Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

2020 Filmmakers in Residence
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2026 JFI Completion Grants
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Filtered By: USA Clear All

Maintenance Artist

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 manifesto declaring her acts of household maintenance as performance art launched a lifelong, revolutionary collaboration with the maintenance workers of museums, galleries, and cities.

Making Morning Star

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Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women

What is it that makes funny Jewish women so funny…and so Jewish? Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women is a laugh-out-loud, impeccably researched documentary that explores six legendary American Jewish women comics. Director Rachel Talbot has created a tribute to Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Wendy Wasserstein and Gilda Radner, whose comedy defied cultural expectations and changed the rules. Get ready to duck when the zingers fly and guffaw at this humor-filled, insightful documentary. Our wacky guides on this comedic journey are four of today’s leading Jewish comedians: Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney and Jessica Kirson.

Malena Barrios: Call Me Lucky

Marc is the protagonist of the 8mm family films shot for over twenty years by his father Henry, a successful Holocaust survivor obsessed with filming happy moments.

Mama, L'Chaim! (To Life!)

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Mamboniks, The | Song and Dance

Bagels meet bongos in ""The Mamboniks,"" a feature-length documentary that tells the little-known story of the Jewish love affair with Latin music and dance. Set in New York, Havana, Miami Beach and the Catskill Mountains, this fun, uplifting film features a lovable, somewhat zany collection of dancers from the 1950s. Now retired yet still dancing, they share their passion for the mambo, the hot dance from Cuba that became a world-wide sensation. With an infectious soundtrack including Tito Puente, Celia Cruz and mambo king Pérez Prado, this film explores a mostly unexamined aspect of Jewish life and culture.

Mamele

Molly Picon, barely five feet tall but a giant of the Yiddish stage and screen, owns the title role of the put-upon “little mother” who plays Cinderella to an ungrateful family that would do Fassbinder proud. A sparkling mix of humor, song and pathos, Mamele, in a restoration honoring the film’s 75th anniversary, is fascinating for its portrayal of gender roles and Jewish life in Poland between the wars.

The Man Without a World

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Manhood

MANHOOD is a darkly funny, compelling family drama that probes the depths of masculinity. Starring Nestor Carbonell, John Ritter and Janeane Garofolo, the film asks: What does it mean to be a father? How do men show love for their sons? MANHOOD is a brilliant look at the intersection of sex, love, and family, and how they shape a man's life.

Marc Smolowitz: The Lonely Child

THE LONELY CHILD is a feature documentary that tells the story of a little-known Yiddish lullaby “Dos Elnte Kind” written inside the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust.

The March

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Marisa Fox: My Underground Mother

Freedom fighter. Femme fatale. Double agent. My mother claimed she had been all three. Many years after her death, a secret diary from a Nazi women’s camp reveals a fourth, leading me on a global investigation to reckon with the harsh truths she took to her grave.

Matzo Balls and Black-Eyed Peas

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Matzo Maidels

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Maurice at the World's Fair

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Mazel Tov: Lesbian and Gay Weddings

Get ready to sing "simon tov and mazel tov" at two Jewish lesbian weddings in the U.S. and a gay Jewish wedding in Rotterdam. Local filmmaker Bonnie Burt’s My Sister, My Bride, Academy Award-nominated Chicks in White Satin, and The Gil & Moti Wedding Project will have you heading for the chuppah!

McJew

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Meaning of Hitler, The

What can history tell us about the present? Filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (Karl Marx City) search for answers, taking inspiration from Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 German best-selling book The Meaning of Hitler. Shot in nine countries, the film explores what Hitler means in the current waves of white supremacy, antisemitism, and the weaponization of history. We hear provocative insights from historians and writers such as Martin Amis, Deborah Lipstadt, and Saul Friedlander, along with famed Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, on why understanding history is more urgent than ever.

Meg Moritz: Isobel Lennart: The Forgotten Funny Girl

She fled a Jewish past only to rediscover it in her last and most famous work, "Funny Girl." Now meet Isobel Lennart, the Hollywood screenwriter who forever changed the way audiences view Jews and women on the silver screen.

Meika Rouda: My Peeps are Whiteys

MY PEEPS ARE WHITEYS is an exploration of identity and how we become who we are. Meika Rouda was adopted as a newborn and never knew her biological background until she was in her thirties and trying to make a family of her own. Because she has exotic looks, she often had people tell her what ethnicity they thought she might be, and in turn sometimes took on those identities to see if they fit.

Melinda Hess: Letter from Cloudcroft

Finding an old suitcase, filmmaker, daughter Melinda Hess looks inside and finds an unopened letter from the piles of her Jewish family’s ephemeral materials. The discovery of the 1946 letter inspires her journey to uncover an American Space Race story as seen through a daughter and Father story lens, revealing the true story of how we got to the moon from the rocket slave camps of the Holocaust.

Memento Mori

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Menashe

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.

MERV

Simon is unexpectedly summoned to his grandmother’s house to meet her new boyfriend, Merv. The man he encounters there upends his understanding of love, loss, and Chinese takeout.

Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is | 2:30pm pst

In 1970, Michael Tilson Thomas was considered the great young hope of American classical music. Oscillating between performance and the personal, Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is offers an intimate look at an exceptional artist who continues to blaze his own trail.

Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw

WNBA star Chamique Holdsclaw has always defied expectations. In her youth she seemed destined for trouble having been born to alcoholic parents. But she worked out her frustrations on the basketball court and grew up to become an iconic figure in women’s basketball, revered by some as “the female Michael Jordan.” Her struggle and her subsequent advocacy around mental illness issues embody the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world through one’s actions.

Miriam

The girl chosen to be the first Bat Mitzvah of her Orthodox community schemes to skip Hebrew lessons and pursue her one true passion: skateboarding.

Molly's Pilgrim

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Monk in Pieces

Visionary composer and performer Meredith Monk overcame hostile critics to become one of the great artists of her generation. In her seventh decade of creativity, she ponders how such singular work can go on without her.

Monk in Pieces

Meredith Monk–Jewish-American composer, performer, and director–is one of the unsung creative geniuses of our time. Featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces illuminates Monk’s wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery.

Montana Oysters

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Moses vs. Godzilla

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The Mountain

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Moving Heaven and Earth

Moving Heaven and Earth tells the fascinating story of the Abayudaya, a community of Jews in rural Uganda, and explores the unique Jewish identity, music and culture of these African Jews.

Murray Avenue: A Jewish Community In Transition

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Music Man Murray

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