Films by Maya Steinberg

Germany 2023, 90 min
by Radek Wegrzyn

“Stand up straight, smile at people and show them we’re still alive.”Fourteen women between the age of 75 and 95 walk a runway and tell their life stories to their audience in Haifa, Israel. They’re wearing their nicest clothes; jewellery and make-up grace their aged faces and fragile bodies. This is the most unique beauty pageant in the world, because these women all have one thing in common: they represent the last generation of Holocaust survivors.The creative documentary MISS HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR brings the lives of Rita and Tova to the silver screen, telling stories of unique women who survived the Holocaust, and of the beauty and strength radiating within them.

Germany, Israel 2022, 30 min
by Maya Steinberg

Maya Steinberg is a secular Israeli. Her father, however, had a late religious awakening. He will not appear in her film. Instead, the young director approaches his faith and her lack of understanding for it through a visit to the gravesite of rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Galilee, where she spends a few weeks, observing believers, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and wondering: Is there a place here for women? And can there be a place for queer women? [65 DOK Leipzig, Marie Kloos]