At Israel's 60th anniversary, the Jewish state takes centre stage in the challenging and diverse programme of the 14th Jewish Film Festival in Berlin

Some 31 movies from nine countries will be screened at the 14th Jewish Film Festival that takes place in Berlin and the nearby city of Potsdam from May 25 to June 8.

Numerous American, European and Israeli directors, screenplay writers and film producers are expected to attend the 12-day event.

With Israel currently celebrating the 60th anniversary of its founding, 16 documentary and feature films in the Berlin programme deal directly or indirectly with various aspects of its history.

Film and TV director Ron Ninio's Arab Work (Avoda Aravit) opens the event. It deals with the conflict of Arabs in Israeli society who are torn between a desire to integrate and be accepted while at the same time preserving their own traditions and values.

In the film Amjad, an Arabic journalist, makes every effort to conform and win favour in Israeli society. But his attempts repeatedly bring him into conflict with his conservative parents.

Further complications arise when his best friend, an Israeli Jew, falls in love with Amal, an Arab feminist, who happens to be a close friend of his (Amjad's) wife.

Before the start of the festival, young Israeli director Ayelet Bargur's movie, The House on August Street, will be screened on May 18. A film portrait of Beate Berger, a Berlin teacher, it tells how for more than a decade between 1922 and 1933 she headed a Jewish children's home in the German capital.

"The House on August Street is the untold story of my great-great aunt Beate Berger, and the Beith Ahawah Kinderheim she founded in 1922 in Berlin for Jewish children in need," says Ayelet Bargur, who studied art at Tel Aviv University and film before she became a film-maker.

The film depicts how Berger rescued two thirds of the children from the home following Hitler's 1933 seizure of power, and how in a unique escape operation succeeded in bringing them to safety in a new centre she had built in Haifa Bay (then Palestine).

The film contains a breathtaking performance from actrees Naomi Krauss in the role of Beate Berger.

"With chilling clarity and without the slightest hint of misrepresentation, she (Krauss) shares with the viewer the process whereby she realized that Germany was no longer a place for Jewish children," Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung (FAZ) wrote about the film.

Four French-made films are included in the programme, as is Tunisian director Ferid Boughedir's popular Villa Jasmin.

Festival director Nicola Galliner, who for years has battled funding difficulties to keep the festival alive, says this year's event has added significance, with a shoal of films "shedding fresh insights into Israel's history."

Berlin's governing mayor Klaus Wowereit, long a supporter of the Jewish movie jamboree, acts as the patron of the 2008 festival, which is just one of a series of Jewish events staged annually in Berlin.

Close on 15,000 Jews live and work in the German capital. Many of them are East European and Russian Jews who gravitated to the city after the collapse of communism in 1989-90.

While this figure is small compared to the more than 170,000 Jews who were active in Berlin before World War II, the city's Jewish Community is today still the largest in Germany. DPA