The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF) is celebrating twenty years.
The LAJFF movie selection is always a tasteful surprise and a teaching moment. Following each screening there is a Q & A to nourish the audience’s curiosity with the movie’s director, screenwriter, or the actors. Such engagement adds impact to the educational experience, seizing the opportunity to provide more insight to their celluloid artistry.
LAJFF Director Hilary Helstein opened the 2025 festival – June 26-to-July 1, 2025 – with the movie Midas Man.
The screening of the Midas Man was attended by the much missed Late Night television host Jay Leno whose part in the movie is of the television host Ed Sullivan. Also attended the current city of Beverly Hills Mayor Sharona Nazarian.
Remembering the Magnificent Beatles Who Changed the Music World
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool, Britain in 1960. The core lineup of the band comprised of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
The Movie, Crew and Cast
The Midas Man is a British production movie. Director: Joe Stephenson; Writer/Actress: Brigit Grant; Writer: Jonathan Wakeham.
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian Epstein; Emily Watson as Epstein’s mother, Queenie; Eddie Marsan as Epstein’s father Harry; Blake Richardson as Paul McCartney; Jonah Lees as John Lennon; Leo Harvey-Elledge as George Harrison, and Campbell Wallace as Ringo Starr.
What is Jewish about the movie is the story of Brian Samuel Epstein – the Midas Man – a gay, Jewish, English music entrepreneur maverick who managed the Beatles from 1961 until his death in 1967. He was instrumental in their rise to worldwide success and international acclaim.
Epstein’s rollercoaster journey of ambition, passion and relentless pursuit of greatness is well depicted in the movie.
The movie “Midas Man” is titled as such because it gives the audience a look into Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager’s character, known for his ability to turn everything he touched into success.
The movie’s title is also a reference to the mythological King Midas who ruled the ancient kingdom of Phrygia, located in what is now central Turkey. Midas had the power to turn everything he touched into gold.
In the film, Brian Epstein is portrayed as someone who had a similar effect on the Beatles, but at the cost of his own personal life and well-being.
The Story of Abbey Road
The Beatles – Abbey Road
The Beatles’ first performances took place in Indra Club, in the city of Hamburg, Germany, where they were booked for a residency. Their significant time in Hamburg helped them develop their musical skills and gain wider recognition. Brian Epstein who was told about this new genre band visited and discovered The Beatles in Hamburg in the 1960s.
Epstein gained the Beatles’ trust and became their manager. He guides the band’s early career and helps shape their rise to fame.
‘Abbey Road’ album, released on September 26, 1969, was The Beatles’ eleventh studio recording. It is known to be the last album the group recorded, even though ‘Let It Be’ was the last album completed before the band’s break-up in April 1970.
LAJFF 2025 Other Screenings
The Glory Of Life
The Glory Of Life, a revealing story about Franz Kafka, the German-speaking, Czech-born author and major 20th century literary figure, happiest last year with his Jewish lover Dora Diamant.
Dora, a religious Jew, activist, actress, twenty years younger than Kafka, who hailed from the town of Pabianice, Poland, emigrated to Germany to escape from difficult family circumstances. Dora met Kafka on July 1923, at Müritz, northern Germany, a Baltic seaside resort. They fell in love and she remained at his side until his death, due to illness, eleven months later.
Dora Diamant is best remembered as the person who kept in her possession some of Kafka’s last writings, against his wishes for them to be destroyed, until they were confiscated by the Nazi Gestapo in 1933.
Plunderer
Plunderer: The Life and Times Of A Nazi Art Thief, an exploratory docufilm about the life of Wilhelm Peter Bruno Lohse who was a German art dealer and SS-Hauptsturmführer – a Nazi Party paramilitary rank used in several Nazi organizations, notably the SS – during World War II. Lohse became Hermann Göring, the German Nazi politician, aviator, military leader, and convicted war criminal, chief art looter in Paris. He helped the Nazi leader amass a vast collection of plundered artworks mostly confiscated from Jewish families.
The movie Plunderer reveals the dark underbelly of the international art world, telling the story of Bruno Lohse’s role in the Nazi art and artifacts looting operation with interviews with Lohse himself, as well as museums’ curators, art investigators, Lohse’s associates, descendants of the victims of Nazi art theft, as well as a look at stunning masterpieces and a deep archive of personal letters.
The Zweiflers
The Zweiflers, a six-episode series about a Jewish family living in Frankfurt, Germany, set in both Frankfurt and Berlin, but Frankfurt is the primary location of the Zweifler family’s delicatessen business and home.
It is a feast of family drama involving a Jewish family’s three generations, with grandfather a Holocaust survivor; a mixture of Jewish-German richness lore that leaves viewers hungry for more.
The Zweiflers won three prestigious awards at Cannes Film Festival 2024, namely Best Series, Best Music, and the High School Students Award for Best Series.
The LAJFF is active with screening right through the year. Being a patron of this Festival is a cultural privilege.
