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Description of a Struggle

A young boy joyfully rides a pushcart down the hilly streets of Haifa, a humped camel crosses a street, and an innocent girl paints an unseen picture in what may best represent the emergence of a new country and its unknown future.

Description of a Memory

Nearly 50 years after Chris Marker’s landmark 1961 documentary about Israel, Description of a Struggle, Dan Geva’s film engages with and pays tribute to its progenitor. Clearly Marker’s film left a lasting impression on the Israeli-born Geva, who uses images from the original film as a springboard to uncovering the many changes that have taken place in the physical and political landscapes of Israel and in its inhabitants.

Bilin My Love

An important documentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen through one village’s struggle, using stunning guerilla aesthetics that capture unique moments of desperation, courage and fear.

Jews in Shorts

From rapid koshering services to the tale of a macho young man afraid to jump from a high place, and capped by a sneak preview of the latest film from SFJFF’s New Jewish Filmmaking Project, this program is a fun and sometimes poignant sample of young Jewish creativity.

Roads

Thirteen-year-old Ismayil searches for a new life for himself and his younger brother outside the Arab drug slums of the Israeli city of Lod.

888-Go-Kosher

A day in the life of New York's only rapid-response koshering service. A humorous and enlightening documentary look at the Jewish Orthodox world.

Toyland

1942: what happens when a German kid believes that his Jewish neighbors are going to Toyland? A beautiful and moving story about lies and guilt.

A Trip to Prague

Does everyone need to meet a nice Jewish girl? With striking illustrations and deadpan narration, this film relates a funny anecdote about the Jewish instinct to make a shiddach (fix-up).

Home-Made Hero

From Tel Aviv University, a thrilling story of a mad woman soldier who kidnaps an innocent cab driver for a fatal mission.

Chronicle of a Jump

To jump or not to jump... Director Zohar Lavi examines the borders of fear and courage in this sweet and creative film.

Tell Your Children

This beautifully crafted and powerful fiction short is the story of a little girl surviving the January 1945 mass murders by the Arrow Cross at the Danube's bank in Hungary.

Holidaze

This triptych of stories from SFJFF’s New Jewish Filmmaking Project, produced by Citizen Film, delivers candid, funny observations of do-it-yourself holiday rituals. Teenage co-directors from a range of backgrounds consider the mysterious relevance of ritual in secular, multicultural lives.

Miss Universe 1929—Lisl Goldarbeiter, A Queen in Wien

The dramatic life of a Jewish Viennese beauty queen as recorded in home movies by the man who loved her from a distance—her cousin.

Eyes Wide Open

What does Israel mean to American Jews today? Veteran filmmaker Paula Weiman-Kelman goes behind the scenes of the ubiquitous bus tours that clog Israel’s ancient landmarks to explore the complex relationship between the American Jewish community and the 60-year-old Jewish state.

My Father's Palestinian Slave

This intimate documentary portrays the unlikely friendship between an undocumented Palestinian worker and his Israeli employer, veteran peace activist Moshe Amirav.

The Old Stores

A wistful portrait of Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s quirky small shops—a button store, an (analog) watch repair shop, an old-fashioned barber—as they wrestle with their fast-paced surroundings and contemplate change in the face of modernization.

Alice and I

What does a broken-hearted French guy would do with three older Jewish ladies in one car? Find out as Simon, while driving his aunt and her two friends, gets a phone call from his irritable girlfriend.

Interschriber

Never heard of an interschriber? Uri Kowalski talks passionately about his obscure profession: designing signatures. Each signature, like choreography, expresses the essence of a human life through its shape and movement.

Black Over White

Black Over White chronicles the Ethiopian concert tour by Israeli-Ethiopian-Yemenite world-beat band The Idan Raichel Project.

Bridge Over the Wadi

Bridge Over the Wadi documents a rocky year in the life of an Arab-Jewish primary school.

In Treatment

Imagine you are in therapy and your shrink is a thoughtful, badly dressed bear of a man who resembles Israeli actor Assi Dayan. Then imagine that when the transference and countertransference are flying so fast you can see trails, your shrink goes to talk to his shrink—who happens to be the all-knowing Israeli grande dame of cinema, Gila Almagor.

In the Family

In this gripping documentary, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick turns the camera on herself as she struggles with an impossible choice—–remove her healthy breasts and ovaries or risk a staggeringly high likelihood of developing aggressive cancer. Followed by filmmaker Q&A.

Love Comes Lately

Three intertwined stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. At the center is the elderly writer Max (Otto Tausig), whose vivid imagination merges life with fiction. Co-starring Rhea Perlman & Tovah Feldshuh.

Strangers

Handsome Eyal and knockout Rana meet by chance on a subway in Berlin. But he’s Israeli and she’s Palestinian—setting in motion a passionate story exploring the boundaries of nationality, culture and the heart.

Stalags–Holocaust and Pornography in Israel

During the early 1960s, a new pulp lit emerged in Israel. “Stalags” pocketbooks featured camp prisoners sexually assaulted by buxom SS officers. Controversial and popular, Stalags were condemned as porn. This documentary asks, what did they really mean?

It Kinda Scares Me

A gritty, funny documentary about a Tel Aviv drama coach (Tomer Heymann) and the talented, “delinquent” students he coaches.

Sixty Six

A London boy’s bar mitzvah party is threatened by a coinciding soccer match in this charming nostalgic comedy. Helena Bonham Carter and Stephen Rea co-star.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

This wonderful and often hilarious documentary follows a once famous Canadian heavy metal band, founded in the 1970s by two nice Jewish boys, and still rocking on.