Filmed at Oscar Peterson Hall in Montreal, Canada in 2000
Produced, directed and edited by David Kaufman

25 years ago, filmmaker David Kaufman captured Brave Old World live in concert at the very apex of the band’s creativity and vitality. Watching this breathtaking film, you’ll have a front-row seat as Michael Alpert, Alan Bern, Kurt Bjorling, and Stuart Brotman perform music from two of the band’s groundbreaking CDs, “Blood Oranges” and “Bless the Fire,” classics of New Jewish Music that are still unsurpassed. By no coincidence, the film takes us back to the era when Brave Old World first arrived in Weimar to teach workshops that were to grow into Yiddish Summer Weimar. So it is only fitting that we begin the YSW25 film series by revisiting the musical inspiration that put us on the path we’ve followed until today.

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Directed by Wolfgang Andrä & Yvonne Andrä, 2011

In 2008-09, Yiddish Summer Weimar launched its most ambitious project up to that time: an EU-funded exploration of the shared history and cultural heritage of klezmorim and lautari. Led by Alan Bern, The Other Europeans brought together 14 musicians from 8 countries--with no single language in common--to recover an immensely rich, multi-ethnic and transnational music culture that had once flourished in Bessarabia (largely in today’s Moldova) before being destroyed by war, Soviet cultural policy, and emigration. The film unblinkingly follows the band on a two-year journey that includes research in Israel, Moldova and France and rehearsals and concerts in Weimar and Vienna, through moments of success and disappointment. An inspiring inside look at how 14 very different musicians learn to trust and appreciate their differences and what they share in common.

With Kalman Balogh, Alan Bern, Daniel Blacksberg, Paul Brody, Marin Bunea, Matt Darriau, Christian Dawid, Zev Feldman, Emil Kroytor, Csaba Novak, Petar Ralchev, Stas Rayko, Adrian Receanu, Mark Rubin, Guy Schalom and Adam Stinga.

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Directed by Yvonne Andrä (in Germany) & Eyal Davidovitch (in Israel), 2022

Imagine this: a German-speaking girls choir from Weimar meets a Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking girls choir from Tel Aviv/Jaffa to learn and perform new songs composed by Alan Bern based on Yiddish poems by Kadya Molodovsky, a Polish-Jewish poet. In the process, they run head-first into their own ideas, hopes and fears about Germans, Jews, Israelis, Arabs, Yiddish, Hebrew, the Holocaust, and their own identities. The brainchild of Diana Matut and Andreas Schmitges, the Kadya Choir challenged 27 girls from very different backgrounds to learn about themselves and each other by living and traveling together while cooperating to turn a daring artistic vision into reality. This creatively imaginative film, shot on location in Israel and Germany, candidly shows the process every step of the way, from the first excitement of meeting and a girls’ night out on the beach in Tel Aviv to sobering encouters with religious division and the unfathomable shock of Buchenwald--and, finally, to the joyful success of the choir’s final performance.

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Directed by Ros Horin, 2024

A feature-length documentary about the progressive artists who are spearheading a global cultural renaissance of the Yiddish language by creating new art in an old language that speaks to our times. The film includes interviews with many artists from the YSW community and an in-depth portrait of the Caravan Orchestra & Choir, an international youth exchange project that brings together young musicians from Israel and Germany to explore Yiddish, Eastern Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern music traditions.

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Directed by Christoph Weinert, 2024

The astonishing story of the Jewish-owned, Berlin-based Semer record label, which produced recordings of Jewish artists from 1932-38 in the midst of growing Nazi repression and terror. Destroyed by the Gestapo on November 9th, 1938 (“Kristallnacht”), the Semer label and its hundreds of recordings were completely forgotten until the late 1990s, when Dr. Rainer Lotz stumbled onto their trail. The film tells the dramatic story of how the recordings were eventually recovered. It also features a beautifully shot and recorded concert by the Semer Ensemble, led by Alan Bern, which has taken on the mission of recreating and performing the Semer label music for today’s audiences and preserving the memory of the original artists, many of whom perished in the Holocaust.

With Alan Bern, Paul Brody, Daniel Kahn, Mark Kovnatskiy, Martin Lillich, Sasha Lurje, Fabian Schnedler, and Lorin Sklamberg.

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