Film festival season is starting up at Brandeis! But before the student-centered SunDeis and IndieLouies start, the season will kick off with JEWISHFILM.2010, the 13th annual festival by the National Center for Jewish Film, which will be running from April 7 through April 18 in Wasserman Cinematheque.Since it began in 1997 to celebrate Israel's 50th anniversary with a showcase of Israeli cinema, the festival has come to include films from all over the world, with this year's movies coming from six different countries, including Israel, the U.S., Germany, France, Poland and Argentina.

Each year's festival also features a film restored by the Center. This year's is 1935's Bar Mitzvah. With roots in the old Yiddish theater of New York and starring the famed Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky, the film comes to Brandeis on the heels of two sold-out screenings at New York's Lincoln Center.

Bar Mitzvah joins 12 other features, seven of which are documentaries, that will be shown at the festival.

The Justice has been able to preview five of them courtesy of the NCJF. Each one presents fascinating and unique visions of the Jewish experience that anyone, Jewish or not, would be sorry to miss.

The festival will open with the New England premiere of Berlin 36, a blend of sports movie and historical drama presenting the true story of Gretel Bergmann, a Jewish-German high jumper. It's 1936, and the Nazis are in damage-control mode as America threatens a boycott of the Berlin Olympics if Jewish athletes aren't allowed to participate. To remedy this, the Germans force Bergmann to train for the high jump to appease the Americans while doing all they can to make sure she doesn't actually make it to the Games themselves. Their efforts at sabotage range from unfair treatment and threats to bringing in competition in the form of Marie Ketteler, a farm girl with a medical record that the Germans want no one, not even her coach, to see. What makes this different from other sports movies is the stakes: Bergmann is caught in the machinery of a government that will do anything to keep her from competing and where even the smallest of victories matter for her. This context is what makes Bergmann's resistance so heroic and what really makes the movie work.

The Wedding Song is another historical piece, though this one takes the audience to Tunisia in 1942, where Jewish Myriam and Muslim Nour are best friends who have opposing experiences with marriage. Nour desperately awaits her wedding to the teenaged Khaled while Myriam tries to get out of a marriage of convenience to a 30-year-old doctor. Their tribulations all take place as the Nazis take control of Tunisia from the French, and the friendship between the two girls is strained as the policies of the Nazis stir up tension between the Arab and Jewish communities. This might be one of the highlights of the entire festival, a movie that is both a tender tale of friendship and a stunning look at the terror of the war. A combination of fast-moving camera work and a unique soundtrack of opera set to electric guitars creates a visceral look at the upheaval in North Africa during World War II.

The parade of period pieces is rounded off by La Camára Oscura, an Argentine film about Gertrudis, an introverted Jewish woman in the 1920s who has settled into a life with her children and emotionally distant husband. This changes when a travelling photographer comes to her family's farm and allows her to recognize her inner beauty for the fist time. Admittedly, this movie is pretty slow. Those who come expecting a fast-moving plot or drama will be disappointed, but those who come knowing this will find a good amount to like. The camerawork is very good, giving some great views of Argentina's coutryside, as are the uses of animation and still photography that include some interesting examples of Surrealist photography.

One of the festival's days, April 11, coincides with Holocaust Remembrance Day, and this will be recognized by a screening of the documentary Einsatzgruppen, which is about the Nazi death squads that operated in conquered areas during World War II, killing 1.5 million people including Jews, Roma, Communists and others with the help of many local groups. This documentary goes into the history of the squads, their tactics and the aftermath during the Nuremberg Trials, and features interviews with witnesses and historians. It should be stated up front that this is hard to watch. There's footage of killings, mass graves, local pogroms and other horrifying events. But it's also a moving remembrance of this dark time in human history, and without a doubt should be seen.

The festival also offers a fascinating glimpse into ultra-Orthodox Judaism in modern Israel. Gevald! and The Rabbi's Daughter and the Midwife form a double feature that looks at Israel's Haredi community, an ultra-Orthodox group that is commonly on the fringes of Israeli society. Gevald! follows two Haredi groups during an election, one protesting the secular state itself as heretical and the other trying to work within the system to benefit the community. The Rabbi's Daughter and the Midwife concerns Adina Bar-Shalom, the titular rabbi's daughter who has set up a university program for Haredi women. The midwife is "Bambi" Chalkowski, who also runs a large charity program to help Haredi families, many of whom live in poverty. Both women's stories are followed as they try to help their community become more integrated into Israel's society. The films are an hour each and will be shown back-to-back on April 11.

Tickets to JEWISHFILM.2010 are free for Brandeis students, but they have to be reserved by April 5 by phone at (781) 736-8600 or by e-mail at jewishfilm@brandeis.edu. A full listing of the festival's screenings can be found at www.jewishfilm.org.