Tuesday, December 18, 2018
7:00 PM

JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave, New York
Tickets: $15.00 / members $12.00  

In 1939 in Poland, Antonina Zabinska (two-time Academy Award® nominee Jessica Chastain) and her husband are successfully running the Warsaw Zoo and raising their family in an idyllic existence. Their world is overturned, however, when the country is invaded by Nazi Germany and they are forced to report to the Reich’s newly appointed zoologist (Daniel Brühl). To fight back on their own terms, the Zabinskis risk everything by covertly working with the Resistance and using the zoo’s hidden tunnels and cages to save nearly 300 Jews and political insurgents from German brutality. In 1968 the state of Israel honored the Zabinskis with the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” a recognition granted to those brave citizens who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.

The Zookeeper’s Wife is based on the book of the same name (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008) by poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman. Ackerman has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer prize and is the winner of many other awards, including most recently a PEN Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing.

The film will be introduced by Annette Insdorf, Film Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. An internationally renowned educator, she is the author of books including Indelible Shadows: Film and Holocaust; Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski; Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has.