A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Original Title:
A Bridge of Books
Production Companies:
Citizen Film
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 13
In 1939, Yiddish was the spoken language of three-quarters of the world's Jews. But when leading Jewish scholars convened in 1980, they estimated that only 70,000 Yiddish books remained in the world. This engaging, often funny documentary film chronicles the adventures of an enterprising 23-year-old named Aaron Lansky, who rallied together an international network of volunteers and set out to rescue the world's Yiddish books. Twenty years later, the National Yiddish Book Center has collected 1.5 million Yiddish books and helped save a rich diverse, and surprisingly modern literature from oblivion. With rare archival images, and a lyrical portrayal of the National Yiddish Book Center's warehouse and cultural complex, A Bridge Of Books celebrates a pursuit that has become a powerful vehicle for the transmission of history, culture and identity across several generations.
Additional Camera:
Carter Tomassi
Additional Soundtrack:
Sheldon Katzman
Assistant Camera:
Melissa R. Donovan
Assistant Editor:
Kevin Abrams
Cinematography:
Brian Dowley
Director:
Sam Ball
Editor:
Gary Weimberg
Music:
Larry London
Producer:
Sam Ball
Sound Re-Recording Mixer:
Dave Nelson
Jeremiah Moore
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.