The 15th Ashkenaz Festival got under way earlier this week at Harbourfront Centre, but the treasure of its film component plays tonight at the Sheppard Grande.

It’s the world premiere of Song Of The Lodz Ghetto, a “documentary program” by David Kaufman that pays tribute to the resilience of the Jewish residents of the infamous Polish ghetto through the music they composed to spite the Nazis.

That music was ultimately recorded as an album by the jazz-klezmer band Brave Old World, and concert footage of them performing a dozen or so songs – in the original Yiddish – gives Kaufman’s doc its spine. Interviews with survivors and historians, illustrated with archival photographs, fill in the larger historical context of upbeat-sounding numbers with lines like “We must not be silent / It’s better to break windows.”

Additional documentaries, screening for free at Harbourfront’s Studio Theatre, include Duki Dror’s 1999 Taqasim (Saturday, September 4, 8:30 pm), which follows Israeli musician Felix Mizrachi on a quest for his Egyptian roots; Slawomir Grunberg’s 2009 short Paint What You Remember (Sunday, September 5, 7 pm), about Toronto painter Mayer Kirshenblatt’s return to his home town of Opatow, Poland, and Garry Beitel’s 2010 musical profile, The Socalled Movie (Monday, September 6, 6:30 pm), fresh from its theatrical run.

Song Of The Lodz Ghetto screens tonight (Thursday, September 2) at the Sheppard Grande.