Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

2020 Filmmakers in Residence
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2024 JFI Completion Grants
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2025 JFI Completion Grants
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2026 JFI Completion Grants
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JFI Filmmakers in Residence
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Pre-2020 Filmmaker In Residence
SFJFF 1981
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Silent Film w/ English Intertitles
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Film Type

Animation
Documentary
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Television Series

Filtered By: USA Clear All

Photos of Her

Conservative Shiri hires Lidor, a liberal trans woman, for her maternity photo shoot. When Shiri’s husband leaves them alone together, they explore questions together about their changing bodies and identities.

Pickled Herring

After getting in an embarrassing accident, Irina must rely on her old world father’s care, but he uses the opportunity to pester her about her modern life.

Plan C (Take Action Spotlight)

Francine Coeytaux, co-director of the grassroots organization Plan C, organizes an extraordinary group of activists and medical professionals in the fight to expand nationwide access to the abortion pill regardless of the consequences.

Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish

This delightful documentary follows Jerry Ross Barrish, an unorthodox sculptor in his 70s, as he struggles to achieve commercial success. Daylighting as a bail bondsman and formally a pioneering independent filmmaker, Barrish now sculpts with found plastic—trash, essentially—which he assembles into works of Picasso-esque humanity. Too often art documentaries treat their subjects with reverent distance. But Barrish’s infectious charm and whimsical art will make you want to pick up a pencil and start drawing.

Please Kill Me…

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Pleasures of Urban Decay

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The Plot Against Harry

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Polish Bar

By day young and ambitious Reuben Horowitz (Vincent Piazza) works a Chicago jewelry store for his uncle Sol (Judd Hirsch). But his wild nights are spent honing his DJ skills at a strip joint while dreaming of spinning wax at a top local club. Things really heat up when Reuben gambles his uncle Sol’s merchandise on a big drug score in this gritty, raucous drama suffused with an urban Jewish hip-hop vibe.

Poor Consuelo Conquers the World

Around the world millions of viewers are devoted to their favorite soap opera or telenovela. Way before the Internet, Mexican telenovela director Miguel Sabido believed that fictional media characters could influence social change, so he created a dynamic new field called entertainment-education. Like Sabido’s work, director Peter Friedman’s Poor Consuelo Conquers the World is a wildly entertaining documentary that also provides a new blueprint for real social change.

Porcelain War

Ukrainian artists Slava, Anya, and Andrey find and create beauty amid the destruction of war in this striking documentary.

The Port of Last Resort

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Postmortem

POSTMORTEM, a hybrid documentary film and theater project, is a boundary-pushing crime drama about a girl who didn’t tell her childhood secret—and the woman she becomes, who does.

Poumy

Poumy: What turns a young French-Jewish mother into a fierce Resistance fighter? "Poumy" Scheuer Moreuil would say she simply "knew how to do the right thing." Understated eloquence from a 91-year-old marvel.

Praying With Lior

Praying with Lior is simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. It’s a deeply human coming-of-age portrait of Lior Liebling, a Down’s Syndrome kid—as loving and joyful and playful a child as you will ever meet. More than anything, Lior is filled with an unquenchable spirit of prayer and singing. His devotion saturates his entire world with a love that is his manna—it multiplies and nourishes everyone.

The Precious Legacy

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The Prince of Egypt

SFJFF invites audiences to rediscover this classic for its 25th anniversary. This animated adaptation of the Exodus story features an all-star voice cast, award-winning songs by Stephen Schwartz and score by Hans Zimmer.

A Private Life

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The Producers (2005)

Max is a Broadway producer with a reputation for consistently churning out flops. Leo is a nebbish accountant. Soon after meeting, Leo plants the idea of embezzlement in Max’s head. Before you know it, their get-rich-quick scheme is born. All they have to do is put together the granddaddy of all flops and they’ll be rolling in dough. However, making a disaster isn’t as easy as it seems.

Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman

An admiring, unsentimental portrait of a Brooklyn boy who became a mensch: the legendary socialist, labor organizer, Spanish Civil War vet and tireless activist Saul Wellman.

Prognosis: Notes on Living - Local Spotlight SFJFF41

When maverick Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Debra Chasnoff is diagnosed with stage-4 breast cancer, she faces injustice as always, with her camera.

Prognosis: Notes on Living - Local Spotlight SFJFF41 (Castro)

When maverick Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Debra Chasnoff is diagnosed with stage-4 breast cancer, she faces injustice as always, with her camera.

Projections of America

Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town won him a 1937 Oscar. Less well known is Riskin’s series of short films, produced to aid America’s WWII effort. The films’ American values reflect his own Jewish, left-leaning principles, countering foreigners’ negative stereotypes of United States citizens. With narration by John Lithgow, director Peter Miller skillfully brings this effort to light.

Promises

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Protocols of Zion

Since 9/11, an alarming upsurge of anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States and around the world repeats claims that Jews seek world domination--a theory propagated by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a century-old tract that, despite being discredited as a libelous forgery, is still widely available and cited. Veteran documentarian Marc Levin takes a personal odyssey to investigate the persistence of what Elie Wiesel calls "the oldest collective bigotry in history."

A Psalm for Moshe

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Public Defender

A liberal public defender representing January 6th rioters takes on America’s epidemic of division with humanity, restoring trust and accountability one conversation at a time.

Puerto Rican Jew

A Puerto Rican man finds out he is half Jewish after taking a DNA test.

Pushcarts and Plantations: Jewish Life in Louisiana

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Raananah: A World of Our Own

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The Rabbi & Cesar Chavez

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Rabbi Goes West, The

The film follows a controversial Chabad Hasidic rabbi from Brooklyn who moved ten years ago to Bozeman, Montana to bring his brand of Judaism to the American west. It examines Jewish identity in one of the most non-Jewish parts of the country, and sees what happens when other established forms of American Judaism (Reform, Conservative) are challenged by this Hasidic rabbi's undeniably charismatic Chabad presence.

Rabbi on the Block

A Black rabbinical student combats racism, misogyny and gun violence by caring for her community on the South Side of Chicago in this inspiring portrait.

Rafea Solar Mama

Can an illiterate grandmother from Jordan become a solar engineer? Rafea, a Bedouin woman from Jordan, says, “Yes!” But when she returns from Barefoot College in India as the first female solar engineer in the entire country, Rafea’s real challenge is just beginning. Will she find support for her new venture? Will she be able to rewire the traditional minds of the Bedouin community that stand in her way?

Raise the Roof

In the early 2000s, two professors were captivated by a series of now vanished but once resplendent synagogues whose painted interiors captured the color of Jewish life in 18th-century Poland. Determined to restore the splendor of these wooden structures, the husband-and-wife team recruited 300 young artists and students to reconstruct a life-sized model of one such synagogue. Raise the Roof tracks the labor and love that illuminate a glorious piece of Jewish history.

Ráj

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Raw Images from the Optic Cross

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