Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

2020 Filmmakers in Residence
2020 JFI Completion Grants
2021 Filmmakers in Residence
2021 JFI Completion Grants
2022 Filmmakers in Residence
2022 JFI Completion Grants
2023 Filmmakers in Residence
2023 JFI Completion Grants
2024 Filmmakers in Residence
2024 JFI Completion Grants
2025 Filmmakers in Residence
2025 JFI Completion Grants
2026 Filmmakers in Residence
2026 JFI Completion Grants
Cinegogue Summer Days
JFI Filmmakers in Residence
JFI/JSP Momentum Awards
Pre-2020 Filmmaker In Residence
SFJFF 1981
SFJFF 1982
SFJFF 1983
SFJFF 1984
SFJFF 1985
SFJFF 1986
SFJFF 1987
SFJFF 1988
SFJFF 1989
SFJFF 1990
SFJFF 1991
SFJFF 1992
SFJFF 1993
SFJFF 1994
SFJFF 1995
SFJFF 1996
SFJFF 1997
SFJFF 1998
SFJFF 1999
SFJFF 2000
SFJFF 2001
SFJFF 2002
SFJFF 2003
SFJFF 2004
SFJFF 2005
SFJFF 2006
SFJFF 2007
SFJFF 2008
SFJFF 2009
SFJFF 2010
SFJFF 2011
SFJFF 2012
SFJFF 2013
SFJFF 2014
SFJFF 2015
SFJFF 2016
SFJFF 2017
SFJFF 2018
SFJFF 2019
SFJFF 2021
SFJFF 2023
SFJFF 2024
SFJFF 2025
SFJFF 2026
SFJFF Madrid
SFJFF Moscow
WinterFest 2019
WinterFest 2026

Country

Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belarus
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Chile
China
Colombia
Cuba
Cyprus
Czechia
Czechoslovakia
Denmark
Egypt
Ethiopia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
India
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Latvia
Lebanon
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Mali
Mexico
Morocco
Netherlands
Norway
Palestine
Palestinian Territories
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Romania
Russia
Slovakia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Tunisia
Turkey
Uganda
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
USA
Uzbekistan
Venezuela

Language

Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Bambara
Berber
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Cameroonian
Catalan
Chinese
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Farsi
French
Georgian
German
Gikuyu
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Italian
Japanese
Kazakh
Ladino
Latvian
Lithuanian
Mandarin
Moroccan
Norwegian
Patois
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Romany
Russian
Silent
Silent Film w/ English Intertitles
Slovak
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Thai
Tigrinya
Turkish
Ukrainian
Yiddish
Zaghawan

Film Type

Animation
Documentary
Episodic
Experimental
Feature
Narrative
Short
Shorts Program
Television Series

Comedy Warriors

Five disabled Iraq/Afghanistan vets bring their painful life-altering experiences onstage, transforming tragedy into brutally fierce comedy gold, mentored by mirth masters Bob Saget, Zach Galifinakis and Lewis Black. With only days to prepare, the five are flown to Hollywood for a gig at LA’s famous Punch Line club. The big night finds the comedy warriors comprehending the healing power of humor and discovering that their lives are about to take an unexpected direction. Followed by live standup comedy by subject Joe Kashnow.

Commandments

In this binge-worthy Israeli TV drama, a thief and an Orthodox Jew form an unlikely friendship in basic training.

Commie Camp

Commie Camp opens with Rush Limbaugh blasting an Obama nominee for sending her kids to a “politically left-wing Jewish summer camp with Communist roots”. That’s Camp Kinderland, and filmmaker and comedian Katie Halper, a third generation Kinderlander, returns to make this delightful film about an inclusive, multiethnic, antiracist community dedicated to making the world a better place. Education or indoctrination? You decide.

Commissar

About This Film

Common Goal, A

Almost half the players on the Israeli National Soccer Team are Muslim, including the captain. The team’s diverse group of players causes controversy, especially during an important European tournament, most of it provoked by racist fans and the media. The players have their loyalty questioned by all sides while trying to guide Israel’s national team through the year’s biggest international challenge.

Commune

What draws Jews to utopian communities? From socialist farms in the early Soviet days to kibbutzim and moshavim, Jews have often been attracted to communal living. Jonathan Berman’s engaging documentary explores one of the boldest such experiments: the Black Bear Ranch in Siskiyou County, California. Featuring Black Bear members Harriet Beinfeld, Peter Coyote, Geba Greenberg, Efrem Korngold, Elsa Marley and Osha Neumann, among others, Commune is an elegantly crafted testament to people who dared to dream of a world remade.

SFJFF38 Community Shabbat Dinner

Join the Jewish Film Institute Staff and Board in welcoming the artists and filmmakers celebrated in this year’s line up to San Francisco at the SFJFF38 Community Shabbat Dinner.

A Compassionate Spy

Academy Award® nominated filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams) tells the story of Ted Hall, the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, and his fateful decision to leak highly classified nuclear secrets to the Soviets.

Complaints

About This Film

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter

With remarkable insight and a healthy dose of levity, Deborah Hoffmann chronicles the various stages of her mother's Alzheimer's disease as well as the evolution of her own response to this illness. This Academy Award- nominated film explores the mysteries of memory and the fierce and complex facets of a daughter's love.

Comrade Stalin's Trip to Africa

About This Film

Concert Yiddish Soul

About This Film

The Conductor - Centerpiece Documentary

A joyful tribute to perseverance, resiliency, and most of all the music, The Conductor is a profile of one groundbreaking woman who believes in the transformational power of art.

Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology

The kaleidoscope of clips in this wide-ranging documentary is so entertaining one could happily watch it with the sound off. But it would be a shame to miss Tiffany Shlain’s meditations on modern life and technology. The Bay Area–based filmmaker delves into everything from the honeybee crisis to her household’s weekly “technology shabbat” to her father’s struggle with brain cancer, all in an effort to understand our need to connect.

The Conspiracy and the Dybbuk

About This Film

The Conspiracy

Documentarian Maxim Pozdorovkin employs historical research and creative storytelling to combat the fallacy of the “secret cabal” that has served as the bedrock of anti-Semitism. Narrated by Mayim Bialik, and including the voice talents of Liev Schreiber and Jason Alexander.

Judith Helfand: Freedom of Expression Award 2019 | COOKED: Survival by Zip Code

In July 1995, a heat wave overtook Chicago: high humidity and a layer of heat-retaining pollution drove the heat index up to more than 126 degrees. City roads buckled, rails warped, electric grids failed, thousands became ill and people began to die - by the hundreds. Cooked tells the story of this heat wave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 Chicago citizens died in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. Balancing serious and somber with her respectful, albeit ironic and and signature quirkly style, Peabody award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand explores this drama that, when peeled away, reveals the less newsworthy but long-term crisis of pernicious poverty, economic, and social isolation and racism. Cooked is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city.

Cosmopolitan

Jacob goes out, for the first time in his life, to a gay party, but discovers that his skin color prevents him from being accepted into the community. The film is part of the ""Equals"" project, by the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund.

Count the Lenins on My Back

About This Film

Cours Toujours (Dad on the Run)

About This Film

Crime After Crime

Yoav Potash’s documentary is a shattering chronicle of Deborah Peagler, an African American woman imprisoned for the 1983 murder of her horribly abusive boyfriend. After a law passes allowing survivors of domestic violence to appeal their sentences, two idealistic lawyers, one an Orthodox Jew, become convinced they can set her free. This is a staggering account of a fight against injustice and a suspect system still imprisoning hundreds of thousands of women across America today.

A Crime on the Bayou

Filmmaker Nancy Buirski (The Loving Story) tells the story of a lasting bond formed between an unjustly arrested Black man, Gary Duncan, and Richard Sobol, his young Jewish attorney.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

About This Film

The Critic

About This Film

Critico, El

Víctor Tellez is jaded, emotionally repressed and arrogant. Not surprisingly, he is an influential but harsh film critic for a daily newspaper. Victor especially detests Hollywood romantic comedies until he meets Sofía, a spontaneous and vibrant woman. He finds himself going soft, and his movie reviews reflect this. El Critico is intelligent, funny, delightful and ultimately succumbs to the genre Víctor so derisively abhors. Love conquers all, even this cynical snob.

The Cross Inscribed in the Star of David

THE CROSS INSCRIBED IN THE STAR OF DAVID tells the compelling story of Father Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel and the search for his identity. Already ordained a priest for twelve years, Father Weksler-Waszkinel learns on his 35th birthday that he is a Jew saved from the ghetto of Swieciany by his foster parents. In this man's unusual destiny, the Judaic and Christian traditions naturally fuse, a fact seemingly beyond belief.

Crossing Delancey

A contemporary romantic comedy in which single, sophisticated Isabelle confronts family tradition when her grandmother hires a matchmaker to find her a marriage prospect.

Crossroads

Meet the determined young African American high schoolers in Charlotte whose lives change when they encounter an inspiring coach.

Cup Final

About This Film

Current Events

About This Film

Curtiz | SFJFF In Good Company

As America prepares to enter WW2, Hungarian film director Michael Curtiz grapples with political intervention and a dysfunctional relationship with his estranged daughter amid the troubled production of Casablanca in 1942.

The Cutoff Man

Gabi’s life is about the stuff that broken dreams are made of. He is an unemployed family man who takes a job severing the water pipes of customers who don’t pay their bills. It’s demoralizing work, but it allows him to pay for things like his beloved son’s goalie gloves. Israeli director Idan Hubel creates an authentic portrait, and quietly condemns an economic system that cuts off people from each other and themselves.

Cuz You're Ugly

Avigail returns home from army service to the Jerusalem apartment she shares with her dysfunctional mother and her younger sister. She hopes to untie the chains of childhood and lose her virginity over the weekend, but things take a sharp turn.

Cycles

Cyril Gelblat uses a light hand to sketch a “sandwich” generation crisis: Cycles shows the special nature of middle age for the children of French Holocaust survivors, as a sister (Miou-Miou) and brother (Charles Berling) watch their mother (Shulamit Adar) slip into an unfathomable world of memories at the same time as their children are slipping effortlessly into adulthood. In marvelous performances, the absurdity of their situation tempers any threat of pathos.

Dancing Alfonso

a pitch-perfect portrait of a vital widower who finds a physical practice that sustains him, and community and creativity in the rhythms and movement of flamenco.

Dancing Dogs of Dombrova, The

On a cold winter night, estranged siblings Sarah and Aaron Cotler arrive at an empty train station in Dombrova, Poland. With their only available ride being a determinedly silent driver, they embark on a quest to fulfill their dying grandmother's wish-to find, dig up, and bring home the bones of her favorite childhood dog, Peter. While navigating the many obstacles and colorful characters they encounter on their journey, Sarah and Aaron must come to terms with their own demons and differences, while also contending with a soicety seemingly content to let its past lay buried for good.

...