Buffalo’s longest-lived such event, the Jewish Film Festival celebrates its 21st year with a week’s worth of films from around the world, including seven features and eight documentaries. Saturday and Sunday screenings will be held at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center, after which the series moves to the Amherst Theater for the remainder of the week. Among the films to be screened:

Isn't This a Time

ISN’T THIS A TIME— For five decades impresario Harold Rosenthal was a key figure in the careers of many who found that music could be a valuable expression of dissent at a time of social repression. In 2003, Arlo Guthrie staged a Thanksgiving concert at Carnegie Hall to honor his mentor Rosenthal for his 50 years of service to the music industry. Along with appearances by singers Leon Bibb, Theodore Bikel and Peter Paul and Mary, he also managed to reunite the Weavers, who in the 1950s were one of the most popular musical groups in the US. This film of that show succeeds both as a nostalgic visit for longtime fans of folk music and an introduction to newcomers. Imbued with a strong sense of family, the performances are both comforting and rousing. Highlights include Bikel’s rendition of a Russian gypsy tune, Weaver Fred Hellerman’s moving solo on “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and the group’s “Sinner Man,” dedicated to George Bush. Even the musicians’ age works to the film’s advantage, showing that you don’t have to slow down if you don’t want to. (Mary Travers and Weaver Ronnie Gilbert are shown in a backstage sequence having a mock swordfight with the canes they need to use on stage.) (M. F.) Sun 1pm, Market Arcade; Thu 9pm, Amherst

KING OF THE CORNER—Actor (and UB graduate) Peter Riegert directed this wryly delightful comedy-drama adapted from the book Bad Jews and Other Stories by Gerald Shapiro. Riegert plays Leo Spivak, a middle-aged marketer who runs focus groups testing products that range from useless to absurd. Having expected that by now his life would be on an even keel, Leo instead finds it perpetually spinning out of control. He hates his job, and has to deal with a protégé who is subtly trying to steal it; his teenaged daughter and elderly father shoebox him with generational problems; and his wife is on to his every misstep. It’s a first-rate movie guaranteed to delight an audience that has all but given up on finding films that speak to their lives. Co-starring Isabella Rossellini, Eli Wallach, Rita Moreno, Eric Bogosian, Dominic Chianese, Beverly D’Angelo and Harris Yulin. (M. F.) Sat 7:30pm, Market Arcade; Thu 1pm, Amherst

LOST EMBRACE—Argentinian director Daniel Burman evinces a dryly amused tolerance for the quirks, caprices and fixations of his movie’s characters. It’s centered on Ariel, a Jewish 23-year-old who works in his mother’s small lingerie shop in a marginal Buenos Aires mall while he makes plans to escape these confining circumstances, and his past, for a new life in Europe. Shortly after Ariel’s birth, his father left to fight in Israel’s Yom Kippur War and never returned. (This would place the action in the 1990s, but Burman is rather vague about such things.) He still calls his wife regularly and sends money, but Ariel disdains the memory of this man. Meanwhile, he and the other small-time merchants and their customers pursue their largely impractical goals and obsessions. The film has a semi-obscured wit and an apparently digressive quality. (“Don’t write me in capitals,” one business man tells another. “It’s hostile.”) There’s a current of tenderness running in and out of Lost Embrace, but it never swamps the tone of impotent eccentricity. (G.S.) Tue 3pm, Amherst; Wed 7pm, Amherst

Paper Snow

PAPER SNOW— Referring to its 1930s Tel Aviv setting, a brief onscreen text at the film’s start says “Many tales from this period have become myths.” The problem Lina and Slava Chaplin’s movie faces is that its story and characters don’t come close to achieving a fabulous mystique. A dramatization of a reputed affair between a prominent, 40ish actress and a Rabelaisian poet in his mid-20s, played out in the close quarters of prewar Palestine’s artistic and intellectual circles, the movie seems more concerned with the passion and histrionics of these people, and their eventually tedious intensity and flamboyance, rather than a mythic, archetypal romance. (G.S.) Wed 9pm, Amherst; Thu 5pm, Amherst

PROTOCOLS OF ZION—You probably haven’t been thinking much lately about what links automotive pioneer and magnate Henry Ford, former Malaysian prime minister Tun Mahather and some Palestinian-American street punks in Patterson, New Jersey. As Marc Levin’s 2004 documentary points out, however, there’s a disturbing, dangerous concurrence among them: They’ve all promoted, or accepted the authenticity of, the ideas in a late-19th-century Russian fabrication that scurrilously purported to be a secret plan for Jews to achieve world domination. (Its full name is “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”) Levin, a Jewish-American documentarist, calls it “the mother of all conspiracy theories,” and if this is somewhat hyperbolic, his movie does compellingly illustrate its pervasive importance in the vilely irrational anti-Semitism of the last 100 or more years. Maintaining a bemused but engaged, and sometimes even amused posture, Levin visits black Muslim prison inmates, a white-supremacist radio program host in Saint Louis and Arab-hating Zionist zealots in New York, among a number of other individuals in a variety of places. His movie sometimes seems to meander, and it’s probably too long, but it contains some sharp insights, and fascinating, if scary, glimpses of rabid hate and stubborn delusion. It becomes a meditation on the origins and durability of anti-Jewish feeling, and group hatred. Beyond its occasional loss of focus, its chief inadequacy stems from its probable audience: It won’t reach enough of those who most need to be challenged. (G.S.) Mon 3pm, Amherst; Tue 9pm, Amherst

USHPIZIN—In the first Israeli film made with the cooperation of the ultra-orthodox community, a rabbi and his wife put up with the boorish behavior of two escaped convicts whom they assume to be God’s test of their worthiness. Made for a secular Israeli audience, the religious holiday and its customs will likely be unfamiliar to many viewers. But director Giddi Dar (working from a script by his star Shuli Rand, an actor who embraced the Orthodox life a decade ago) captures what appears to be a clear-eyed portrait of life in this insular community, akin to a modern version of the Sholem Aleichem stories that comprised Fiddler on the Roof. With Michal Bat-Sheva Rand and Eliyahu Scorpio. Directed by Giddi Dar. (M. F.) Sun 7pm, Market Arcade; Wed 3pm, Amherst

WALK ON WATER—Israeli drama about a troubled Mossad assassin (played by Israeli superstar Lior Ashkenazi) assigned to follow the grandchildren of an escaped Nazi war criminal. Director Eytan Fox (Yossi and Jagger) and screenwriter Gal Uchovsky seek to capture moral ironies and reveal subtle human continuities that cross stoutly defended divisions. Their efforts can be heavy-handed, but there’s sufficient sincerity and grace that, even if you don’t buy into it, you may regret its shortcomings. (G. S.) Sun 9pm, Market Arcade; Tue 5pm, Amherst

WONDROUS OBLIVION— In the early 1960s, a working-class street in East London is home to two displaced families: the Wisemans, German Jews who emigrated here after WWII, and the Samuels, a Jamaican family that has just moved in next door. Most of the street has only barely accepted the Jewish family, and they’re ill disposed to welcome black faces. But the film turns on smaller connections made when young David Wiseman learns that his new neighbor (played by Delroy Lindo) can teach him a thing or two about cricket, enough to get him on the school team. Writer-director Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor) adds what initially seems like an odd subtext: Mrs. Wiseman, whose husband works long hours, finds herself becoming attracted to Mr. Samuels, an infatuation she briefly acts upon. But it speaks to the issues of tradition and adult responsibility and is not finally inappropriate. (M.F.) Sun 5pm, Market Arcade; Mon 9pm, Amherst