Eric Friedler’s sharp documentary takes a biting look at Germany’s richest family, and asks the question the Quandts hoped they could keep silent forever – where did they get their fortune from?

The family have always claimed their fortune came from their ownership of car giant BMV. But in Shattering Silence Friedler goes back to explore Gunter Quandt’s role in the Third Reich, and his exploitation of thousands of slave labourers in his factories, Jews, resistance fighters and prisoners of war.

The New Israel Fund screening of City of Borders at the UK Jewish Film Festival covers just about every inch of Israeli society, as it hones in on the lives of Jerusalem’s gay, lesbian and transgender community, through the vista of Israel’s political landscape.

Sa’ar Nathaniel, present at the screening, is also one of its main protagonists- Jerusalem Municipality Councillor during the day, he runs the city’s only full-time gay bar, Shushan, at night.

Actress Maureen Lipman has said that the BBC will not produce DVDs of work by her late husband, playwright Jack Rosenthal, despite numerous requests and high demand.

Ms Lipman, 63, made the comments while speaking to a packed audience attending the screening of Mr Rosenthal’s 1976 television play, The Barmitzvah Boy, screened to mark the UK Jewish Film Festival’s barmitzvah year.

She said later that she receives dozens of letters from fans asking where they can find DVDs of his films and plays, and she has even leant out her own personal copies.

Thirteen-year-old Hannah Sherrard made her debut film appearance this week starring as the lead in Minkie Spiro’s I Am Ruthie Segal, Hear Me Roar. She was 12 when selected for the part.

The musical comedy, which premiered at the UK Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, tells the story of a Ruthie Segal, a batmitzvah girl who takes the opportunity of her moment on the bimah to tell the congregation what she really thinks about the ceremony.

Most children are told fairy stories to send them to sleep at bedtime. Miri and Sagi were told scary stories. Stories about their father’s time in the ghettos and concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Now the elderly and fierce Dani drags his two grown-up Israeli children, the chain-smoking, petulant Miri and solemn, religious Sagi to retrace his steps to the concentration camps that have haunted him, and them.

Hollywood actor Jeff Goldblum is not noted for his deep, insightful interpretations of a role. If anything, Goldblum usually plays Goldblum: a very tall, not unhandsome character actor with a whimsical smile and a predilection to get the girl.

In Adam Resurrected, however, Goldblum is a revelation. As the pre-war cabaret entertainer Adam Stein, the most famous clown in Germany, Goldblum startles and delights; and as the charismatic hero of an Israeli desert institution for mentally damaged Holocaust survivors, one simply cannot take one’s eyes off him.

The Coen Brothers' latest film, A Serious Man, is their most Jewish, definitely, and among their funniest, undoubtedly. Whether most audiences will understand it is another matter.
The first 15 minutes are, after all, entirely in Yiddish, set in a snowbound shtetl wherein a husband and wife may or may not be entertaining a dybbuk — the fantastically craggy-faced Fyvush Finkel.

Adrienne Posta floated downstairs in her pink walkabout hairdryer mobcap, and it was as though the last 33 years had never existed.

To a collective sigh from the audience, Jack Rosenthal's iconic comedy drama, The Barmitzvah Boy, decorated the UK Jewish Film Festival's 13th year like a Black Forest Vacherin.

"We’re Jewish film-makers, for sure," admits Joel Coen, one half of the Oscar-winning sibling team whose brand of ironic, darkly eccentric and often violent cinema has dominated independent American film-making for 25 years.

“We’ve never tried to hide that or tip-toe around it,” chips in his brother Ethan, three years his junior. “Hollywood has always been largely Jewish, although made of Jews who wanted to assimilate. As a friend of ours once said: ‘If the movie business wasn’t difficult, God wouldn’t have given it to the Jews.’”

For an audience with a ... shall we say, overt appreciation of food and drink, the UK Jewish Film Festival's opening gala film, A Matter of Size, had a certain frisson.

This gentle Israeli comedy is the story of the doleful Herzl, fat since childhood and desperately putting himself through an endless series of dietary hoops in the grim working-class Israeli town of Ramle.