New York Jewish Film Festival returns for its 35th edition to Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater from January 14 through January 28, 2026, showcasing nearly 30 features, documentaries, and shorts.
Opening the festival is Once Upon My Mother, an inspiring drama directed by Ken Scott and based on the autobiographical novel by Roland Perez, the matriarch of a bustling Jewish immigrant family from Morocco in the Parisian suburbs in the 1960s will do anything to give her youngest son the best possible life.
This year’s Centerpiece Film is All I Had Was Nothingness, a new documentary by filmmaker Guillaume Ribot paying tribute to Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 epic, Shoah. The film tells the story of how Lanzmann accomplished the groundbreaking feat of creating an over nine-hour-long masterwork focusing on the evils of the Holocaust, revealing never-before-seen excerpts from more than 200 hours of unreleased footage.
The Closing Film, Fantasy Life, is a captivating comic drama of modern anxiety by Matthew Shear starring Amanda Peet as a wealthy but depressed middle-aged mom whose life intersects with a recently laid-off paralegal (played by Shear) hired to babysit her three daughters while her husband chases his dreams of living the rock-star life. The cast also includes Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban, Jessica Harper, and Zosia Mamet.
Also featured are two historic films highlighting the famous Polish comedy duo Dzigan and Schumacher. I Have Sinned (Al Khet), a long-unseen, genre-defying gem of the 1930s and the first Yiddish sound film made in Poland, mixes melodrama, comedy, and music to tell the story of Esther, a rabbi’s daughter who, during World War I, becomes pregnant by a German Jewish officer, abandons her baby, and flees to the U.S. Set in an orphanage and school near Łódź, Our Children (Unzere Kinder), is a fascinating, rarely seen classic from post–World War II Poland. The film combines fiction and documentary to address the then-recent suffering of a group of children who had survived the Holocaust and explores the potential of artistic expression as a method of processing trauma.
The festival is presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center.
2026 New York Jewish Film Festival Film Descriptions & Schedule
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th St.)
Opening Film
Once Upon My Mother
Ken Scott, 2025, France/Canada, 102m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In this inspiring, emotionally charged, and often funny real-life drama set in the 1960s, the matriarch of a bustling Jewish immigrant family from Morocco living in the Parisian suburbs will do anything to give her youngest son the best possible life despite his physical setbacks. Born with a clubfoot, little Roland is unable to walk, yet his mother, Esther (Algerian French actress Leïla Bekhti, in a flamboyant, tour de force performance), is undeterred, her determination to help him live “normally” turning into an obsession. The film follows Roland into adulthood, as his maternal relationship grows increasingly complicated, even overwhelming. A fiery and wondrous adaptation of an autobiographical novel by French writer and radio personality Roland Perez, featuring music by Sylvie Vartan, who plays herself in the film, the upbeat and miraculous Once Upon My Mother beautifully demonstrates the complex phenomenon of a mother’s single-minded, against-all-odds devotion.
Centerpiece Film
All I Had Was Nothingness
Guillaume Ribot, 2025, France, 95m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The 1985 film Shoah is a groundbreaking and utterly unique nine-hour-plus meditation on the earth-shattering evil of the Holocaust that collects eye-witness testimony from victims, perpetrators, and complicit bystanders. Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann culled his 12-years-in-the-making epic from endless hours of footage. With this new documentary, released on Shoah’s 40th anniversary, director Guillaume Ribot returns to this important work and pays homage to Lanzmann’s journey, telling the story of how he accomplished this feat and revealing never-before-seen excerpts from more than 200 hours of unreleased footage. The result is a tribute to a masterpiece and to the outsize personality of Lanzmann himself, as well as a revelation for followers of the filmmaker’s indefatigable archaeology of memory, a crucial addition to cinematic Holocaust scholarship.
Closing Film
Fantasy Life
Matthew Shear, 2025, U.S., 91m
New York Premiere
In this captivating comic drama of modern anxiety, first-time writer-director-actor Matthew Shear (who’s appeared in films by Noah Baumbach and Nathan Silver) weaves an unexpected tale of connection. Amanda Peet stars as Dianne, a wealthy but depressed middle-aged mom whose life intersects with newly laid-off paralegal Sam (Shear) when he’s hired—by his therapist—to babysit her three daughters while her husband (Alessandro Nivola) is away chasing his dreams of living the rock-star life. As Sam and Dianne find surprising intimacies by bonding over shared neuroses about lives they feel they no longer control, Fantasy Life reveals itself as a deeply honest character study, culminating in an emotional blowout family dinner. The brilliant cast also stars Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban, Jessica Harper, and Zosia Mamet.
Preceded by:
Animated New Yorkers: Joel
Jack Feldstein, 2024, U.S., 6m
New York Premiere
Animator Jack Feldstein returns to NYJFF with a portrait of a former ultra-Orthodox Jewish man describing his first ever physical encounter with a woman.
Along the River
Gerburg Rohde-Dahl, 2025, Germany, 62m
New York Premiere
A group of Israelis and Palestinians came together in Germany for a dialogue in the aftermath of October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. This nine-day seminar allowed those taking part to express their unresolvable feelings of trauma, grief, and rage while at the same time encouraging them to find moments of empathy and compassion. For this powerful and momentous documentary, director Gerburg Rohde-Dahl visited the seminar, filming the participants during breaks between the sessions. The resulting work shows the tremendous attempts of people in agony to put aside politics and discover their shared humanity. Rohde-Dahl’s film shows that through the act of listening, all of us may live with and through our own pain.
Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause
James L. Freedman, 2024, U.S., 93 min
A beloved figure of American culture, Charles Grodin emerged as a star in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Thanks to his effortlessly brilliant work in films like The Heartbreak Kid, The Great Muppet Caper, Midnight Run, Beethoven, and Dave, he would remain a mainstay of comedy for generations of viewers. But Grodin’s off-screen accomplishments were even more dramatic: he was a social activist who devoted decades of his life to fighting for wrongly imprisoned people and reforming drug laws. Featuring interviews with collaborators, including Carol Burnett, Ellen Burstyn, Robert De Niro, Marc Maron, Steve Martin, Elaine May, and Martin Short, as well as women for whom Mr. Grodin was instrumental in releasing from prison, this eye-opening documentary sheds light on Grodin’s career and life.
The First Lady
Udi Nir, Sagi Bornstein, 2025, Germany/Israel, 82m
English, French, German, and Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
An urgent and daring documentary that champions human rights in the face of repression, The First Lady is a profile of Efrat Tilma, a transgender woman who fled Israel in the 1960s when, as a teenager, she was harassed and threatened by the police for wearing women’s clothes. Decades later, Tilma would go on to become a pioneering Israeli activist for LGBTQ+ rights as the country’s first transgender volunteer in the police force. Now, at 75, Tilma tries to wind her own way through the political and bureaucratic complexities of contemporary Israel, confronting discrimination and speaking out about the aggression and intimidation of the more conservative government—and representing the humanity of the endangered trans community.
Frontier / Frontera
Judith Colell, 2025, Spain/Belgium, 101m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
This remarkable historical thriller from Catalan director, screenwriter, and producer Judith Colell tells the gripping and incredible true story of the heroism of a Spanish village on the border with France in the Pyrenees during World War II. In 1943, a group of the town’s inhabitants, led by customs officer Manel Grau (Miki Esparbé), defied their country’s fascist regime to save Jews smuggled in from Nazi-occupied France, despite the shadow of recent trauma connected to the nation’s Civil War under Franco’s rule. Colell meticulously recreates this tense moment in history, shooting on vintage lenses and 35mm film, to evoke the desperation and anxiety of people trying to do the right and moral thing.
Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold
Abby Ginzberg, 2025, U.S., 79m
English and Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A visionary leader and one of history’s most influential, yet under-recognized, American Jewish women, Henrietta Szold left an indelible mark on the 20th century. She founded Hadassah in 1912, creating a vital link between American women and communities in Palestine. Through this organization, she established the region’s modern health care system, built on a mandate to treat Arabs and Jews equally. Later, she spearheaded Youth Aliyah, an operation that rescued 11,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe. Peabody Award–winning director Abby Ginzberg’s heartfelt documentary offers a thought-provoking look at a woman who reshaped history through compassion and an unwavering belief in the power of humanity.
The Last Spy
Katharina Otto-Bernstein, 2025, U.S./Germany, 86m
English and German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Before he died in 2025 at age 102, CIA spy master Peter Sichel—aka the “Jewish James Bond,” as some friends called him—sat down for a wide-ranging interview. The result is a fascinating conversation that provides the backbone for Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s gripping documentary. After perilously immigrating with his wine merchant family from Nazi Germany to France and then to New York, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight Hitler. Soon enough he is recognized for his ability to turn German POWs into spies—the beginning of a brilliant and dangerous career that would lead to his taking part in the formation of the CIA and the country’s prolonged involvement in the Cold War. Sichel recounts his experiences with honesty and wit, which the director embellishes with historical images and footage to create a real-life noir.
A Letter to David
Tom Shoval, 2025, Israel/U.S., 74m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
David Cunio was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz and taken hostage on October 7, 2023, along with his wife and two baby daughters. Filmmaker Tom Shoval was shocked and horrified to learn of this abduction amidst the fear and terror of that fateful day, as David had played a lead role in Shoval’s 2013 film, Youth. Shoval decided to revisit that film and its behind-the-scenes material to pay tribute to his friend and collaborator. A Letter to David is a unique and deeply moving film that does not use footage from the October 7 attacks but rather weaves together raw footage, audition tapes, and scenes from the making of Youth. This deeply personal documentary essay expands into an examination of how cinema and memory can testify to the unimaginable.
Maintenance Artist
Toby Perl Freilich, 2025, U.S., 95m
After becoming a mother, pioneering artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles published a daring manifesto: from that moment on, all of her childcare and household maintenance would be acts of performance art. The manifesto propelled her into the male-dominated 1960s avant-garde art world. This feminist artist and observant Jew soon became a staple of the New York scene, using her revelatory experimentations to link child-raising, cleaning, and sanitation as an interrogation into how maintenance work is valued and connected to issues of class, race, and gender. Toby Perl Freilich’s delightful documentary reveals that Ukeles—who would become the first artist-in-residence at the NYC Sanitation Department—draws explicitly from Jewish tradition, making it more inclusive and less patriarchal, and reflects Jewish values of social justice.
Mazel Tov
Adrián Suar, 2025, Argentina, 97m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Argentinean actor and director Adrián Suar has made an alternately touching and raucous drama about the fragility of family ties and the importance of tradition with his engrossing Mazel Tov. Suar stars as Dario Roitman, who decides to make the trip from the U.S. back to his hometown in Argentina to attend both his sister’s wedding and his niece’s Bat Mitzvah; yet just as he’s about to board the plane he finds out that his father has died. Because Dario has been estranged from his dad and brothers, this creates considerable complications, leading to emotional reckonings that will either threaten to break the family apart or heal long-standing wounds. Suar’s film is a quintessential story of familial dysfunction told with a healthy dose of humor.
My Underground Mother
Marisa Fox, 2025, U.S., 86m
Czech, English, German, Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A daughter plays detective to dig into her mother’s secret past, discovering astonishing revelations about her life as a spy and freedom fighter against the Nazis in this absorbing and intimate documentary debut from New York journalist Marisa Fox. Twenty years after the death of her mother, Tamar, Fox begins to piece together a puzzle that spans Israel, Poland, and beyond, leading her to the discovery of a teenage sisterhood that formed within a Jewish women’s forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland to stand in brave resistance to the evils of the Holocaust, including sexual assault. Both a tale of female empowerment during World War II and a contemporary journey of a woman coming to terms with a parent’s unreconciled legacy, Fox’s film is an ever-expanding story of one woman’s refusal to be defined by trauma.
Neshoma
Sandra Beerends, 2024, Netherlands, 88m
Dutch and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In this beautifully composed work, filmmaker Sandra Beerends uses a rich trove of archival footage to resurrect the vibrant Jewish communities of Amsterdam in the years before World War II changed these lives and landscapes forever. Rather than simply telling a visual history through testimonies or talking heads, Beerends employs this vivid historical material to create a film that exists in the space between documentary and fiction, inventing the life of a 17-year-old girl named Rusha as she, her friends, and her family navigate an environment of post–World War I optimism, followed by economic depression, the subsequent rise of fascism, and finally occupation. Neshoma—named for the Yiddish Hebrew word for soul—is a reminder of a way of life that even the monstrous evils of the 20th century could not entirely eradicate.
Orna and Ella
Tomer Heymann, 2025, Israel, 54m
Hebrew with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
When the renowned Tel Aviv restaurant Orna and Ella closed after 26 years, the city said farewell to a landmark culinary destination. This mouthwatering documentary, shot during the final days of the restaurant, was directed by Tomer Heymann (Paper Dolls, Mr. Gaga), who has not only been a major award-winning voice in Israeli nonfiction cinema for more than two decades but also worked at Orna and Ella for six years himself. In addition to the beloved sweet potato latkes, homemade bread, and ice cream, this Tel Aviv institution was a bastion of open-mindedness. Humorous and poignant, his film stands as a complex testament to the two women who owned the restaurant, Orna Agmon and Ella Shine. They are refreshingly candid as they look back on the ups and downs of their partnership, while Heymann’s film also pays tribute to a recent past that has begun to feel increasingly distant.
Preceded by:
A Bit of Everything and Matzoh Balls Too
Emily Lobsenz, 2025, U.S., 19m
New York Premiere
A tribute to the history and magical healing powers of that most durable of Jewish comfort foods—matzoh ball soup—and the personal family stories that surround it.
Out of Exile: The Photography of Fred Stein
Peter Stein, Dawn Freer, 2021, U.S., 86m
New York City Premiere
This stylish portrait of German Jewish photographer Fred Stein transports the viewer back to some of the most dramatic historical moments of the mid-20th century. After fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, the Dresden-born Stein relocated to Paris and then New York, becoming a renowned street photographer, capturing the heartbreak of living amidst war without losing sight of his subjects’ essential humanity. This documentary offers a visually marvelous testament to the artist and his work, as well as to the son who refused to let his father’s legacy fall through the cracks of history.
Real Estate
Anat Maltz, 2024, Israel/France, 99m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Set over the course of one anxious day, this comic gem, the debut feature from director-writer Anat Matlz, touches upon resonant and universal themes of belonging, economic instability, and unsettled romance. Maltz follows Tamara (Victoria Rosovsky) and Adam (Leib Lev Levin), a young couple about to become parents who are being forced to move out of their enviable Tel Aviv apartment. Their hunt for a new home in the more affordable Haifa, where Adam was raised, is the catalyst for major reckonings about their relationship, and summons a host of fears and fantasies about the path their life together is taking. Real Estate is the touching story of an unmoored generation whose financial future is more precarious than ever, yet who still cling to ideals of love, career, and family. Wednesday, January 21 at 8:00pm
The Safe House / La cache
Lionel Baier, 2025, Switzerland/Luxembourg/France, 90m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier gives the events of May ’68 in Paris an unusually lighthearted but multilayered treatment in this winsome portrait of a 9-year-old and his extended stay in his grandparents’ apartment while his parents join the earth-shaking student protests exploding all over the city. As the demonstrations outside swell, the family reunion inside the walls expands to include his artistic and intellectual-minded uncles and outspoken Odessa-born great-grandmother, until they are joined by an unexpected guest. Adapted from the novel La cache by Christophe Boltanski—a nephew of the renowned French artist Christian Boltanski—The Safe House is an entertaining portrait of a free-spirited Jewish family that recreates a vibrant and intense historical moment from a surprising perspective.
Sapiro v. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford
Gaylen Ross, 2025, U.S./Canada, 69m
New York Premiere
He was both the wealthiest man in America and notoriously antisemitic. But automobile tycoon Henry Ford met his match in 1927 when a Jewish lawyer named Aaron Sapiro brought a lawsuit against him. Ford had launched a smear campaign, accusing the lawyer, who was dedicated to helping struggling farmers unionize, of being a communist and part of an international “Jewish conspiracy.” Sapiro’s subsequent libel case against Ford’s hate speech—a landmark moment in our nation’s judicial history for being the first time a Jew fought antisemitic slander in an American court—forms the center of this enlightening documentary, which tells the ultimate American David and Goliath story. Featuring Ben Shenkman voicing the words of Aaron Sapiro.
I Have Sinned / Al Khet
Aleksander Marten, 1936, Poland, 95m
Yiddish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of Digital Restoration
This long-unseen, genre-defying gem of the 1930s was the first Yiddish sound film made in Poland, mixing melodrama, comedy, and musical to tell the story of Esther, a rabbi’s daughter who becomes pregnant by a German Jewish officer during World War I. When the Russian Army advances into the family’s village, Esther (Rachel Holzer) decides to abandon her baby and flee to the U.S. Spanning 20 years of history and family tumult, I Have Sinned (Al Khet) also features the famous Polish comedy team Dzigan and Schumacher in crucial roles as a duo determined to reunite Esther with her child. This restoration, carried out by the National Center for Jewish Film, gives audiences the chance to see a rare landmark that had been out of circulation for decades. New English translation, subtitles and digital restoration by the National Center for Jewish Film.
Our Children / Unzere Kinder
Natan Gross, Shaul Goskind, 1948, Poland, 35mm, 68m
Yiddish with English subtitles
In this restoration of a fascinating, rarely seen classic from post-WWII Poland, filmmakers Natan Gross and Shaul Goskind mix fiction and documentary to address the then-recent atrocities of the Holocaust, setting their story in an actual orphanage and school near Lodz. Here, the famous Yiddish comedy duo of Shimon Dzigan and Israel Schumacher perform Sholem Alecheim’s play Kasrilevke Is Burning for an audience of Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust, which leads to a discussion about the young people’s experiences during the war. This singular document of survival stands out for its candor and complexity, and the way in which it suggests artistic expression as a way to process trauma. Author and critic J. Hoberman wrote, “Our Children is not only among the first films about the Holocaust, it is also the first to critique its representation.” Restored by The National Center for Jewish Film.
NYJFF 2026 Shorts Program
The Suitcase
Laetitia Clareton, 2024, Canada, 5m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A Quebecoise filmmaker uses family photos and archival images to send a message to her long-deceased grandmother in an attempt to establish her own path toward healing.
Blood Ties
Tomi Joelah Drucker, 2025, Israel, 13m
Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Two teenage sisters must come to terms with their grief after the death of their mother, while at the same time seeing and understanding one another for the first time, in this delicate tale of mourning.
Parents
Jonas Lajboschitz, 2024, Denmark, 18m
Danish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The scars of the past haunt an unsettled present in this emotional drama about a Jewish man in Stockholm who reconnects with an ex-girlfriend on her wedding day and summons up a tragic memory.
The Cave Synagogue
Peter Decherney, 2024, U.S./Uganda, 8m
Luganda and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The Ugandan Jewish elder J.J. Keki, whose father was among the first generation of Ugandans who converted to Judaism in the early 20th century, makes a pilgrimage with his sons to the secret synagogue where Jews prayed during Idi Amin’s reign.
The Last Jews of Guantanamo
Yael Bridge, 2024, U.S., 13m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In this precious and intimate portrait of sacred ritual, two octogenarian women prepare for and celebrate their Bat Mitzvahs in Guantanamo, Cuba, where only around 50 people (out of 200,000) are Jewish.
Double Happiness
Shari Albert, 2025, U.S., 16m
In this moving, comic-tinged romantic drama revolving around family and food and set during the Christmas holidays, a surprising bond forms between a Jewish widow and a Chinese American restaurateur, both seeking connection after losing loved ones.
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