Festival dates:
April 30 – May 10
A Nice Jewish Boy Le dernier des Juifs
Featuring a Chaplinesque turn from newcomer Michael Zindel as Bellisha, A NICE JEWISH BOY is a light-hearted tale about entering adulthood and all the responsibilities that come with it.
ADA – My Mother the Architect
Ada - My Mother the Architect celebrates the groundbreaking legacy of the unheralded Israeli artist Ada Karmi-Melamede, who gave physical form to some of Israel’s highest democratic ideals, including the Supreme Court Building, Israel Institute for Democracy, and Ben Gurion University.
Among Neighbours Be’in Shkhenim
Combining magical realism and evocative hand-drawn animation with revelatory interviews and verité footage, Among Neighbors examines the story of a small, rural town where Jews and Polish Catholics lived side by side for centuries before World War II.
Bliss Hemda
Shemi Zarhin, one of Israel's most prominent filmmakers, presents us with a moving, tender, and wise love story set in Galilee, about a couple whose extreme love for each other and their family transcends social norms, financial struggles, and past mistakes.
Boy On The Run: An Extraordinary Journey of Survival
This poignant and profoundly insightful film tells the gripping story of Paul Galan, who recounts the unbelievable story of his family’s survival in the Holocaust as a child.
Cabaret Total
Assi, an aspiring actor, returns home after completing reserve duty during the war. Though he dreams of becoming a successful performer, reality finds him teaching theater at the local high school and putting on a nightly cabaret show at the community center. An unexpected turn of events suddenly thrusts him into the spotlight—but not for the reasons he had hoped.
Charles Grodin – Rebel With a Cause
Raised in a Jewish household in Pittsburgh, Charles Grodin’s life embodied the concept of Tikkum Olam. The film not only celebrates Charles Grodin’s hilarious acting career, but also his remarkable, decades-long, successful fight to get wrongly convicted people out of prison.
Chopin’s Preludes: A Life in Fragments
For lnna and Boris, this documentary marks the culmination of a fifty-year artistic journey that began in Odessa, when Boris arrived at lnna's doorstep with a four-hand sheet music on their second meeting. Since then, their partnership has intertwined life and art, leading them across continents and through decades of performance, teaching, and collaboration.
Fantasy Life
Andrew Shear has crafted a classic kind of family dynamic film for this smart, dialogue-driven comedy, but shows a great deal of promise in carefully keeping the inherent drama beneath the surface. Perfectly casted, these characters and their deep anxieties and life problems feel very real.
For the Love of a Woman
Set in the in the late 1970s, this intriguing drama follows Esther, an American woman, who is given a mysterious letter upon her mother’s death that sends her out on a journey to Israel in search of her family's origins. Piece by piece, she unlocks a family secret about her family’s past.
Mariana’s Room La chambre de Mariana
In the darkest days of the Second World War, Yulia and Hugo, a Jewish mother and son, escape from a Ukrainian ghetto. Fearing for his safety, Yulia entrusts her eleven-year-old boy to the care of her friend Mariana, who lives in a brothel. Hugo is placed in a closet, nominally for his safety, but from which he rarely leaves. As the war rages on outside, Hugo and Mariana form an intimate yet complex bond of love, loyalty and devotion.
Martha Liebermann – A Stolen Life Martha Liebermann – Ein gestohlenes Leben
The ever-dignified Martha Liebermann has enjoyed a life of comfort as the wife of renowned German impressionist Max Liebermann. In 1943, under Nazi threat and burdened by her years, she faces a harrowing choice: abandon her beloved home or risk deportation.