Jewish film fest brings holiday food for thought 

The 27th Jerusalem Jewish Festival, which will take place this year from December 13-18 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, will feature both food for thought and fun, as it showcases movies – about 40 films from 15 countries around the world – that tell stories of Jewish life in both the distant past and the uncertain present. 

This year’s festival will open with The Soundman, a Belgian drama by Frank Van Passel about a young, shy technician at a Brussels radio station in 1940 whose unlikely romance with a rising actress unfolds as the Nazi invasion looms. 

A related film will be screened: Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold by Abby Ginzberg, a portrait of the woman who founded the Hadassah organization, connecting American women with communities in Palestine and helping to build a healthcare system based on equality for Arabs and Jews. This heartfelt documentary honors her legacy and celebrates a woman who reshaped history through compassion and conviction.

There are always new historical stories to explore, and this year, there will be a special focus on movies by and about the master documentary film director, Claude Lanzmann. Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness draws upon 220 hours of raw material filmed by Lanzmann during the making of Shoah, much of it never seen publicly. This highly recommended documentary examines in detail how the director shaped this mass of material into the comprehensive and affecting film that has become a classic. 

Mimi Aish, the former Film Acquisition and Research coordinator at the Visual Center at Yad Vashem, will present Lanzmann’s four-episode film, Shoah: Four Sisters, which features four interviews conducted in the 1970s with indomitable women who survived the Holocaust. 

Two new films look at how the Nazis looted art owned by Jews during World War II. These are Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief, by Hugo MacGregor, which explores the career of Bruno Lohse, a Nazi art dealer who served as Hermann Goring’s agent in Paris. The Spoils, by Jamie Kastner, looks at Germany’s botched recent attempts to honor Jewish art dealer Max Stern, revealing the continuing battle over the restitution of Nazi-looted art. 

Also part of the festival is Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a look at his life as well as his art by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, and The Hell of Auschwitz – Maus by Art Spiegelman, directed by Pauline Horowitz, which spotlights the impact of his two-part graphic novel about his childhood and his parents’ Holocaust experience. 

• Mariana’s Room, directed by Emmanuel Finkiel, an adaptation of Aharon Appelfeld’s Blooms of Darkness, about an 11-year-old Jewish boy who survives the war by hiding in a prostitute’s closet.

• Proud Jewish Boy, by Isri Halpern, examines the life of Herschel Grynszpan, whose 1938 shooting of a German official was used by the Nazis as justification for Kristallnacht.

• Lior Geller’s feature film, The World Will Tremble, is the story of a daring escape attempt from a death camp.

• Cywia & Rachela – They Resisted in the Warsaw Ghetto, by Rafael Lewandowski, which tells the story of two women, Cywia Lubetkin and Rachel Auerbach, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

• Neshoma, by Sandra Beerends, brings prewar Jewish Amsterdam to life through the story of a teenage girl, and is told through archival footage; and Hitler’s Reich: A German Journal, by Eva Roger, Daniel Ast, and Jurgen Ast, a documentary series that explores the Third Reich from the perspectives of eight individuals – both victims and perpetrators – between 1933 and 1945. 

There is always a musical happening as part of the festival, and this year, the event Red, White & Blues: Gershwin Changes the Sound of America will feature a screening of the 1945 George Gershwin biopic, Rhapsody in Blue by Irving Rapper, with Robert Alda – Alan Alda’s father – as Gershwin, with Oscar Levant and Al Jolson playing themselves. 

Classics on the program include Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler satire, The Great Dictator, and Brighton Beach, a 1980 documentary by Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg, about the ever-changing, immigrant-friendly Brooklyn neighborhood.

New documentaries look at some of the most beloved Jewish creators of all time, including Billy Joel: And So It Goes, a two-part film by Sarah Lacy and Jessica Levin; and Steven Spielberg – The New Hollywood Prodigy, directed by Michael Prazan.

Joshua Zeman’s Checkpoint Zoo documents a daring rescue led by a heroic team of zookeepers and volunteers who risked their lives to save thousands of animals trapped in a zoo behind enemy lines during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

One of the highlights of the festival is the International Film Competition, which will award the Schoumann Prize for Jewish Cinema. Among the films this year in the competition is Laszlo Nemes’s Orphan, set in Hungary in 1957, in which a boy longs for the father he was told died a hero, yet has to contend with a brutal man who shows up claiming he is the child’s real father.  

Olivia Levi-Hadid’s Cha Cha Cha follows a Latin-American woman navigating Argentina and Israel, in a more intimate story of migration and identity. 

The Ma’aleh Ultra-Orthodox Track will present short fiction and documentary work by women filmmakers from the haredi world, offering glimpses from an insider’s point of view into a community that is rarely shown on screen.

Among other films slated for screening during the festival week are theatrical releases and world premieres. In addition to The Soundman, the program includes features such as Nandauri and Oxygen, both part of the selection for contemporary Israeli cinema. 

Nandauri, a debut feature, is set in a remote Georgian village, where the arrival of a mysterious woman disrupts the community’s fragile balance. Oxygen portrays a mother’s desperate search for her son after he is sent to a war following a canceled release from the army. 

The Jewish Film Festival Jerusalem 2025 is supported by the Culture Ministry, the Azrieli Foundation, the Jerusalem Municipality, the Jerusalem Foundation, Yad Vashem, Helene Schoumann, the Goshen Foundation, as well as cultural institutes and embassies.

To view the full program, go to jer-cin.org.il/en/JJFF2025_ENG.