationship develops, Maria, a Holocaust survivor, reveals details of a guilty secret she has kept from her post-war past.

Tykocin Bat-Yam [טיקוצ’ין בת ים]

Two plays showcased together: In Tykocin, a Warsaw newspaper editor investigates a woman who is about to receive the “Righteous Among the Nations" medal. He suspects there is a dark secret behind the story. His research stirs up old demons in the village, and the villagers are forced to confront their past as well as their investigator—a representative of the younger generation. Bat-Yam is the story of three generations of one Israeli family, going on a trip to Poland to learn about their past. They arrive at Tykocin, and enter into a bitter dispute among themselves, and with the villagers, regarding family assets stolen by the Polish.

Under the Apple Tree

Over 2,500 Jewish children were rescued from the Warsaw Ghetto by Polish nurse and social worker, Irena Sendler. At great personal risk, she smuggled children out of the ghetto providing them with false identity papers and keeping their true identities safe in the hopes of reuniting them with their families when the war ended. Their names were kept in glass jars and buried under the apple tree of a house in Warsaw.