Breaking Home Ties

Post-screening discussion with Lisa Rivo and Sharon Rivo, co-directors of the National Center for Jewish Film, and composers and performers of new film score, Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) and Adam Dorn (aka Mocean Worker)

The New York Jewish Film Festival is pleased to present this classic silent movie from 1922, a melodrama set in both New York and Russia that was once believed lost. After a badly damaged print was rediscovered by the National Center for Jewish Film in a Berlin archive in the 1980s, the film went on a decades-spanning journey toward the digital restoration presented here with a new recorded score performed by Grammy Award–winning musicians. The film follows a Russian émigré who falls in love and becomes a successful lawyer. His life takes a difficult turn when his parents follow him from his home country and struggle to adjust to immigrant living, and his own potentially violent past comes back to haunt him. Breaking Home Ties was originally made to combat growing tides of antisemitism in the United States, and it merits mention alongside such renowned silent films as The Jazz Singer and Hungry Hearts in its depiction of Lower East Side existence in New York. Film restoration by the National Center for Jewish Film; score produced by Reboot Studios.

The film includes an exciting contemporary score composed, performed, and recorded by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Mocean Worker (aka Adam Dorn), Scott Amendola (Charlie Hunter/Amendola Duo), with additional music from Nels Cline (Wilco), Yuka Honda, Gretchen Gonzales, and Joey Mazzola.