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Filtered By: SFJFF 2017 Clear All

When Eli, a young army officer returns home to a small desert town, things appear as stagnant as always. However, as news reaches Eli that his aunt has been raped, he decides to take the law into his own hands and things quickly get out of control. Screens with Death in the Terminal

This chronicle of the fascinating career of fashion designer Zac Posen, known to many as a celebrity judge on Project Runway, shows how Posen began designing as a teen. With his family’s support, he enjoyed a meteoric rise. Friendships with famous women (Claire Danes and Natalie Portman) helped catapult him to fame. But when his career stalls, Posen struggles with depression. His plans for a comeback will have audiences cheering for the likeable and talented artist.

The current refugee crisis, the deepest the world has seen since World War II, has been burned into everyone’s consciousness. Journalist and filmmaker Pia Lenz set out to approach the topic with a new set of eyes. She follows two families as they resettle in Germany. Lenz is as patient as the film’s subjects, taking the time to transform from making a film about the refugee problem to a thoughtful look at the refugees as individuals

Sex, drugs, techno, and . . . Arab traditions? What sounds like an unlikely combination exerts a strong emotional attraction in this female dramedy about friendship, love and the search for independence by three young, hip, Palestinian women. When the Muslim—and religious—Nour moves in with hard-partying Laila and Salma, all three begin their own journeys of self-discovery and gain an understanding of the male-dominated society in which they live but refuse to reconcile themselves to.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

While many sequels do not live up to their predecessors, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is a rare exception. A decade after An Inconvenient Truth, local filmmakers Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk follow Vice President Al Gore as he continues his tireless efforts to alert the human inhabitants of this planet to the catstrophic consequences of climate change and the urgency to take action.

Intent to Destroy

Intent to Destroy

One hundred years after 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire, Academy Award–nominated documentarian and this year’s Freedom of Expression Award recipient Joe Berlinger reveals the disturbing truth behind Turkey’s well-funded campaign of genocide denial, suppression and intimidation. Berlinger utilizes the filming of The Promise, a $100 million Hollywood film production ambitiously billed as the Armenian Schindler’s List, to explore this historical tragedy and its relevance to the barbaric genocides that followed.

Jews in Shorts: Documentaries

Jews in Shorts: Documentaries

Meet the fascinating subjects from this year's superb collection of doc shorts: a heavily tattooed Jewish prizefighter; a Holocaust survivor set for immortality as a 3-D digital projection; a legendary NYC mom and pop cafe struggling to keep the lights on; and the wild paintings of gun-toting Nazi-fighting wonder women and the artist who brings them to life.

Jews in Shorts: Narratives

Jews in Shorts: Narratives

People aren't always what they seem. This year's collection of narrative shorts finds complex people grappling with even more complex relationships: a single mother unexpectedly alone on a sweltering summer day; a father and a daughters separate and profound encounters with the great composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein; a married couple testing their limits on a wild night out; and a gentle cantor who meets a lovely chanteuse while visiting a small Israeli seaside town.

Opening Night: Keep the Change

Opening Night: Keep the Change

Under the guise of a New York romantic comedy, Keep the Change does something quite radical: In a refreshingly honest way it portrays two adults on the autistic spectrum. David desperately wants to be seen as “normal,” but Sarah accepts who she is. Together they navigate the vicissitudes of a burgeoning relationship. Writer/director Rachel Israel has an obvious affection for her characters, which infuses this poignant and funny film from the first frame to the last.

In this deeply human story, Emmy-nominated director Matt Ogens profiles up-and-coming boxer Zachary "Kid Yamaka" Wohlman and explores Wohlman's troubled background in Los Angeles, his training under world-class coach Freddie Roach and his path to personal redemption through boxing, Judaism and sobriety.

The Last Blintz

The Last Blintz

The closing of the Cafe Edison (aka the Polish Tea Room), the Broadway diner immortalized in Neil Simon's 45 Seconds from Broadway, is not just a story about another famous show business haunt shutting its doors, but the fading away of a piece of America's past.

Over the past five years, tens of thousands of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa have sought relief and safety in Israel only to find a society bitterly divided on how to treat them. Filmmaker Beth Toni Kruvant examines Israel’s moral obligation to extend aid and comfort to the refugees and the role that race and religion play in the willingness of a community to accept them in their midst.

This inspiring documentary profiles four women, each putting tremendous effort into helping women around the world in unique ways. A Brazilian graffiti artist speaks out against domestic violence; a Senegalese hip-hop musician educates young women about the perils of genital mutilation; a classically trained dancer in India helps heal victims of sex trafficking through movement therapy; and a young American finds high-end U.S. markets for poor Kenyan women’s hand-sewn clothing.

Love is Thicker Than Water

Love is Thicker Than Water

In this modern-day retelling of the story of Romeo and Juliet, Arthur is a bike messenger from a working-class Welsh mining town and Vida is a cellist and daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from London. Their hipster romance takes on gratifying depth when their families—and their divergent backgrounds—come into play. The film feels simultaneously polished and experimental as it delicately explores hard questions about faith, love and devotion.

Joshua Z. Weinstein’s Brooklyn-based Yiddish drama is an authentic, tightly written, compelling story for anyone jonesing to hear more than a bisl (little bit) of the mamaloshen (mother tongue). Menashe, a complex and lovable schlemiel, is a young widower deep in the heart of New York’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community who is fighting for custody of his son and struggling with his aversion to marrying again.

Awkward but lovable single gal Moos is a young Jewish Dutch woman who has devoted the last seven years of her life to caring for her father after the death of her mother. When she finds herself suddenly entangled with two love interests at once, she has more to worry about than a new career on the road to independence. Will she follow the advice of her family or venture out on her own path?

More Alive Than Dead

More Alive Than Dead

The legacy of Sigmund Freud is a slippery subject indeed. Whatever your views on the founder of psychoanalysis, there is no denying his incalculable influence on science, art, culture and even language. More Alive Than Dead explores opinions on Freud over the years with a sense of humor accompanied by hilarious animation. Experts assess his influence on psychoanalysis, neurology, literature, the LGBT community, the economy and feminism. In other words, just about everything.

After Debbie hears about her father's life-changing musical experience in a refugee camp, she tracks down the famous conductor years later, with unexpected consequences.

Mr. Predictable

Mr. Predictable

Adi Levi is such a steady and reliable husband and father, everyone in his life takes him for granted—until he’s misdiagnosed with cancer and told he has only weeks to live. Everyone in his life continues to take him for granted, but in this endearing Israeli romantic comedy, he is finally forced to choose whether to stand up for himself or continue to let life push him around.

A compelling tale of loss, betrayal and redemption, Andrei Konchalovsky’s bold, black-and-white World War II drama won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion and was Russia’s entry in the 2017 Academy Awards. Three lives fatefully intersect when Russian countess Olga is arrested for sheltering two Jewish boys in Nazi-occupied France. Echoing the intensity of Laszlo Nemes Son of Saul, Konchalovsky’s deeply spiritual vision is a major contribution to Holocaust cinema.

Personal Affairs

Personal Affairs

In this dry, bitingly funny satire set in Nazareth, Ramallah and Sweden, a long-married Palestinian couple communicates through an elaborate series of mutually inflicted micro-aggressions. An official selection for the Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Maha Haj’s deftly insightful debut is both a timeless portrait of domestic discontent as well as a thoroughly contemporary and droll look at the bemusing indignities of border checkpoints, communications technology and impulsive romance.

Two séance-conducting sisters from America (the luminous Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp) meet a silver-haired French film producer who vows to capture their communions with the dead on his own cinematographic medium. This handsomely reptilian producer, who is based on the real-life illustrious filmmaker who was executed at Auschwitz, Bernard Natan, may be enchanted by the young and beautiful sisters, but he casts a darker, stronger spell on them.

In this tense, slow-burning thriller, a young woman finds herself on the dividing line between secular and religious life in Israel while confronting her uncertain future as a promising pianist. Naomi leaves her home in Tel Aviv for a new job in the Haredi neighborhood of Kiryat Yovel. The neighborhood is increasingly hostile to her for being secular, and things only get stranger when she develops a close friendship with a Catholic monk.

Rabbi Wolff: A Gentleman Before God

Rabbi Wolff: A Gentleman Before God

Willy Wolff escaped the Nazis, became a renowned British journalist and didn’t go to rabbinical school till he was in his 50s. Now in his 80s, he leads two communities in Germany and still finds time for yoga, learning Russian and enjoying the racetrack. We go behind the scenes to see the beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking life of a deeply religious man who is rarely seen without a twinkle in his eye.

The Willers were one of only 12 Jewish families to survive the Nazi occupation of Prague. More remarkably, they survived openly as Jews. Red Trees is an exquisitely filmed essay that chronicles the family’s life in the Czech Republic, their narrow escape from the death camps and eventual emigration to Brazil; it is both a testament to the human will to survive as well as a celebration of diversity and acceptance.

Stranger in Paradise

Stranger in Paradise

This timely fiction/documentary hybrid plays with our minds as a European lectures, then interrogates refugees from Africa and the Middle East who are seeking asylum. He tells them they are not wanted, then that they deserve refugee status, then asks specific questions to weed out those who do not qualify. First-time helmer Guido Hendrikx uses innovative and provocative techniques to make us share in the emotions of the most powerless people in the world.

Tadeusz Goldberg is having a midlife crisis . . . at the age of 90. He misses the loves of his youth and hates the libido-suppressing medication he must take to avoid memory loss and confusion. A Polish communist who fought against Franco in Spain, he later fled to exile in Buenos Aires, and became an adored chess champion. Defying clueless doctors and relatives, Tadeusz wonders if he can ever recapture the romance of his youth.

Adolescence is hard enough without having to worry about maintaining a world record. But for Naomi Kutin, shopping for a bat mitzvah dress, keeping up with homework and lifting nearly three times her weight is just another day. What started as a hobby turned awe-inspiring when Naomi set a world record in powerlifting. But as the young Orthodox Jewish girl approaches adolescence, the competition is getting fierce and unexpected health issues may jeopardize her future.

Peter Stephan Jungk’s fascinating documentary retraces the path of his great-aunt Edith Tudor-Hart, née Suschitzky, from her Viennese youth through her years as a Soviet spy in Great Britain. Her life was marked by tumultuous love affairs, a short-lived marriage, a son who became mentally ill at an early age, a Bauhaus education, unheralded work as a photographer and her recruitment of MI5 agent Kim Philby to spy for the Soviets.

Erez, an Israeli commissioned officer, and two other soldiers have been ordered to transfer an Arab prisoner to Megiddo prison. Along the way, a conflict arises that makes them all question their prejudices. Screens with Ben-Gurion, Epilogue

Voyage of the Damned

Voyage of the Damned

Haunting in its relevance for today’s refugee crisis, this star-studded 1976 film evokes the hopes and fears of a people uprooted from their homes en route to a promised land on the MS St. Louis, the ship that brought 937 Jews escaping Germany on the eve of the Shoah in 1939 to the shores of Cuba, where they are forbidden to disembark (only to then be similarly rejected by the United States and Canada)

The Young Karl Marx

The Young Karl Marx

Director Raoul Peck’s (I Am Not Your Negro) finely crafted period drama vividly brings to life the August, 1844 meeting between Karl Marx, a German philosopher and journalist exiled to Paris, and Friedrich Engels, the rebellious son of a wealthy factory owner. After Marx lobs a few barbs at the dandified Engels, a revolutionary bromance is born. Within a few years Marx and Engels founded the Communist League and created its defining document, the Communist Manifesto.

It’s no wonder this thriller has been optioned for an American remake; this television series is reminiscent of HBO’S The Night After in its gripping portrayal of upstanding citizens ensnared in Israeli’s underworld. A judge’s son is involved in a hit-and-run accident unwittingly killing the son of a notorious crime family. As the plot unfolds, the title, Your Honor, takes on a double meaning, as the judge discovers how far he’ll go to shield his son.

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