FILM

Jewishfilm.2012

The National Center for Jewish Film

15th Annual Film Festival Presents: Hotel Lux

Once again, the ICA is delighted to present a selection from Jewishfilm.2012, the storied National Center for Jewish Film's 15th Annual Film Festival.  This screening of Hotel Lux marks the film's East Coast premiere and only its second appearance in the US.

In this black comedy satirizing the Nazi regime and Stalin’s Reign of terror, writer director Leander Haußmann pays homage to Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940s classic To Be or Not to Be. In 1930s Berlin, Cabaret star Hans Zeisig (Michael Bully Herbig) gets by on charisma and talent until he finally pushes the envelope too far in his popular but provocative Stalin-Hitler comedy act. Having wrangled false papers, he sets out for Hollywood, but ends up in Moscow instead, at the infamous Hotel Lux, home to Communist politicos and European exiles fleeing Hitler. By the time of Zeisig’s arrival, Stalin’s paranoia has unhinged the soviet leadership. A case of mistaken identity brings Zeisig face to face with Stalin and Zeiser must pull off the performance of a lifetime if he is to survive. When Zeisig is reunited with his beautiful Communist love interest Frida (Thekla Reuten, The American) and his former Jewish stage partner Meyer (Jürgen Vogel, The Wave), three embark on a zigzag screwball adventure. Winner of the Bavaria Film Award and major prizes at the Rome Int’l Film Festival.

The National Center for Jewish Film helped launched the now de rigueur programming of Jewish film festivals and is responsible, in part, for the development of Jewish and ethnic film as a subject for academic study and public exhibition.

View the complete schedule for the festival here. 

Co-Presented by: Goethe Institut Boston; Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University