Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

2020 Filmmakers in Residence
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2024 JFI Completion Grants
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Film Type

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Television Series

Phantom Limb

Silence shrouded the death of filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt’s little brother four decades ago; Phantom Limb is his haunting and healing meditation on postponed grief.

Phnom Penh Lullaby

Polish doc maker Pawel Kloc¹s riveting doc look at naïve and desperate Israeli tarot card reader, Ilian Shickman, his Cambodian girlfriend, Saran, and two infant daughters who struggle each night to make a living on an avenue lined with prostitutes, pimps, and drunken tourists. This unflinching portrait of a family's descent into madness makes this powerful film one of the best docs of the year.

A Photographic Memory | Artist Spotlight

In this intimate, genre-bending documentary, filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed attempts to piece together a portrait of her late mother after discovering her archive of work.

A Photographic Memory

A daughter attempts to piece together a portrait of her mother, an avant-garde journalist and a woman she never knew. Uncovering the vast archive Sheila Turner-Seed produced, including lost interviews with iconic photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, and Lisette Model, the film explores memory, legacy and stories left untold.

Photographs for Our Children

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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.

Physician, Heal Thyself

World renowned addiction expert Gabor Mate’s polarizing ideas are explored through the story of his life and personal evolution.

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.

Picture of His Life | EAST BAY OPENING NIGHT

"Amos Nachoum is one of the greatest underwater photographers of all times.Fascinated by the most fearsome creatures on Earth, he has developed a unique approach, that puts him face to face with his subjects, without any protection. He has swam with and photographed Anacondas, Giant Leopard Seals, Great White Sharks, Orcas and Crocodiles, but Now, at the age of 65, he is about to face his ultimate challenge: to swim, face face, unprotected with A Polar Bear.While he is on this journey to the Canadian high Arctic, he will also have to deal with an old and painful memory…."

Pillar of Salt

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Pink Lady

Bati and Lazer have a seemingly perfect marriage and family, but they must renegotiate their desires when Lazer is blackmailed over an affair with his male study partner.

A Place in Heaven

A fiercely non-believing, war-weary soldier sells his place in Heaven to an army cook for a plate of scrambled eggs. With this fable-like incident at its heart, A Place in Heaven charts how the unholy bargain resonates through four decades in the life of a war hero/criminal, asking epic questions like: Are the sins of the father inevitably visited on the son? Who really deserves a place in Heaven?

Plan A - SFJFF41 Closing Night

Based on a true story. In 1945, a group of Jewish holocaust survivors planned to poison the water system in Germany, killing back 6 million Germans. The film tells the dangerous and bold secret-operation which was called ""PLAN A"".

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.

Planetarium

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.

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.

Playing God

Kenneth Feinberg inhabits a unique role in the American legal system where everything—including a life—has a price.

Please Kill Me…

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Pleasures of Urban Decay

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The Plot Against Harry

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The Polgar Variant

In the annals of chess, the true story of the Hungarian Polgár sisters has become the stuff of legend. Believing every child to be a potential genius, father Laszlo Polgár put his young daughters, Zsuzsa, Sofia and Judit, through a daily marathon of intense game training. The Communist dictatorship confiscated the girl’s passports and even threatened Polgár with imprisonment, but the Polgár girls went on to conquer the male-dominated world of chess.

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.

Polonaise

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Poor Butterfly

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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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Portrait of My Family in My Thirteenth Year

Omri is trying to direct a scene recreating the day his dog died. The attempt becomes complicated when Omri discovers that his father remembers the events differently.

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.

Powder Keg

In icy cold Europe in 2015, people are slowly moving on after the shocking terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris earlier in the winter. In Copenhagen, the newly released criminal Omar has his own agenda. Meanwhile filmmaker Finn, Jewish watchman Dan and the worn-out action force officer Rico live their various everyday lives without knowing that they will all soon cross paths. Only one of them will be left alive to discover if there’s a way out of the anger, in a city and country that will remember this day as a historic milestone.

Praying in Her Own Voice

Praying in Her Own Voice documents the contentious struggle of Women of the Wall for the right to wear prayer shawls and read aloud from a Torah scroll at the Western Wall—acts that are fiercely objected to by the Orthodox establishment in Israel. The film follows the group for two years during their services, hearings at the Supreme Court and violent confrontations with their ultra-Orthodox opponents.

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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Precious Life

Journalist Shlomi Eldar made his career as a war correspondent for Israeli television. His beat was Gaza, but after Hamas came to power Gaza was closed. He looks now to hospitals—one of the few remaining bridges between Israelis and Palestinians—for stories. Following a lead to a desperate Palestinian family trying to save their immune-deficient baby, Eldar tells a dramatic, complex story through a hopeful, humanist lens in this internationally acclaimed film.

Presence Feminine

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