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Filtered By: Gr Clear All

Brother and sister filmmakers conduct an obsessive archeological dig through their deceased grandmother’s treasured mementos.

32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide

32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide

In this heartfelt documentary director Hope Litoff struggles with her own demons as she explores the life and death of her sister, Ruth Litoff. A gifted photographer, Ruth was as lovely as the artwork she created, but she struggled with mental illness throughout her life. The film charts Hope’s excavation of the belongings that Ruth left behind and Hope’s journey of exploration to learn more about her older sister.

A Crime on the Bayou

A Crime on the Bayou

"A Crime on the Bayou" is the story of Gary Duncan, a Black teenager from Plaquemines Parish, a swampy strip of land south of New Orleans. In 1966, Duncan tries to break up an argument between white and Black teenagers outside a newly integrated school. He gently lays his hand on a white boy’s arm. The boy recoils like a snake. That night, police burst into Duncan’s trailer and arrest him for assault on a minor. A young Jewish attorney, Richard Sobol, leaves his prestigious D.C. firm to volunteer in New Orleans. With his help, Duncan bravely stands up to the District Attorney, challenging his unfair arrest. Their fight goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and their lifelong friendship is forged.

A Father's Kaddish

A Father's Kaddish

A FATHER'S KADDISH tells the story of how Steven Branfman used the art of pottery to help him work through his grief after the death of his 23-year-old son. The film is a potent and moving journey through the universal experience of loss, mourning and rebuilding a life.

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.

Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force

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.

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.

Adventures of a Mathematician

Adventures of a Mathematician

Based on the autobiography by Polish-Jewish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN follows Ulam’s dramatic journey to the United States in the 1930s where he plays a vital role in The Manhattan Project in the creation of the hydrogen bomb while desperately trying to help his sister flee Nazi occupied Poland.

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."

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.

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.

American Birthright

American Birthright

Who hasn’t asked themselves the question “why be in a relationship?” Sure enough, filming in between her 20s and 30s, American Birthright’s director and producer Becky Tahel Bordo, doesn’t take any answer for granted, and even complicates the question by making a documentary about it.

Arthur Miller: Writer

Arthur Miller: Writer

Arthur Miller: Writer is an intimate portrait of one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century told from the unique perspective of his daughter, Rebecca Miller, who filmed interviews with her father over decades. Coupled with a wealth of personal archival material, the film provides new insights into Miller’s life as an artist and explores his character in all its complexity.

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

Bang! The Bert Berns Story

Bang! The Bert Berns Story

Music meets the Mob in this biographical documentary, narrated by Steven Van Zandt, about the life and career of Bert Berns, the most important songwriter and record producer from the sixties that you never heard of.

Near the end of the war in Lebanon, a group of Israeli soldiers defends an isolated mountain outpost next to a 12th-century fortress called Beaufort Castle.

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.

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jewish resistance fighter, an optimist in the face of dire circumstances and a poet. Roberta Grossman’s first-rate documentary Blessed Is the Match, narrated by three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, is a paean to Hannah Senesh’s courage and creativity. This inspirational film features gorgeous images of parachutes floating gracefully in the air, like Senesh’s poem “Blessed Is the Match,” written days before her capture by the Nazis.

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.

“I want to get to that place where I have no strength to hide anything.” After a decade of stardom in Israel as part of the illustrious Batsheva Dance Company, dancer/choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith at age 30 pursues a solo career in the U.S. Winner of the Best Documentary prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, Bobbi Jene is a portrait of a dancer which is as unflinching, wondrous and embarrassing as life itself.

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.

Almost half the players on the Israeli National Soccer Team are Muslim, including the captain. The team’s diverse group of players causes controversy, especially during an important European tournament, most of it provoked by racist fans and the media. The players have their loyalty questioned by all sides while trying to guide Israel’s national team through the year’s biggest international challenge.

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