The Jewish Film Institute awarded $80,000 to six projects in 2024. The fourth round of JFI Completion Grants announced honor films that articulate nuanced, contemporary, and bold depictions of Jewish life and identity.
To combat the rising tension in their Brooklyn communities, a Rabbi and a Reverend team up to unite their congregations. As their faith is shaken, both congregations struggle to not let their differences drive them apart.
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Perl and Dalia make waves creating Bulletproof Stockings, the first all-female Hasidic rock band. They challenge gender norms as their global attention increases but their diverging visions and ideologies threaten the band's unity and future.
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Coexistence, My Ass! follows Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi as she struggles to create a one-woman comedy show called “Coexistence, My Ass!” about racism, sexism, war, peace and… her ass. With hatred and violence in Israel/Palestine turbo-charged like never before, “co-existence” already a problematic term now sounds like a bad joke — so where does she go from here?
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Meredith Monk–Jewish-American composer, performer, and director–is one of the unsung creative geniuses of our time. Featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces illuminates Monk’s wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery.
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With the outbreak of a new war in Israel, a soldier is about to enter Lebanon. His mother refuses to wait for bad news and decides to take matters into her own hands.
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Wednesdays in Mississippi is the little-known story of the first-ever all-women national civil rights program, whose multifaith Northern Black and White women citizen activist teams flew into deadly Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964, clandestinely supporting integration efforts, and local Black women’s leadership to seed community economic and educational empowerment.
Read MoreLisa Fruchtman is an Academy Award–winning editor who has worked in both feature film and television. Among her many film projects are Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, Children of a Lesser God, The Godfather Part III, The Doctor, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Dance with Me, and The Woodsman. For television, she has edited such HBO films as Truman, Witness Protection, Point of Origin and Normal. Her awards include an Oscar for The Right Stuff, Academy Award and BAFTA Nominations for Best Editing for both Godfather Part III and Apocalypse Now, an Emmy Nomination and a Cable ACE Award for Truman. Children of a Lesser God was nominated for Best Picture. In addition, she Produced and Directed Sweet Dreams, a critically acclaimed documentary about Rwanda and has several projects in development as Producer/ Co Producer. She has served as an Advisor at the Sundance Feature Film Lab in Utah and at the eQuinoxe International Screenwriters Workshop in Europe.
Su Kim is an Emmy® and two-time Peabody Award-winning producer. She is an acclaimed documentary producer whose credits include the Oscar®-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Free Chol Soo Lee; and Midnight Traveler. Su is a former Women at Sundance fellow and is the recipient of the 2022 Sundance Amazon Studios Nonfiction Producers Award. Films in release currently include, Bitterbrush, Hidden Letters, Sanson and Me, and The Tuba Theives.
Meredith Lavitt has over 30 years of experience working in the independent film arena. Lavitt is the founder of Swirl Productions, an independent media company focusing on producing socially conscious and story-driven media and providing filmmaking and festival consulting services. Most recently, Lavitt was president of Original Thinkers, where she co-produced the annual Original Thinkers multi-media ideas festival and curated year-round programming for organizations and companies. Before that, she spent over 20 years at Sundance Institute, focusing on program development. She was the founder and director of the Sundance Ignite Program, where she cultivated and supported a new generation of filmmakers ages 18 to 25. Lavitt also directed the Sundance Film Forward Initiative, an international touring program designed to enhance greater cultural understanding by using the power of story to connect filmmakers and audiences. She spearheaded Sundance Institute's youth and community programs. Lavitt was also instrumental in establishing the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, serving as the Associate Director of the Program and lead administrator for the Sundance Documentary Fund, which granted over $1 million annually. Her producing credits include the critically acclaimed Home Front, which premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and on Showtime and The Grand Rescue, which premiered at the Mountain Film Festival in 2014 and first aired on PBS in 2016, and her newest project, The Garden Bridge in post-production. Lavitt has also been a consulting producer for numerous award-winning documentary films. Lavitt holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and lives with her family in Park City, Utah.
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