Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

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77 Steps

Filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana leaves her Arab-Muslim village to make a life for herself in Tel Aviv—and make a movie about her journey. Early on, she meets her Jewish-Canadian neighbor Jonathan, who becomes her boyfriend. Mara’ana creates a raw, nuanced portrait of their cross-cultural relationship as it unfolds against the backdrop of the 2009 Gaza war, and asks, Can love conquer all?

888-Go-Kosher

A day in the life of New York’s only rapid-response koshering service. A humorous and enlightening documentary look at the Jewish Orthodox world.

9 Star Hotel

An intimate look inside the lives of Palestinian construction workers who cross illegally into Israel in search of a livelihood. Director Ido Haar gains extraordinary access to a small band of workers who build luxury apartments by day but at night avoid arrest by scurrying into clandestine makeshift huts. Their determination to scratch out a living sheds poignant new light on the interdependence of two separated societies.

9 Years Later

Raised as a Muslim in Morocco, Danielle is now Jewish and a single mother living in Israel. At the beginning of this moving documentary, Danielle decides to return to Morocco to gain custody of the son she left behind. The filmmakers trace her difficult journey, skillfully unveiling the fascinating details of Danielle’s family history, while exploring themes of class, religious identity and the bonds between women.

The 90 Minute War

In this sharp-edged political mockumentary, a century of intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine is going to be settled once and for all . . . on the soccer field. The region’s leaders, in a desperate attempt, have agreed that one 90-minute match will determine the fate of two peoples: Winner gets to stay, loser goes away. Moshe Ivgy and Norman Issa (Arab Labor) star in a dark satire that scores some serious points.

93Queen

A cohort of bold ultraorthodox Jewish women battle to create their own all-female ambulance corps.

A mother and son shop for a Bar Mitzvah gift at a 99 Cent store.

A Study on Effort: A Duet Between Bobbi Jene and Keir GoGwilt

SFJFF is thrilled to present a rare duet performance from Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt, the subject of Bobbi Jene, in partnership with ODC Theater. She will perform her piece A Study on Effort on August 2.

A.K.A. Doc Pomus

This musically rich biography pays homage to Doc Pomus, the legendary Brill Building songwriter who authored such enduring rock-and-roll hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas” and dozens of others for talents as diverse as Dion, Elvis Presley, Dr. John and B.B. King. Like so many of his R&B songwriting colleagues, Doc Pomus was a city-bred Jew. Born Jerome Felder, he spent a lifetime overcoming both visible and private pain through his extraordinary songs. In this spirited documentary, he is revealed as an American original. [MINIGUIDE 94/100]

Abe | Film & Feast

The Israeli-Jewish side of his family calls him Avram. The Palestinian-Muslim side Ibrahim. His first-generation American agnostic lawyer parents call him Abraham. But the 12-year-old kid from Brooklyn who loves food and cooking, prefers, well, Abe. Just Abe.

Abe's Manhood

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Abortion: Stories Women Tell

Award-winning filmmaker and Missouri native Tracy Droz Tragos, director of the Sundance Grand Jury Award–winning documentary Rich Hill and Emmy-winning Be Good Smile Pretty confronts the power of Missouri’s restrictive abortion laws by sensitively telling the intimate stories of women who must surmount every obstacle to access abortion. This timely and relevant film reveals the ultimate connection between the right to choose and the right to live a fully empowered life. —Lexi Leban

About the Jews of Yemen

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Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force

This gripping documentary unfolds like The Great Escape, a true-life wartime adventure story. Produced by Nancy Spielberg and directed by Roberta Grossman (Hava Nagila: The Movie, SFJFF 2012), it celebrates the daring young pilots who volunteered to fly for Israel in the war of 1948. Though their planes were WWII junk heaps, their flight suits Nazi discards, their bravery and skill helped turn the tide of the war.

Abraham and Eugenia: Stories from Jewish Cuba

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The Abraham File

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Abraham Troen: Family Pictures

When violence claims a mother and great granddaughter a century apart, one family’s past and present collide, forcing each generation to decide what legacy of peace, justice and dignity they will carry forward.

Absolutely No Spitting

"So, you know how I told you to never spit? And that you're not allowed to spit and you shouldn't spit? SO... I need you to spit" And thus begins a very quirky, sometimes self-deprecating, and always heymish spit-driven DNA-journey-turned-love-letter between Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand, a fifty-something new old mom, and her much beloved and very spunky four-and-a-half-year-old adopted daughter Theo. And thank G-d they call NYC home - because it's the perfect place to embrace life as a multi-racial, multi-cultural, pan-global family.

Acne

At thirteen, Rafa Bregman is balanced on the brink of youth’s innocence and the expectations of adulthood—namely, a young man’s first kiss. Meanwhile, his family structure is shifting and his pimples are flaring out of control. Acne is a charmingly melancholic look back at the tiny battles of youth and the joys that come in between as a boy awkwardly makes his way toward what it means to be a man.

Across Time and Space

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Next Wave Spotlight: Act One

In this rhythmic psychological thriller, a lonely aspiring teen actress finds herself drawn to an acting teacher who pulls her into a web of desire and control, blurring the lines of seduction and obsession.

Adam

Directed by Transparent producer Rhys Ernst and adapted by Ariel Schrag from her novel of the same name, Adam drops us down in the hipster lesbian and trans culture of Brooklyn, 2006. It’s essentially a coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old straight, cisgender male who falls in love with a lesbian after she mistakes him for a transgender man. Adam decides to maintain this Shakespearean deception and a satirical and nuanced exploration of identity ensues.

Adam

When nice Jewish girl Beth (Rose Byrne) moves into a new apartment, the refreshingly literal, brainy guy next door, Adam (Hugh Dancy), is probably not what her upper-middle-class Jewish mom (Amy Irving) and dad (Peter Gallagher) had in mind for her. But cupid’s arrow strikes these two different denizens of Gotham hard; they have major chemistry and within minutes we find ourselves rooting for them to overcome differences in culture and communication styles.

Adam Sandler's Hanukah Song

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Adam's Circus

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Addes

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Adio

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Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

The Adventures of Saul Bellow is the first-ever documentary film on Bellow, the man described by critic James Wood as the "greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century."

Advocate

Israeli human-rights lawyer Lea Tsemel is a force that won't be deterred. Having defended Palestinians against a host of criminal charges in Israeli courts for nearly five decades, she is a staunch supporter of compassion within the court system. Frequently subjected to harsh criticism in the press and in the public view, Tsemel remains optimistically steadfast in her belief that justice can be served.In this impressive documentary, Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellache masterfully juxtapose two of Tsemel's cases, one professional and the other personal: the defense of a minor accused of attempted murder and a past case in which she defended her activist husband from an accusation of treason against the state. Delicately animated sequences conceal defendants' identities as Tsemel frankly addresses their best possible chances for acquittal, while interviews with Tsemel's adult children reveal her unique ability to see the humanity of those accused. Advocate is an original, provocative film that both exposes the human fallout of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and provides hope for a peaceful resolution.

Africa

Struggling with life post-retirement, 68-year-old Meir fights to restore his shaken sense of self. Director Oren Gerner blurs the lines between documentary and fiction, casting his own father as a man struggling against irrelevance and decline. Preceded by the short film, Long Distance.

After

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After the End of the World

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After Tiller

Screened to great acclaim at Sundance, this documentary about third-trimester abortion hardly sounds life-affirming on its surface. Yet Martha Shane and Lana Wilson inject a welcome dose of rationality to the incendiary topic. With deliberate pacing and a calming soundtrack, they offer an intimate portrait of the only four doctors in the United States who still perform the procedure, despite the assassination of their mentor Dr. George Tiller by an antiabortionist in 2009.

Aftermath

In this contemporary thriller, a hard-nosed Polish Catholic laborer from Chicago pays a visit back to his family’s farm in Poland to find that his brother is being mysteriously threatened and shunned by local townspeople. The brothers are inexorably drawn to investigate the village’s deep secrets about its long deceased Jewish residents. Made in Poland, Aftermath is proving controversial there for raising taboo topics of Polish complicity in wartime anti-Semitism.

Afternoon Delight

Rachel is a quick-witted, lovable, yet tightly coiled, thirtysomething steeped in the creative class of Los Angeles’s bohemian Silver Lake neighborhood. Everything looks just right—chic modernist home, successful husband, adorable child and a hipster wardrobe. So why is she going out of her gourd with ennui? Plagued by purposelessness, Rachel visits a strip club to spice up her marriage and meets a stripper whom she becomes obsessed with saving.

Afterward

Ofra Bloch, a New York-based psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family that emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. Disturbed by the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism around the world, Ofra travels to Germany, Israel, and Palestine to confront her own deep-seated feelings about Germans and Palestinians, and the tensions between the Holocaust and the Nakba. In the process, she explores the nature of resistance and the possibility of hope.

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