Film Archive | Jewish Film Institute

Exhibition Series

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Vulcan Junction

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Waiting for the Messiah

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Wajeh

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Wajib

Shadi, an architect who lives in Italy, returns to Nazareth for the wedding of his sister.

The Waldheim Waltz

CENTERPIECE DOCUMENTARY: A stunning chronicle of Austrian Kurt Waldheim’s 1986 presidential election bid.

Wall

Simone Bitton’s Sundance award-winning Wall explores the physical and psychological dimensions of the barrier being built to divide Israel and the Palestinian territories. Bitton, a Mizrahi Jew, interviews Israelis and Palestinians who live and work close to the wall; all are affected by the rupture it creates in the landscape. Bitton’s painterly cinematography and restrained pacing allow her subjects to speak for themselves.

Wall Within the City

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A Walled Garden

Efrat, a religious woman who grew up in the secular world, is married to a young rabbi and raising three small daughters. Curiosity draws her to the walled garden of the St. Clare monastery in Jerusalem, where befriends a number of the nuns there and tries to get a sense of the women they are under their severe black and white dress, their faith and their life's mission. Then, a dramatic and unforeseen event changes Efrat's life irreversibly. After a year of absence she returns to the monastery, hungry for the spiritual calm she sought there in the first place.A gentle story of women reaching out to one another across an almost unbridgeable gap of age, history, culture and religion.

The Walnut Tree

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Wandering Rabbi

A young, traveling rabbi makes his way through the American South, struggling to breathe life back into dwindling rural Jewish congregations.

Wanderings: A Journey to Connect

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Wannabe

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The Wannsee Conference

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The Wanted 18

Once upon a time (in 1988), in a Palestinian town near Bethlehem, 18 dairy cows were purchased by the people of Beit Sahour from an Israeli kibbutz. This well-crafted, creative documentary, which includes stop-motion animation, explores the strange mixture of political complexities and bovine hijinks that were manifested by the town’s efforts to take dairy production—and fiscal resistance—into their own hands.

War Against the Weak

The pseudoscience of eugenics—selective breeding for “improvement” of the human species—infamously fed Nazi state policy up to the genocide. But eugenics has American roots, and this stimulating and engrossing documentary traces this international history with cinematic verve and chilling insight. Complicating the usual accounting of right and left, reactionary and progressive, War Against the Weak deepens our understanding of the underlying motors of change in Western civilization’s fraught social evolution.

War Game

Animated retelling of the famous Christmas truce between young British and German soldiers in the trenches of World War I--a powerful story with meaning today.

Wasted

Veteran filmmaker Nurit Kedar’s accomplished documentary Wasted (based on Ron Leshem’s novel If There Is a Heaven) is a candid look at Israeli soldiers who served in the fortress of Beaufort in Southern Lebanon before Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. A quiet, elegant film about the horrors of war, Wasted intersperses interviews with the young soldiers with footage of the Bat Sheva Dance Company.

Watchers of the Sky

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Watching You...

Sharon, a single mother, is living in a harsh reality. She has problems both on the romantic field, with her jealous girlfriend, while being exploited in the restaurant she works, by her controlling boss who doesn’t get along with Yoni, Sharon’s 7 years-old son, who spends most of his time hanging around his mother. As a way out, Sharon finds herself comfortable by watching her neighbor (Michal) who lives across the street, and also starts taking pictures of her. Michal, who isn’t aware of Sharon, is a dependent woman, who is currently under a crisis and needs someone to talk to, a roll her spouse doesn’t seem to fit. On one magical night, fate brings these two women together, the curiosity and the instant attraction between the two, leads them to an emotional adventure which in the end, leads each to the understanding and the strength toward the essential change in her life.

The Wax and the Wicks

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We Are Going to America

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We Are Not Alone (2011)

What would you do if the world was ending in a week, and you just met the most fascinating person to ever come into your life? Lonesome security guard Eddy (Ohad Knoller, Yossie and Jagger) firmly believes in the impending “apocalypse,” but he couldn’t predict meeting the defiant and precocious Maya, a rebellious young woman who makes his end-of-days plan a little less certain in this delightfully quirky comedy about friendship and romance.

Encore Screening: We Met at Grossinger's

Encore screening added by popular demand. 'We Met at Grossinger's' is an immersive journey through the vibrant history of the Grossinger's Resort Hotel, a landmark of the Catskills—known as the Borscht Belt—that played a pivotal role in shaping Jewish American identity and culture.

We Should Eat

When Agi gathers her family for a school identity project over dinner, they rethink who they are and what they want to eat.

We were Exodus

The journey of the Exodus was the boldest clandestine immigration event following World War II: in July 1947, 4,551 Holocaust survivors boarded the ship in Sète, France, and left secretly for Palestine. The men who volunteered to crew the Exodus were a ragtag team of Jewish World War II veterans and mariners with a conscience from all over the world. Their recollections form the structure of this impeccably researched documentary about the Exodus ’47.

Weapons of the Spirit

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The Wedding Entertainer (or The Tale of Moishe Badhan)

To get the funds to marry off his own child, a disgraced Hasidic wedding-comedian must fight to reclaim his former glory in Gidi Dar’s hilarious caper.

The Wedding Entertainer: SFJFF46 Audience Award

Winner of the SFJFF46 Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. To get the funds to marry off his own child, a disgraced Hasidic wedding-comedian must fight to reclaim his former glory in Gidi Dar’s hilarious caper.

Wedding in Galilee

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The Wedding Song

Karin Albou (La Petite Jerusalem, SFJFF 2006) explores Jewish and Arab culture and female sexuality in her bold and exquisite second feature. In Nazi-occupied Tunis, two teenage girlfriends, Muslim Nour and Jewish Myriam, cling to their lifelong bond. Outside the intimate female quarters of home and hammam, the world shared by Jews and Arabs is split apart by German promises of liberation. When the propaganda seeps through the gender wall, Myriam and her mother are no longer safe, and a hasty wedding must be arranged. But marriage, like friendship, becomes a test of ethics and courage. Karin Albou in person at the Castro.

Wednesdays In Mississippi

Wednesdays in Mississippi is the little-known story of the first-ever all-women national civil rights program, whose multifaith Northern Black and White women citizen activist teams flew into deadly Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964, clandestinely supporting integration efforts, and local Black women’s leadership to seed community economic and educational empowerment.

Weintraub's Syncopators

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Weitzman St. No. 10

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Welcome and Our Condolences

It’s 1991. Twelve-year-old Misha is documenting his Russian family’s journey to Israel on a home video camera. The already traumatic immigration experience is amped up to absurd proportions when the family’s elderly aunt dies on the plane just before they reach the land of their ancestors.

Welcome in Vienna

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Welcome to Leith

In 2010 the attempted takeover of a tiny rural North Dakota town by notorious anti-Semite Craig Cobb ignited a national media frenzy. Filmmakers Michael Nichols and Christopher Walker captured the rising tension between machine gun–toting racists and pistol-packing residents leading to Cobb’s armed street patrol that took events to their inexorable conclusion. This chilling document powerfully highlights the rise of hate groups and the often questionable methods used to silence them. TL

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