Atlanta Jewish Film Festival – A Shabbat on the Other Side of the River

Along the winding waterways of the Brazilian Amazon, descendants of nineteenth-century Moroccan Jews sustain rituals and identity distant from any traditional center of Jewish life. In Belém, an aging synagogue preserves melodies, prayer traditions, and family heirlooms carried across the Atlantic, while upriver communities tend jungle-encroached cemeteries and safeguard customs shaped by generations of river travel, regional trade, and geographic isolation. Unfolding from interwoven family histories, rare archival photographs, and observant scenes of festivals, prayers, and daily routines, is a vivid portrait of a community adapting its heritage to the rhythms of the rainforest: a lyrical, deeply rooted exploration of Jewish continuity in one of the most remote corners of the world.