New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) returns for its 34th edition at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater from January 15 through January 29, 2025.
The festival opens with Midas Man, an empathetic biopic on Brian Epstein, the Jewish and gay music lover and visionary man who discovered and then managed the Beatles in the 1960s before his tragic death at age 32. The seismic impact of the Beatles on popular culture continues to reverberate 60 years after they took The Ed Sullivan Show by storm in February 1964. Yet that revelatory TV appearance never would have taken place—and the band may never have been discovered—if not for Epstein. Directed by Joe Stephenson and written by Brigit Grant, the film features a deeply moving Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (The Queen’s Gambit) as Epstein, with a cast that includes Jonah Lees as John Lennon, Blake Richardson as Paul McCartney, Emily Watson and Eddie Marsan as Epstein’s parents, and Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan.
In this year’s Centerpiece Film, Of Dogs and Men, filmmaker Dani Rosenberg dives headfirst into the psychological horrors of our contemporary world with this experiential account of a teenager named Dar (Ori Avinoam), who returns home to her kibbutz searching for her missing dog in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attacks in Israel, filmed in late October 2023. Of Dogs and Men takes a humanist approach to the ongoing conflict, reckoning with both the horrifying losses within her Jewish community and the imminent tragic violence of retribution in Gaza.
The Closing Film, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, is a timely and uplifting evocation of cooperative political protest. Ilana Trachtman’s documentary recalls a crucial 1960 chapter in the Civil Rights Movement when protesting Black students were joined by Jewish locals as they perched defiantly on a merry-go-round in Maryland’s segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park. Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round reminds viewers of the importance of collaboration and humility in the face of injustice and features a voice-over cast that includes Mandy Patinkin, Jeffrey Wright, and Dominique Thorne, among others.
Other highlights in this year’s festival include Blind at Heart, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, Full Support, The Glory of Life, The Spoils, and The Zweiflers.
Also featured are two historic films including: the 50th anniversary screening of the recently restored 1975 period drama, Hester Street, directed by Joan Micklin Silver, which brilliantly recreates Jewish immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century, and features Carol Kane in an Oscar-nominated performance; and Breaking Home Ties, a 1922 classic silent melodrama, once believed lost, which has been digitally restored by the National Center for Jewish Film, and is now presented with a newly recorded score performed by Grammy Award-winning musicians.
2025 New York Jewish Film Festival Lineup with Film Descriptions
Opening Film
Midas Man
Joe Stephenson, 2024, U.K., 112m
New York Premiere
The seismic impact of the Beatles on popular culture continues to reverberate 60 years after they took The Ed Sullivan Show by storm in February 1964. Yet that revelatory TV appearance never would have taken place—and the band may never have been discovered at all—if not for Brian Epstein, the owner of a furniture and record store with an eye for style and an ear for music, who happened upon the eventual “Fab Four” at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1961 and would go on to become the Beatles’ manager until 1967. Epstein summons a mythic stature himself: Jewish and gay, Epstein was an eternal outsider in British culture before dying at age 32 of an accidental drug overdose. Joe Stephenson’s empathetic biopic, written by Brigit Grant and starring Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (The Queen’s Gambit), tells Epstein’s story with style and compassion. The outstanding supporting cast includes Jonah Lees as John Lennon, Blake Richardson as Paul McCartney, Emily Watson and Eddie Marsan as Epstein’s parents, and Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan.
Centerpiece Film
Of Dogs and Men
Dani Rosenberg, 2024, Israel/Italy, 82m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York City Premiere
Filmmaker Dani Rosenberg dives headfirst into the psychological horrors of our contemporary world with this experiential dramatic account of a teenager in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attacks in Israel. Using lightweight, handheld video cameras, Rosenberg stays close to his protagonist, a 16-year-old survivor named Dar (Ori Avinoam), who has returned home to her kibbutz in search of her lost dog. The film takes a humanist approach to the ongoing conflict, reckoning with both the horrifying losses within her Jewish community and the imminent tragic violence of retribution in Gaza. Of Dogs and Men was filmed in late October 2023, in the immediacy of the confusion and terror, and Rosenberg’s realism extends to casting (other than Avinoam, the performers are nonprofessional), actual locations, and improvised dialogue. Note: some images may be disturbing.
Closing Film
Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round
Ilana Trachtman, 2024, U.S., 90m
New York Premiere
A timely evocation of cooperative political protest, director-producer Ilana Trachtman’s invigorating, nuanced documentary recalls a small yet crucial chapter in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960, five students from Howard University perched defiantly on a merry-go-round in Maryland’s Glen Echo Amusement Park, which had been segregated since the turn of the 20th century, and refused to leave. As their sit-in gained national attention, the Black students were joined in their resistance by members of Bannockburn, a mostly Jewish housing community across the street. Borrowing its title from a Langston Hughes poem, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round features a voice-over cast that includes Mandy Patinkin, Jeffrey Wright, and Dominique Thorne, among others. Inspired by her own family history, the Emmy-winning Trachtman, whose father was a Jewish labor organizer, has created an uplifting work of historical excavation that reminds viewers of the importance of collaboration and humility in the face of injustice.
Films
Ada: My Mother the Architect
Yael Melamede, 2024, Israel/U.S., 81m
English and Hebrew with English subtitles
After living for nearly two decades in the U.S. and raising a family there, Ada Karmi-Melamede moved back to Israel in the early 1980s, where she became one of the world’s most accomplished and prolific architects. From Jerusalem’s Supreme Court building to the Open University of Israel to Ben Gurion Airport, and beyond, Karmi-Melamede’s work has defined many corners of her home country. In this heartfelt and elegantly made documentary, her daughter Yael Melamede, a filmmaker and former architect herself, widens the scope on this pioneering figure, inquiring into the sometimes difficult choices instrumental in forming her family life and professional career. Sculpting with a cinematically architectural aesthetic all her own, Melamede had constructed a film that’s as much about how the public spaces around all of us are imbued with the personal as it is an intimate family portrait that only she could have told.
Blind at Heart
Barbara Albert, 2023, Germany/Switzerland/Luxembourg, 137m
German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A magnetic Mala Emde portrays Hélène, an aspiring doctor who tries to hide her Jewish identity after arriving in Weimar-era Berlin as a young woman. Over the subsequent decades, Hélène finds her career ambitions and romantic expectations transformed as she begins to witness the frightening rise of Nazism, ultimately leading her to drastic decisions that will forever change her sense of self and make her question the very idea of personal independence. With an assured sense of dramatic motion, Barbara Albert (director of the invigorating Free Radicals, an NYFF41 Main Slate selection) adapts Julia Franck’s internationally renowned, German Book Prize–winning novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blindness of the Heart) into an exacting moral tale about the difficult choices people make during times of tumult, spanning the late 1920s to the darkest days of World War II. Note: some images may be disturbing; contains a depiction of sexual assault.
Breaking Home Ties
Frank N. Seltzer, George K. Rowlands, 1922, U.S., 78m
Silent with English intertitles
New York Premiere of New Recorded Score
The New York Jewish Film Festival is pleased to present this classic silent movie from 1922, a melodrama set in both New York and Russia that was once believed lost. After a badly damaged print was rediscovered by the National Center for Jewish Film in a Berlin archive in the 1980s, the film went on a decades-spanning journey toward the digital restoration presented here with a new recorded score performed by Grammy Award–winning musicians. The film follows a Russian émigré who falls in love and becomes a successful lawyer. His life takes a difficult turn when his parents follow him from his home country and struggle to adjust to immigrant living, and his own potentially violent past comes back to haunt him. Breaking Home Ties was originally made to combat growing tides of antisemitism in the United States, and it merits mention alongside such renowned silent films as The Jazz Singer and Hungry Hearts in its depiction of Lower East Side existence in New York. Film restoration by the National Center for Jewish Film; score produced by Reboot Studios.
The film includes an exciting contemporary score composed, performed, and recorded by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Mocean Worker (aka Adam Dorn), Scott Amendola (Charlie Hunter/Amendola Duo), with additional music from Nels Cline (Wilco), Yuka Honda, Gretchen Gonzales, and Joey Mazzola.
Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
Oren Rudavsky, 2024, U.S., 88m
English and French with English subtitles
New York City Premiere
With his unforgettable and shattering 1958 memoir Night, Elie Wiesel forever changed the way the Holocaust would be written about. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager, the Romanian-born Wiesel became an international spokesperson and renowned author, eloquently transforming his trauma into literature of the highest and most profound order. In this enthralling new documentary, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky goes deeper into Wiesel’s philosophically abundant inner life, depicted with nuance and tenderness, and enriched by access to his personal archives. In many ways a private man despite being one of the most public voices of Holocaust remembrance, Wiesel is presented here in newly intimate ways known only to his closest friends. Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire stands as a crucial testament to an extraordinary man who helped shape our collective memory of the darkest chapter of the 20th century.
Full Support
Michal Cohen, 2024, Israel, 71m
Hebrew with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The funny and revealing Full Support takes the viewer into a bra shop in Jaffa, Israel, where a string of women share stories and anxieties about their relationships with their own bodies. In choosing to focus her documentary around such sensitive and unorthodox subject matter, director Michal Cohen reminds us of the centrality of women’s chests to the arc of their lives, from birth to awkward teenage years to mammogram check-ups and beyond, though it’s not often seriously discussed in broader society. Cohen’s film analyzes something that is so seemingly mundane—and often cast into cheap hierarchies of size and desirability—from a crucial female perspective in an entertaining and poignant work of nonfiction that, in giving women voices about their bodies, functions as its own form of resilience and liberation.
Preceded by:
Tattooed4Life
Kineret Hay-Gillor, 2024, Israel, 30m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
To help cope with her own personal trauma and also memorialize those murdered on October 7, 2023, an Israeli tattoo artist who survived the killings imprints her pain and healing directly on the skin. This documentary presents one soul’s unique approach to showcasing resilience amidst the world’s darkness. Note: some images may be disturbing.
The Glory of Life
Georg Maas, Judith Kaufmann, 2023, Germany, 98m
German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In this emotional, elegantly realized romantic historical drama, filmmakers Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann sensitively sketch the last year in the life of novelist Franz Kafka and the love he experiences with Dora Diamant, a Polish Jewish woman he meets on holiday at the Baltic Sea. Stricken by tuberculosis, the 40-year-old Czech writer is suddenly facing the unthinkable—happiness—at the moment that his health is most dramatically failing him. After a mutual instantaneous attraction, the two move in together in Berlin, but when he must relocate to a sanatorium in Austria, Dora makes the decision to join him, bringing joy to his final days. Starring Henriette Confurius and Sabin Tambrea as the tragic lovers, The Glory of Life, adapted from an acclaimed book by German writer Michael Kumpfmüller, takes an uplifting approach to its material, telling its story with dignity, humor, and poignant joy.
50th Anniversary Screening
Hester Street
Joan Micklin Silver, 1975, U.S., 89m
One of the most beloved American films of the 1970s, this recently restored, exquisitely wrought period drama from the groundbreaking independent director Joan Micklin Silver brilliantly recreates Jewish immigrant life on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. Carol Kane received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her precious, jewel-like performance as Gitl, a wife and mother newly arrived in New York from Eastern Europe who is taken by surprise at how much her husband, Yankel (Steven Keats), has already assimilated to the new world. Charting the timid Gitl’s gradual journey toward independence, Silver (who would later paint a more contemporary portrait of the same milieu with the iconic Crossing Delancey) transports the viewer to a distant past, captured in crystalline black-and-white, that remains emotionally relevant in its inquiries into gender and tradition in a world forever on the cusp of modernity.
Lost City
Willy Lindwer, 2024, Netherlands, 91m
Dutch with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The horrifying history of the Holocaust is also one of horrific bureaucracy. To accomplish the Nazis’ barbarity, untold numbers of municipal organizations and government bureaus throughout Europe showed self-interest and cowardliness in the name of cooperation. As this new documentary by indefatigable Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer reveals, the Amsterdam Transit Authority, even in the years after World War II, profited from its agreement to deport Jews—soliciting payments from Germany for the public city trams that deported 48,000 Jews, including Anne Frank, to their deaths. Retracing the tragic journey of the tram and interviewing Holocaust survivors, Lindwer details the city’s collaboration and the local non-Jewish population’s willingness to look the other way, showing the historical stakes of complying with evil. And his film has had real-world results: because of Lindwer’s revelations, Amsterdam recently announced the placement of Holocaust memorials at train stations along the route.
Preceded by:
A Great Big Secret
Yoav Potash, 2024, U.S., 13m
New York Premiere
In this lovingly crafted profile, Dutch-born Holocaust survivor and retired teacher Anita Magnus Frank narrates her story from childhood trauma to adult healing, when she finally opened up to the world as one of World War II’s “hidden children,” dramatized with a collage-like combination of interviews, archival footage, and animation.
Neither Day Nor Night
Pinhas Veuillet, 2024, Israel, 105m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Set in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, this absorbing and powerful drama from Jerusalem-born director Pinhas Veuillet is a meticulously detailed narrative centered around a conflict between Shmuel, the patriarch of a French Sephardic family, and the headmaster at his son’s school. Despite the boy’s educational qualifications and remarkable abilities as a star pupil, he is not accepted within a very prestigious, predominantly Ashkenazi Yeshiva; the family feels this is due to their Sephardic lineage. Unwilling to accept this reality, Shmuel takes action—which will lead to tragedy. Neither Day Nor Night is also the deeply personal work of a filmmaker who left a strict Orthodox community at a young age, later using cinema to explore the contours of the world he knew.
Nina Is an Athlete
Ravit Markus, 2024, Israel/U.S., 72m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This intimate documentary portrait brings us into the fast-paced world of Nina Gorodetsky, a champion wheelchair badminton player preparing to represent Israel in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics—potentially her last chance as a woman in her late thirties. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic complicates things, as does her aspiration to expand her family with another child. Set over the course of three years, Nina Is an Athlete examines with empathy and rigor the intense emotional and physical commitment it would take Gorodetsky to realize her professional and personal dreams. So much more than a sports documentary, Ravit Markus’s film is about motherhood, the societal expectations put on women, the necessary resiliency of living as an immigrant (at age 11, Nina emigrated to Israel from Georgia with her family after the fall of the Soviet Union), and what it’s like to live as an extraordinary person with so much to offer.
The Other
Joy Sela, 2024, U.S., 100 min
English, Hebrew, and Arabic with English subtitles
At a moment when it increasingly seems there’s no escape from the polarization of politics and ideology, Joy Sela’s documentary about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, filmed from 2017 to this year, is an inspiring revelation. Following Israeli and Palestinian subjects working toward connection and hope rather than division and bloodshed, The Other shares the voices of peace activists on both sides—humans fighting for the dignity and equality of all in the wake of deeply tragic personal loss. Sela’s film charts the history of the conflict up through the October 7 attacks and subsequent violence. Reflective of its American-Israeli filmmaker’s own personal, transformative journey, this is a thoughtful, intellectually enriching work of nonfiction that communicates the possibility of change when one confronts the self as much as the beliefs of one’s society at large. Note: some images may be disturbing.
Sixty and the City
Nili Tal, 2010, Israel, 70m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Presented in memory of Nili Tal
Known for a decades-spanning career in newspaper and television journalism, film distribution, and nonfiction filmmaking, Nili Tal died in March 2024. One of her best-loved works is this delightful and humorous personal documentary, in which she traces her own mission to find new romance as a sixty something divorcée with grandchildren. It’s a defiant, revealing journey of self-discovery that takes Tal from her home country of Israel to across Europe and the far reaches of the internet dating world. Unabashed in her interest in dating younger men, Tal cuts a brash and entertaining figure on-screen. Sixty and the City is the rare film to consider middle-aged female sexuality, as Tal bravely centers her discussions around physicality and desire. The New York Jewish Film Festival presents this retrospective screening in tribute to its late veteran director, who was a frequent and beloved guest at NYJFF.
The Spoils
Jamie Kastner, 2024, Canada, 104m
English and German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The ongoing dilemmas around the reclamation, ownership, and exhibition of art looted by the Nazis during World War II are the focus of Canadian filmmaker Jamie Kastner’s absorbing documentary. At the center of the film is the case of Max Stern, a German Jewish art dealer who escaped to Canada in 1937 after he was forced by the Nazis to liquidate his gallery. In Montreal, Stern became a successful collector, dealer, and gallerist renowned for his generosity. Kastner’s film shows how a series of failed attempts by the city of Düsseldorf to honor Stern opens up many issues around the restitution of Nazi-looted art. Filmed across four years, featuring contemporary and archival footage, The Spoils marks the urgency of this moment in the art world, which will have lasting historical consequences for the future as many try to right the wrongs of the past.
This Is My Mother
Julien Carpentier, 2023, France, 104m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Joyous and heartbreaking in alternating breaths, French writer-director Julien Carpentier’s searing family tale stars a fierce Agnès Jaoui (The Taste of Others) as Judith, a middle-aged woman who reunites with her 33-year-old son, Pierre (William Lebghil), after two years apart. Judith has just escaped from a clinic, where she was being treated for bipolar disorder. Her tornado-like reappearance naturally upends Pierre’s quiet and comfortable life as a florist, resurfacing daily anxieties and lingering resentments. Yet, over the course of a single whirlwind day, the two will find common ground. The gradual recalibration of their relationship is depicted in an enormously touching and often very funny fashion. Buoyed by a pair of sensitively drawn, lived-in performances, This Is My Mother depicts both the fragility and unbreakable force of the maternal bond.
Torah Tropical
Ezra Axelrod, Gloria Nancy Monsalve, Jimmy Ferguson, 2024, Colombia, 100m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Perceptive and revelatory, this documentary about a family that has converted to Orthodox Jewish life in Cali, Colombia, and wishes to escape to Jerusalem, makes an ongoing global crisis relatable. Living precariously in a beautiful but dangerous city that has been rocked by the country’s escalating unrest and drug war violence, parents Isska and Menajem wish to relocate to Israel with their two young daughters, fervently believing that the Promised Land is calling them home. Immigration won’t be easy. With intimate empathy and escalating tension, Torah Tropical depicts the lengths people will go to improve their lives, find where they belong, and affirm their faith despite struggle and hardship.
The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival
Julie Rubio, 2024, U.S., 96m
New York Premiere
The first feature-length documentary about the extraordinary Polish Jewish painter Tamara de Lempicka—whose enduring work is beloved by art collectors the world over, including Barbra Streisand, and who was the subject of a recent Broadway musical—Julie Rubio’s film provides an essential and riveting account of a woman who defied all rules. After stunning the international art world in 1920s Paris with her work, which mixed cubist and neoclassicist styles, Lempicka fled to the United States in 1940 amidst the rise of fascism in Europe. This film charts her path to freedom—as an artist, as an immigrant, as a bisexual woman—and examines what gives her marvelous paintings their aesthetic power and political impact. Narrated by Anjelica Huston, and featuring newly discovered material, including 8mm home movies, Rubio’s film is a tribute to an undimmed luminary and an investigation into the sociohistorical and psychological realities that create artistic legacy.
The Zweiflers
Created by: David Hadda, Sarah Hadda, Juri Sternburg
Directors: Anja Marquardt, Clara Zoe My-Linh von Arnim, 2024, Germany, 300m
German, English, and Yiddish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Presented in six episodes, this altogether compelling series is a comic-dramatic, multigenerational saga following the travails of an extended Jewish family sorting out the future of its vast delicatessen empire in contemporary Germany. Symcha (Mike Burstyn), the patriarch of the Zweifler clan and a Holocaust survivor, is looking to sell off his deli business. Yet potentially damaging secrets from the past throw his future—and that of his children and grandchildren—into question and the Zweiflers’s present into disarray. The novelistic, expansive narrative of The Zweiflers, set in Frankfurt and Berlin, encompasses themes of tradition, succession, the multiculturalism of the Jewish diaspora, estrangement, prejudice, and familial trauma all while maintaining a vivid, humorous tone over its multiple, gripping hours. This multilayered and often hilarious examination of modern Jewish identity was the winner of the Best Series award at the Cannes International Series Festival.