Events

[FILM] This week brings the 30th anniversary of the Buffalo International Jewish Film Festival, one of the oldest such events in North America. To mark this momentous occasion, the festival’s organizers are doing nothing different, which is great considering that this is Western New York’s most reliable annual presentation of quality world cinema. Why mess with a good thing? This year’s lineup includes 17 features and two shorts, all area premieres and most of them otherwise undistributed in the US. Among the expected highlights are The Outrageous Sophie Tucker, a documentary using newly discovered materials about the iconic entertainer; For a Woman, writer-director Diane Kurys’ (Entre Nous) drama based on the story of her parents’ marriage after surviving a French internment camp; Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent, about the rabbi who was expelled from Germany by the Nazis and came to the US to become a leader of the civil rights movement; and from Argentina, the psychological thriller God’s Slave, in which a planned bombing pits two extremists from opposite ends of the Arab-Israeli conflict against each other. The festival runs from Friday, May 15 through Thursday, May 21 at the Amherst Theater, followed by an encore of all films in the week beginning May 31 at the Jewish Community Center’s Maxine and Robert Theatre, 2640 North Forest Road in Getzville. For more information visit www.bijff.com or call 204-2084.