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10% - What Makes a Hero?

10% - What Makes a Hero?

Checkpoint (SFJFF 2004) and Defamation (SFJFF 2009) established Israeli documentarian Yoav Shamir as an unapologetic provocateur. Michael Moore executive produced the filmmaker’s newest film, a globetrotting quest to identify the shared characteristics of heroic individuals. From a bonobo preserve in Congo to the suburban home of a Flemish woman whose family harbored Jews during WWII, Shamir takes viewers on a fascinating journey that is sure to spark thoughtful conversation and passionate debate.

In this astonishingly haunting film, deep undercurrents run beneath the simple surface in a quaint village that's ultimately forced to face up to its "ill-gotten gains" from the Second World War.

200 Meters - SFJFF41 Centerpiece Narrative

200 Meters - SFJFF41 Centerpiece Narrative

A Palestinian father embarks on a perilous journey to reach his hospitalized son in this tense yet tender family drama about the human toll of oppression.

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

Abe | Film & Feast

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.

Absolutely No Spitting

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.

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.

Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

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."

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.

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.

As Nazis separate children from their parents in the Warsaw Ghetto, a gang of women risks everything to smuggle their friend's three-month-old baby to safety.

American Factory

American Factory

In 2014, a Chinese billionaire opened a Fuyao factory in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio. For thousands of locals, the arrival of this multinational car-glass manufacturer meant regaining their jobs - and dignity - after the recession left them high and dry. American Factory takes us inside the facility to observe what happens when workers from profoundly different cultures collide.

As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM

As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM

Forget whatever you’ve heard about the life and death of Philadelphia-born DJ AM (born Adam Goldstein), the superstar club deejay who attained rock star status and survived a fiery plane crash only to die a short time later of a drug overdose at the age of 36. Director Kevin Kerslake’s haunting and heartbreaking portrait intimately conveys the brief life of an obsessive sonic genius for whom music, fame and love were tragically not enough.

Baby Face is a provocative pre-Code film starring Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers. who “sleeps her way to the top.”

Before You Know It

Before You Know It

Stage manager Rachel Gurner still lives in her childhood apartment - along with her off-kilter actress sister, Jackie; eccentric playwright father Mel; and deadpan preteen niece Dodge - above the tiny theatre they own and operate. Level-headed and turtleneck-wearing Rachel is the only thing standing between her family and utter chaos. Then, in the wake of a sudden family tragedy, Rachel and Jackie learn their presumed-deceased mother is actually alive and thriving as a soap-opera star. Now the sisters' already-precarious balance turns upside down, and Rachel must figure out how to liberate herself from this surreal imbroglio. Co-writer/director/star Hannah Pearl Utt is a triple threat with an impeccable sense of timing and a flair for juxtaposing unpredictable elements. Just as pragmatic Rachel and off-the-wall Jackie seem to hail from different planets while inhabiting the same universe, so too do the film's over-the-top moments and characters coexist alongside subtle, grounded ones. Equal parts madcap comedy, adult coming-of-age story, and poignant drama, Before You Know It gleefully defies categorization, and that is its genius.

Ben Lee: Catch My Disease

Ben Lee: Catch My Disease

At the age of 14 a nice Jewish boy from Sydney, Australia, became a rock star, and at 16, an international pop star. His name is Ben Lee and like his music, he's still evolving. Featuring interviews with his former girlfriend Claire Danes and friends Winona Ryder, Jason Schwartzman and Michelle Williams, Ben Lee: Catch My Disease is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist’s evolution. [MINIGUIDE 67/70]

The Jewish National Fund's ubiquitous Blue Boxes were an internationally successful fundraising campaign to support the purchase and forestation of land in Israel. This thought-provoking documentary focuses on Joseph Weits, a seminal figure in the growth of the organization, its tree-planting programs and the subsequent myth-building of a national narrative.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Notorious for a nude scene in the 1933 film Ecstasy, Hedy Lamarr became a sex symbol for the ages and achieved top stardom in Hollywood. But her deeper passion had to do with mechanics and technology. She was obsessed with creating useful inventions to benefit mankind, and her inventions were predecessors of wi-fi, bluetooth and cell phones. Spurned as too beautiful to be smart, she nonetheless upended stereotypes and serves as a role model to this day.

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

This modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet tale is set in Israel and Gaza. After witnessing a suicide bombing, a girl writes a letter to Gaza seeking understanding and sends it into the Gaza Sea in a bottle. It’s found by a young Gaza man who emails back. Though they live less than 100 kilometers apart, they communicate only through emails and letters. While they often disagree, their relationship deepens as the political situation worsens. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

Bye Bye Germany

Bye Bye Germany

“After World War II approximately 4,000 Jews stayed in Germany. Later, none of them could explain to their children why,” we learn in Sam Gabarski’s Bye Bye Germany. This stylized, humor-laced drama devotes itself to answering this question by portraying the lives of a sundry group of survivors who remain in Germany immediately after liberation and are led by a charismatic, top hat–wearing jokester (Run Lola Run’s masterfully expressive Moritz Bleibtreu).

Chasing Portraits

Chasing Portraits

Moshe Rynecki’s granddaughter is on a quest to recover the Polish-Jewish artist’s works lost during World War II.

50 miles north of New York City lies the town of Monroe, where one of the fastest-growing Hasidic communities in the country thrives deep within the Hudson Valley. As the 25,000+ population within the village of Kiryas Joel looks to expand their city, the neighboring villages of non-Hasids see the encroaching community as a burgeoning power grab, leading to an increasingly tense standoff between locals. Shot over several years with seemingly boundless access, Emmy-winning director Jesse Sweet's documentary observes the simmering tensions that have come to define the community of Monroe, and the myriad ways in which the town's divide echoes the country's as well.

In this quiet but intense psychological drama, director Franziska Schlotterer crafts an erotically charged story set in the remote mountains of the Black Forest during WWII. A young Jew fleeing the Nazis is saved by a German peasant couple, but soon discovers that there is an unexpected price to pay for his salvation. The spare but sumptuous cinematography captures the passion, desire and jealousy waiting to explode.

The Conductor - Centerpiece Documentary

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.

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