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Every Face Has a Name

Every Face Has a Name

This beautiful film ponders identity and survival. Concentration camp survivors watch film footage of their arrival into the port of Malmo, Sweden and relive the euphoria of liberation. Their stories are juxtaposed against the plight of refugees today fleeing violence in North Africa. In the process we’re reminded that war is still with us and that compassion demands we extend aid when we can. The question is, will we?

Everything is Illuminated

Everything is Illuminated

A young Jewish-American man obsessed with his family history, Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) decides to journey to the Ukraine to find out more about the life of his grandfather.

As a 13-year-old, Matthew Boger was thrown out of his home for being gay. While living on the streets of Hollywood, he was savagely beaten in a back alley by a group of neo-Nazis. Twenty-five years later, Boger finds himself in a chance meeting with the same neo-Nazi.

Facing Windows features dual love stories, one from the 1940s between two Italian Jews and one contemporary story of neighbors who watch each other furtively from facing windows across a street. The erotic tension between a sexy but routine-weary woman (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and her hunky Italian Clark Kent look-alike neighbor (Raoul Bova) gives way to quiet communication and a profound experience when together they befriend Davide , an elderly Jewish man (Massimo Girotti).

A letter from Romania inspires a woman to travel halfway across the world to meet the brother she never knew she had. Like an archaeologist discovering pieces from the past, she finds the secrets to her late father's life, sparked by the discovery of a photo of a little boy.

We all love a good rags-to-riches story, and few are as improbable as the tale of Nathan Handwerker of Nathan’s Famous, the storied hot dog franchise. Famous Nathan draws on hundreds of hours of interview footage, home movies and audio recordings to weave the story of Handwerker as fast food pioneer, upstanding member of the Jewish community and family man. It is a quintessentially American tale of food, family and faith.

Fanny's Journey

Fanny's Journey

Riveting from the first frame to the last, Fanny’s Journey is the true and absorbing story of a 13-year-old girl who is separated from her parents in Nazi-occupied France. Fanny is brave and determined and leads her younger sisters and a group of Jewish children towards sanctuary in Switzerland. Expertly directed and well acted, the film emphasizes the resilience of these young heroes and is especially relevant in the present moment.

In November 2016, a nasty election cycle had exposed a seismic cultural rift, and the country suddenly felt like a much different place. For underground cartoonist Matt Furie, that sensation was even more surreal. Furie’s comic creation Pepe the Frog, conceived more than a decade earlier as a laid-back humanoid amphibian, had unwittingly become a grotesque political pawn.FEELS GOOD MAN is a Frankenstein-meets-Alice in Wonderland journey of an artist battling to regain control of his creation, while confronting a disturbing cast of characters who have their own peculiar attachments to Pepe. Now, as Pepe continues to morph around the world – FEELS GOOD MAN offers a vivid, moving portrait of one man, one frog, and the very strange reality we’ve all found ourselves living in.

Hadas Yaron (of the internationally acclaimed film Fill the Void) returns to the big screen in Maxime Giroux’s Felix and Meira, a story of an unconventional romance between two people living vastly different lives mere blocks away from one another.

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles | SFJFF39's OPENING NIGHT FILM

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles | SFJFF39's OPENING NIGHT FILM

The documentary tells the story behind Broadway musical "Fiddler on The Roof” and its creative roots in early 1960s New York. “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles” includes interviews with the Broadway show’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist Sheldon Harnick, legendary producer Hal Prince, original cast members, such as Austin Pendleton, as well as rare archival footage of choreographer Jerome Robbins.

14 year old Jewish Mina, is trying to navigate between a surreal routine dictated by the civil war in Ethiopia and her last days of youth with her Christian boyfriend Eli. When she discovers that her family is planning to immigrate to Israel and escape the war, she weaves an alternate plan in order to save Eli. But in times of war, plans tend to go wrong. Marsha's coming of age film debut film is based on her childhood memories of a civil-war-torn Ethiopia.

A Film Unfinished

A Film Unfinished

Filmmaker Yael Hersonski discovers that the Warsaw Ghetto footage that we’ve seen in countless documentaries was actually staged by the Nazis using the actual Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto as actors. A Film Unfinished is a rigorous and profound documentary that simultaneously exposes the perversity of Nazi propaganda, honors its victims and pays tribute to the resiliency of the filmmaker’s own grandmother and the other survivors of the Ghetto.

Filmmaker Residency Showcase

Filmmaker Residency Showcase

Since 2012 the JFI Filmmaker Residency has provided creative, marketing and production support for independent filmmakers. JFI residents are in various stages of completion on their projects whose work promotes the exploration and understanding of Jewish identity and culture.

First Cousin Once Removed

First Cousin Once Removed

Alan Berliner is known for creating original, personal and highly inventive documentaries that utilize home movies, found footage and probing interviews. In his new film the subject is his mother’s first cousin, poet Edwin Honig, who for the past several years has been living with Alzheimer’s. Berliner has chronicled his visits over many years to create a profound study of memory that is both playful and incisive. A gem from a master filmmaker.

Five Weddings and A Felony

Five Weddings and A Felony

Twentysomething Chicago filmmaker Josh Freed’s comic essay documents his real-life inability to commit to a serious relationship even after meeting the incredibly adorable and wise second-grade school teacher Paulina. When five close friends get married and his dad develops a life-threatening illness, Josh begins to question his own life choices in this freewheeling self-portrait that manages to be charming, galling, funny, cringe-inducing, and always compelling.

Already the winner of Israel’s top film prizes, this superb documentary thriller begins just after the death of the filmmaker’s 95-year-old grandmother. Sifting through a lifetime of accumulated possessions in her Tel Aviv apartment, Goldfinger makes an astonishing discovery: the deep friendship between his grandparents and Leopold von Mildenstein, the Nazi predecessor of Adolf Eichmann. The Flat is a complex, penetrating look at a different kind of Holocaust denial altogether. [MINIGUIDE 68/70]

Verité filmmaker Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, 5 Days) hangs out in India’s Himalayan foothills with some of the 30,000 young Israeli men and women who annually escape there, take drugs and often “flip out” after their military service. We also meet the growing band of Israeli social workers and barefoot rabbis who have followed the “lost generation” to their Shangri-La to keep them from going off the edge.

Fluchkes is an honest, humorous look at growing older and its relationship to creativity and art. The film follows a group of talented, energetic and feisty women, all aged between 72 and 82, as they prepare for a professional dance performance.

Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story

Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story

Take a riveting journey into the intrepid exploits of the leader of Operation Entebbe. On July 4, 1976, 30-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan (Yoni) Netanyahu led the daring operation to rescue the 103 Israelis who were held hostage in Uganda. Filmmakers Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot delicately weave the epic with the intimate in this personal story of a young man who dedicated his life to the service of his people. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

Diane Kurys (Peppermint Soda, Entre Nous) once again mines her autobiography to fictionalize the early years of her parents’ marriage, a mysterious uncle of whom nobody speaks and the circumstances of her birth. Intimacy and suspense are the keys to Kurys’s novelistic framing of Jewish life in a corner of Lyon, France, just after the war, when freedom meant one thing to a man, another to a woman.

For the Love of Spock

For the Love of Spock

“Live long and prosper.” It’s impossible not to cherish those famous words spoken by the beloved half-human Vulcan. Leonard Nimoy, the man behind the pointy ears, left an indelible mark as an artist and as a mensch. Featuring clips from Nimoy’s career and inspiring interviews with the Star Trek cast, director Adam Nimoy has crafted a loving tribute to not only his father, but also to the man we know as Mr. Spock. —Joshua Moore

Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection

Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection

FORGET BAGHDAD: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi ConnectionThe son of a Shi'ite emigrant family that fled Iraq for political reasons, Swiss film director Samir has created a brilliant tour-de-force in his new documentary FORGET BAGHDAD. This entertaining, ironic and visually stunning film essay is an exploration of the lives of Iraqi Jewish writers in Israel, former members of the Communist Party, in which Samir’s father was also a member.

A 20-year-old American Israeli decides to move back to Israel and reconnect with his roots, only to be institutionalized in a mental-health facility constructed on the grounds of a Palestinian village that was massacred by a Jewish militia back in 1948.

Forman vs. Forman

Forman vs. Forman

This intimate portrait of Miloš Forman, the powerhouse director of AMADEUS and ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEWS reveals a man who never stopped searching for a place where he would feel free. Born in Czechoslovakia, his traumatic experience with the Nazi regime bestowed him with the theme of the conflict of an individual versus institutions.

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