Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

2020 Filmmakers in Residence
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Film Type

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Television Series

Rue Mandar

Take a traditional Jewish funeral whose rituals no one can quite recall. Mix in a Yiddishkeit setting in a predominantly Sephardic Jewish community. Add one of the most beautiful cities in the world as your location and top it off with a terrific ensemble cast. The result, Idit Cébula’s charmingly poignant French film Rue Mandar, reminds us that the messy, sometimes humorous and often bittersweet business of death can lead to new beginnings.

Rule of Stone

If Jerusalem stone could speak, it would tell this story: from Imperial Britain to the Israeli occupation, buildings in Jerusalem have been clad in it. This is a story of how beauty and abuse go hand in hand.

Run Boy Run

Srulik is running for his life. Literally. His once happy family is now dead or dispersed following the Nazi occupation of Poland, and he is alone in the world. Based on a true story, Run Boy Run tells the harrowing tale of young Srulik as he struggles to evade capture by the Nazis and ward off starvation, a harrowing story comprised in equal measures of cruelty and compassion, despair and hope.

Run Trailer

About This Film

Running On Sand

When a young Eritrean refugee at risk of deportation from Israel is mistaken for the new foreign player of a struggling soccer team, his survival depends on the team’s success.

Russ Finkelstein: Our Home Is Not Of This World

Our Home Is Not Of This World follows the work of a medical examiner’s office in Texas that identifies people who die crossing the border, revealing its personal, political and spiritual significance.

Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House

Ruthie and Connie, a working-class Jewish lesbian couple in their 60's, share stories of their emergence as a lesbian couple, their previous marriages, and the everyday ups and downs of their relationship- all as a vehicle for exploring Jewish identity.

Saba

Saba is a metaphorical animated short film, about life, our journey and the endless effort to get closure with the meaningful people in our life.

Sabbath Queen

Sabbath Queen joins director Sandi DuBowski and his rabbi, Amichai, on a lifelong and cinematic quest to creatively and radically reinvent religion, ritual, and love for a challenging, rapidly changing twenty-first century.

Sabbath Queen | Closing Night

From drag-queen rebel to rabbi, Amichai Lau Lavie radically reinvents religion and ritual and establishes a God-optional, artist-driven, pop-up experimental congregation.

Sabbath Queen SoulSpa with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie

Before the San Francisco Closing Night presentation of "Sabbath Queen" join Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie and Shira Kline, founders of Lab/Shul for a special SoulSpa experience at Congregation Sha'ar Zahav.

The Sacred Society

A documentary animated in sand about the volunteers who clean, dress, and prepare bodies for burial according to Jewish tradition.

Sacred Sperm

For the Orthodox Jewish community, masturbation is a grave sin. Filmmaker Ori Gruder grapples with how to educate his prepubescent son about his emerging sexuality. Sacred Sperm challenges viewers to explore the subject of human sexuality through the lens of deeply religious people. It is also a universal tale of parents anxious at the prospect of their children transitioning from the innocence of childhood into the moral complexities of adulthood.

Sada

An Arab-Israeli kindergarten teacher defies expectations after her husband’s death by taking over the family coffee factory. Facing a conservative family, patriarchy, racism, and crime, she is determined to succeed and carve a new path.

Safe Spaces (After Class) | Next Wave Spotlight

"Safe Spaces" is a comedy about a NYC professor who spends a week re-connecting with his family while defending his reputation over controversial behavior at a college.

Saint Clara

About This Film

Sal Santen, Rebel

About This Film

Salomea's Nose

Salomea remembers the day her beloved brothers, Max and Karl, disfigured her and themselves for life. The Day of Tragedy, is what their mother called it, and blamed it on the fate of her children. Though fate and tragedy have a different meaning by the end of her tale. A tragicomedy about sibling rivalry, disfigurement and the pain that binds us. With Barbara Sukowa as the voice of Salomea.

Salty Somewhat Spicy

Gur and Gaya run a delivery restaurant in their village home’s kitchen. A house demolition order disrupts the peace, cracks their relationship, and forces them to redefine the term “home.”

Sam Radutzky & Josh Fruend: Joyva

Joyva, the 113-year-old, family-run candy company, a beloved household name amongst Jewish Americans that’s woven into the fabric of their traditions, is at risk of going out of business, along with its legacy and four generations of dreams, which the great-grandchildren must now fight to save.

Sam Spiegel Film School--A Tribute in Shorts [program]

The most prestigious film school in Israel, Sam Spiegel boasts Israel’s top filmmakers among its graduates, including feature filmmakers Nir Bergman (Broken Wings), Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (James’ Journey to Jerusalem) and Omri Levy (Miss Entebbe). Renen Schorr, Founder and Director of the school, will present this slice-of-life showcase of Israeli films -- some political, some humorous, but all exceptionally well crafted shorts from filmmakers to watch. The program includes Bergman’s coming-of-age short Sea Horses.

Closing Night: Sammy Davis, Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me

Closing Night: Director Sam Pollard’s riveting portrait of a supremely complex, courageous and very talented man.

Samson

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Samy y Yo

Samy Goldstein, a television scriptwriter who suffers from acute consciousness, is a lovable anti-hero plagued by doubts about his intellectual worth in this witty comedy. The television program he is writing for suffers from plummeting ratings when his new girlfriend sees his potential, not as a writer, but as a character and pop icon with his own show. Viva reality TV! preceded by FOUR SHORT FILMS ABOUT LOVE (New Jewish Filmmaker Project)

Sand Box

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Sand Storm

Layla, a teenager in a Bedouin village in South Israel has a cell phone, drives a car, and has a secret boyfriend at the college she is attending. She watches from a distance as her mother accepts her father’s second wife into their family, prompting questions about her own future. This stunning first feature by Israeli director Elite Zexer sympathetically captures the struggle between tradition and modernity in the beautifully stark Negev desert landscape.-Lexi LebanWinner, World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival 2016

About This Film

About This Film

About This Film

About This Film

Sari Gilman: One Family

ONE FAMILY is about the wildly divergent views on Israel that exist within the filmmaker's own Jewish family. A hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, it is a meditation on the meaning of home and belonging.

Satan & Adam

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT: This doc captures the unlikely teaming up of a young Jewish harmonica player and a Black street musician.

Sauna Dreams

Dave Roffman, Sauna Athlete, is on a quest to win the 2023 World Sauna Championships in Detroit.

Saved By Deportation: An Unknown Odyssey of Polish Jews

Most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust did so because of being deported to Stalin’s gulags and then living out the war in the southern Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. A blessing, if a mixed one, as Saved by Deportation recounts with wit and charm, following two lively eighty-somethings back to the scene where they came of age.

Saviors in the Night

Based on true events, this bravura drama powerfully records one memorable instance of moral courage under desperate conditions. Menne Spiegel, a German Jew, meets his old army comrade Heinrich Aschoff on the eve of a mass deportation of Jews in 1943. Aschoff, a Catholic farmer with a conscience, agrees to shelter Spiegel’s wife Marga and their daughter in spite of the deadly risk to his own family. Saviors in the Night, based on Marga’s best-selling memoir, relates the extraordinary true story of the families’ perilous years together. Join us for Opening Night in San Francisco with special invited guests Marga Spiegel, director Ludi Boeken and principal actor Lia Hoensbroech. Followed by Opening Night Bash at Swedish American Hall.

Savoy

An engrossing hybrid film from the perspective of a forgotten heroine. Taken as hostage, Kochava Levy volunteers to mediate between the PLO and the IDF, but her bravery becomes overshadowed by her personal life.

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