More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

Lev Syrkin was a successful artist in Moscow who dreamed of pursuing artistic and personal freedom in Israel.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

The process of learning a language is always fraught with humor, frustration—and pantomime. A Hebrew Lesson opens with a scene that might seem familiar, as Yoela, the teacher at a Hebrew immersion class (or ulpan) in Tel Aviv, introduces herself in Hebrew relying on simple body language.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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).

More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

Whether it leaves you in stitches or up in arms, this irreverent Israeli Arab sitcom will bring you the Middle East conflict as you’ve never seen it before.

More info | Buy tickets

A pithy but panoramic view of Israel’s “white� Jews, revealing a surprisingly diverse group, seen through the eyes of a Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

“The Coops,� cooperative Bronx apartments, symbolized an experiment in justice and equality. Tthis documentary portrays the workers who embraced communist, socialist and union movements.

More info | Buy tickets

Joining a small but growing number of films about the Jews of Iraq, Baghdad Twist—by Baghdad-born Joe Balass (Nana, George and Me, SFJFF 1998)—is an evocation of a lost world, one of reed boat rafting on the Euphrates, spice markets and doing the Twist. Wonderful archival footage melds with the recollections of Valentine, the director’s mother, in exploring one family’s choices and the way historical realities shaped them.

More info | Buy tickets

Yves Jeuland’s extraordinary documentary captures centuries of Jewish life in France in two episodes broadcast on French television to critical acclaim.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

Roberta Grossman’s first-rate documentary Blessed Is the Match, narrated by three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, is a paean to Hungarian resistance fighter and poet Hannah Senesh.

More info | Buy tickets

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

More info | Buy tickets

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

More info | Buy tickets

Dancing Alfonso is a pitch-perfect portrait of a vital widower who finds a physical practice that sustains him, and community and creativity in the rhythms and movement of flamenco.

More info | Buy tickets

A cache of home movies shot in the Netherlands before and during World War II tells the devastating story of the Peereboom family. Screening with The Danube Exodus.

More info | Buy tickets

An inspiring portrait of South Africa’s outrageous, controversial and brilliant political satirist (and occasional drag entertainer) Pieter-Dirk Uys, who now uses humor and rage to combat HIV/AIDS.

More info | Buy tickets

In deceptively naive black-and-white line drawings, animator Max Cohen (Tale of the Goat, SFJFF 2005) limns a wordless soldier's tale—a haunting miniature that is equal parts Beckett and Kafka.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

A surprise visitor (Gabriel Byrne) triggers turbulent childhood memories of love and loss among war survivors (Susan Sarandon, Max von Sydow) in this achingly beautiful story set in modern Quebec. Co-starring Christopher Plummer.

More info | Buy tickets

Of 30,000 Jewish partisans fighting the Nazis and their allies, 10 percent were women. This little gem of a documentary recognizes the unique contributions of women partisans during World War II. The stories of these courageous women, who had to battle sexism within their ranks as well as fascism in Europe, are riveting.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

Facing the Wind is the story of 13-year-old Oran, who lost his eyesight and five members of his family in a terrorist attack. Despite his blindness, Oran is going to make his dream come true and keep on sailing.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

Two 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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

The Film Class explores the black Bedouins’ legacy of slavery through the astonished eyes of the current generation of women.

More info | Buy tickets

Every year, the cloud forests of India’s Himalayan foothills provide the ideal escape for some 30,000 young Israelis just released from mandatory military service.

More info | Buy tickets

Four Questions for a Rabbi is a poignant and thoughtful documentary begun by Bay Area filmmaker Stacey Ross and completed after her death by renowned documentarian and master found-footage alchemist Jay Rosenblatt (2005 SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award). Ross asks profound questions, including: What is the role of Judaism and the Jewish soul?

More info | Buy tickets

Noga Gamlieli playfully captures the beauty and spunk of Maya and Manana, Georgian immigrants to Israel who express their love for Georgia through their strongest talents: music and dance.

More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

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

More info | Buy tickets

Returning to her Jewish grandmother’s birthplace in India, director Sadia Shepard discovers the story of Bene Israel, a tiny Jewish community in Bombay.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

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

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

In 2006, Jerusalem hosted the World Pride events, which were planned to culminate in a gay pride parade. Nitzan Gilady’s award-winning documentary weaves together the passions of gay rights activists and religious Jews, Muslims and Christians who oppose them.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

A cache of home movies shot in the Netherlands before and during World War II tells the devastating story of the Peereboom family.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

A fun, family-oriented comedy about a bookish 12-year-old girl in modern Berlin who neglects her bat mitzvah studies in order to become a basketball player.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

Lior and Yuval are a couple; Lior comes from a kibbutz near the Dead Sea and Yuval was born in central Israel. Like many couples, they are opposites: Lior is opinionated and Yuval is introverted. Both were born as women, but throughout their lives they identified as male.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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

More info | Buy tickets

8mm home movies from the 1970s and the discovery of an unopened letter from his mother are the potent and poetic ingredients of San Francisco–based director Daniel Robin’s reexamination of his parents’ relationship, set against the background of his own failed marriage. His father’s participation in the 1972 Israeli Olympic hostage crisis plays a crucial role.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

Operation Mural is the incredible but true story of the smuggling of 530 Jewish Moroccan children to Israel, under the guise of a holiday trip to Switzerland, in the spring of 1961.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

Out of Focus captures the creativity of Ohad Naharin, Israel’s “rock star� choreographer and director of Batsheva Dance Company.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

What makes a man risk his life for people he doesn’t know? Perlasca is a taut drama about one Italian man’s remarkable courage in saving 5,200 Hungarian Jews.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

An excellent documentary about the contentious struggle of Women of the Wall for the right to wear prayer shawls and read Torah scrolls aloud at the Western Wall.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

The Quest for the Missing Piece is a hilarious romp through the debate over circumcision.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

With wit and charm, this documentary follows two lively eighty-somethings back to the scene where, by a fluke of history, they survived the Holocaust: in Stalin’s Siberian gulag.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

Naomi and Michelle come to Safed to study in an orthodox women’s seminary. While seeking spiritual knowledge, they embark upon a secret journey of rituals and forbidden love.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

In today’s Kiev, masked characters in colorful traditional attire dance in a circle for the winter celebration of Koliada; one dancer steps forward, pulls fake products from his pockets and begins a barter monologue, enacting the traditional stereotype of “the Jew.�

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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?

More info | Buy tickets

Fabulous archival footage of Tel Aviv’s gay life from the 1950s immerses us in the world of society furrier Stefan Braun and the man who loved, worshipped and stood by him for 39 years, Eliezer Rath.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

A father’s mysterious disappearance throws his family into a personal and spiritual crisis in this engrossing, beautifully acted drama set in modern Jerusalem.

More info | Buy tickets

This free-spirited and mesmerizing docu-fiction hybrid explores the complexity of modern womanhood and the fragility of human relationships.

More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

The harrowing story of a Gaza-born woman locked in the battle of a lifetime for custody of her six children, and locked out of the legal process.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

To See If I’m Smiling tells the powerful stories of six Israeli women soldiers who did their army service in combat units in the occupied territories.

More info | Buy tickets

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.

More info | Buy tickets

The popular Trio Lescano—three Dutch Jewish sisters—were the 1930s Italian equivalent of the Andrews Sisters in the 30s, until fascism forced them into silence.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

In this comedic drama, a Parisian schoolteacher’s newfound independence puts a strain on her conventional family when an attractive publisher takes an interest in her writing.

View trailer | More info | Buy tickets

A unique window into the Italian Jewish Holocaust experience, this documentary features testimonies of nine Italians who survived Auschwitz, including Liliana Segre, who will be present for an onstage interview after the screening.

More info | Buy tickets

The men who volunteered to crew the Exodus were a ragtag team of Jewish World War II veterans from several countries and mariners with a conscience from all over the world. Their recollections are the masts upon which Jean-Michel Vecchiet hangs the structure of his impeccably researched documentary about the ship Exodus ’47, which was both haven and prison to thousands of Holocaust survivors.