Breaking Home Ties
Directors: Frank Seltzer & George Rowland
USA | 1922 | Silent with English intertitles | 78 min
Closing Night Event – Rare 1922 Silent Film with New Music Score
New England Premiere of New Music Soundtrack – From Grammy winning musician Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) and artists drawn from some of today’s legendary jazz and indie rock bands produced and recorded by Reboot Studios
Q&A with NCJF Directors Sharon Pucker Rivo and Lisa Rivo
After more than 100 years, Breaking Home Ties is back on the big screen! Long thought lost, the world’s only surviving film print of this independently-made feature was rescued and restored by The National Center for Jewish Film.
In this entertaining drama full of charm, romance and plot twists, the idyllic life of the Bergmann family is broken when son David flees pre-revolutionary Russia for America. In New York he becomes a successful lawyer and woos smart, independent Rose. When the Bergmann parents leave St. Petersburg and emigrate to New York, immigrant life takes its toll. Will David marry Rose? Will the Bergmanns be reunited? Come find out!
Released for general audiences in 1922, Breaking Home Ties was produced by Jewish filmmakers with the express purpose of countering escalating antisemitism in the US stoked by the anti-Jewish campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan and Henry Ford. Featuring sympathetic Jewish lead characters, the film is a rare example from early cinema that explicitly depicts Jewish life and rituals. Its sensitive depiction of immigrant life merits mention alongside such renowned silent films as The Jazz Singer and Hungry Hearts (also restored by NCJF).
Our Boston audience will be one of the very first to hear an exciting new soundtrack created for the film by musicians drawn from some of today’s legendary jazz, Americana, R&B and indie rock bands. A collaboration begun during the pandemic and produced by Reboot Studios, the score was composed, performed and recorded by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Mocean Worker (aka Adam Dorn), and Scott Amendola (Charlie Hunter/Amendola Duo), with additional music from Nels Cline (Wilco), Yuka Honda, Gretchen Gonzales, and Joey Mazzola. Produced by David Katznelson.
Special Thanks:
Critical Acclaim for Breaking Home Ties:
New York Times Critics Pick: NYT #1 movie to see in New York City in January 2025
“The discovery and restoration of the long-forgotten film Breaking Home Ties by The National Center for Jewish Film is the latest revelatory moment in classic American Jewish cinema.” –The Forward
Read the JTA / New York Jewish Week feature story about Breaking Home Ties and NCJF’s restoration – A lost film about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side returns to the big screen in NYC
– Preceded by —
A Child of the Ghetto
Director: D. W. Griffith
USA | 1910 | Silent with English intertitles | 18 min
115th ANNIVERSARY SCREENING!
Digitally Restored by The National Center for Jewish Film
Score composed, performed and recorded by Swedish musicians Alexander Freudenthal & Hans Nyman
The New Yorker Critics Pick! “A silent masterwork“
Griffith shot some of the film on the street outside his studio. “Rivington Street,” Griffith wrote at the time “was the lively one, eternally jammed with pushcart peddlers hawking their wares. They had every imaginable commodity, from a needle to a wedding outfit. Emotional, tempestuous, harrowing Rivington Street was perpetually a steaming, bubbling pot of human flesh.”
