The films in the 23rd edition of the JBFC's Jewish Film Festival offer close encounters with remarkable individuals in a wide range of fiction films and documentaries. In all of these films, personal stories lead to broader perspectives on history, culture, and society.

Schedule of Events:

April 23, 2025

7:00pm - Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire

Jewish Film Festival Opening Night Q&A with Professor and Writer Annette Insdorf

2024. 87 m. Oren Rudavsky. Panorama. US. English/French/German. Rated NR.

"Sometimes I'm afraid the tale might be forgotten. Sometimes I'm afraid it is forgotten already. So I'm telling it to relive it again." —Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, the best-known of his 57 books, brought his harrowing experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and his subsequent spiritual journey to millions around the world, chronicling history in the most personal terms. Oren Rudavsky's artful documentary portrait does the same, using Wiesel family archives, original interviews, and beautiful hand-painted animation. An unforgettable scene where a group of black high school students discuss their deeply engaged response to Wiesel's writing is just one example of how the movie shows Wiesel's enduring relevance.

The Opening Night screening will be followed by a conversation with producer Annette Insdorf, Professor of Film at Columbia University's School of the Arts and the author of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. After the screening on April 23, join us upstairs for a Cocktail Reception in the Jane Peck Gallery to celebrate the beginning of the JBFC's 2025 Jewish Film Festival

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

April 24, 2025

4:00pm - Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire

Jewish Film Festival Opening Night Q&A with Professor and Writer Annette Insdorf

2024. 87 m. Oren Rudavsky. Panorama. US. English/French/German. Rated NR.

"Sometimes I'm afraid the tale might be forgotten. Sometimes I'm afraid it is forgotten already. So I'm telling it to relive it again." —Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, the best-known of his 57 books, brought his harrowing experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and his subsequent spiritual journey to millions around the world, chronicling history in the most personal terms. Oren Rudavsky's artful documentary portrait does the same, using Wiesel family archives, original interviews, and beautiful hand-painted animation. An unforgettable scene where a group of black high school students discuss their deeply engaged response to Wiesel's writing is just one example of how the movie shows Wiesel's enduring relevance.

The Opening Night screening will be followed by a conversation with producer Annette Insdorf, Professor of Film at Columbia University's School of the Arts and the author of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. After the screening on April 23, join us upstairs for a Cocktail Reception in the Jane Peck Gallery to celebrate the beginning of the JBFC's 2025 Jewish Film Festival

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

7:00pm - ADA–My Mother the Architect

Q&A with Director Yael Melamede on April 24
2025. 81 m. Yael Melamede. Film First. Israel/US. English/Hebrew with subtitles. Rated NR.

Ada Karmi-Melamede is one of the greatest architects in Israeli history. Her breathtaking modern buildings, including Israel's Supreme Court, Ben Gurion Airport, and the Open University, helped forge the nation's identity. We are fortunate that her daughter Yael, who started her career as an architect, decided to become a filmmaker. Her documentary about her mother is a refreshingly candid encounter between director and subject. It is also one of the most revealing studies of the creative process in recent memory, and one that is keenly sensitive to the perseverance and sacrifice required of a woman who strives to excel in a male-dominated field.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

April 25, 2025

1:00pm - ADA–My Mother the Architect

Q&A with Director Yael Melamede
2025. 81 m. Yael Melamede. Film First. Israel/US. English/Hebrew with subtitles. Rated NR.

Ada Karmi-Melamede is one of the greatest architects in Israeli history. Her breathtaking modern buildings, including Israel's Supreme Court, Ben Gurion Airport, and the Open University, helped forge the nation's identity. We are fortunate that her daughter Yael, who started her career as an architect, decided to become a filmmaker. Her documentary about her mother is a refreshingly candid encounter between director and subject. It is also one of the most revealing studies of the creative process in recent memory, and one that is keenly sensitive to the perseverance and sacrifice required of a woman who strives to excel in a male-dominated field.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

4:00pm - The Heiresses

1980. 105 m. Márta Mészáros. Janus Films. France/Hungary. German/Hungarian/Latin with subtitles. Rated NR.

This recently restored gem by the great Hungarian director Márta Mészáros is a multilayered melodrama set in Budapest as the Nazi threat is rising. Among its many virtues is a wonderful performance by a young Isabelle Huppert. She plays Irén, a Jewish shopgirl of modest means who is befriended by Szilvia (Lili Monori), an heiress who is unable to give birth, and who pays Irén to conceive a child with her husband (Jan Nowicki). The situation is fraught with class distinctions and moral dilemmas, and evolves into a twisted emotional triangle complicated by the clear homoerotic tension between the women. Emotionally absorbing and exquisitely crafted, it is also an incisive study of prewar European decadence.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

7:00pm - Midas Man
2024. 112 m. Joe Stephenson. Menemsha Films. UK. English. Rated NR.

The life story of Brian Epstein, the entrepreneurial Liverpudlian who discovered The Beatles, managed them to meteoric global superstardom, and died at 32, has not had a proper feature-film treatment… until now. With an absorbing lead performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Midas Man shows how Epstein escaped his fate working in his family's retail furniture business to help launch Beatlemania, changing the world of music forever.

"Brian deserves an honest film that celebrates everything he did and was. Through an honest film we can celebrate him without sugar coating the difficult subjects. An honest film can remind people what a society that oppresses people for who they are does on a personal level." —Director Joe Stephenson

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

April 26, 2025

12:00pm - Midas Man

Midas Man
2024. 112 m. Joe Stephenson. Menemsha Films. UK. English. Rated NR.

The life story of Brian Epstein, the entrepreneurial Liverpudlian who discovered The Beatles, managed them to meteoric global superstardom, and died at 32, has not had a proper feature-film treatment… until now. With an absorbing lead performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Midas Man shows how Epstein escaped his fate working in his family's retail furniture business to help launch Beatlemania, changing the world of music forever.

"Brian deserves an honest film that celebrates everything he did and was. Through an honest film we can celebrate him without sugar coating the difficult subjects. An honest film can remind people what a society that oppresses people for who they are does on a personal level." —Director Joe Stephenson

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

7:20pm - Janis Ian: Breaking Silence

2025. 114 m. Varda Bar-Kar. Greenwich Entertainment. US. English. Rated NR.

Singer-songwriter Janis Ian spent her Jewish childhood on her family's chicken farm in New Jersey. She was catapulted into stardom and then controversy as a teenager, with her surprise hit "Society's Child," about interracial love, and her piercingly bittersweet hit song "At Seventeen," about body shaming. Her life and career have had remarkable ups and downs, all depicted in this thoroughly absorbing documentary that features rare material from her vast personal archive and fascinating interviews with family, friends, and musicians with whom she worked. A compelling story about a uniquely gifted and resilient artist that feels epic in scope.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

2:35pm - Of Dogs and Men

2024. 82 m. Dani Rosenberg. Menemsha Films. Italy/Israel. Hebrew with subtitles. Rated NR.

How is it possible to make a narrative film that addresses the massive horror of the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel, and also acknowledges the tragedy of the inevitable retribution just across the border in Gaza? In the case of Dani Rosenberg's Of Dogs and Men, the answer is by going small. With deep humanism and sensitivity, he tells the story of a 16-year-old survivor who returns to her kibbutz searching for her lost dog. Remarkably, Rosenberg picked up his camera to start filming less than a month after the attacks. A touching, necessary, and poetic work.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

April 27, 2025

7:30pm - Breaking Home Ties
1922. 78 m. George K. Rowlands/Frank N. Seltzer. National Center for Jewish Film. US. Silent with English Intertitles. Rated NR.

Long thought to be a lost film, Breaking Home Ties was one of a handful of feature films made in the 1920s to portray everyday Jewish life in the U.S., which was facing a scourge of antisemitism led by the Ku Klux Klan and Henry Ford. Set in New York, the film tells the story of David Bergmann, who fled pre-revolutionary Russia for America thinking he killed his friend in a jealous rage. As David becomes a lawyer and woos his beloved Rose, his family and his past come back to haunt him. In the 1980s, the National Center for Jewish Film rediscovered the movie in a German archive and lovingly restored it.

Screening with a new contemporary music soundtrack—From Grammy winning musician Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) and artists drawn from some of today's legendary Americana, R&B and indie rock bands. A collaboration produced by Reboot Studios, the score was composed, performed and recorded by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Mocean Worker (aka Adam Dorn), and Scott Amendola (Charlie Hunter/Amendola Duo), with additional music from Nels Cline (Wilco), Yuka Honda, Gretchen Gonzales, and Joey Mazzola.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

11:00am - Panel Discussion: Jewish Film in 2024
Featuring Film Critics J. Hoberman, Esther Zuckerman, Jordan Hoffman, and Series Curator David Schwartz
60 m. Rated NR.

2024 was a surprisingly rich year for Jewish-themed films, with widely acclaimed films like the two-character film A Real Pain and the epic The Brutalist exploring the aftermath of the Holocaust in wildly different ways, A Complete Unknown delving into the transformation of Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, and Between the Temples offering an offbeat romance between a disillusioned cantor and an elderly woman who wants a Bat Mitzvah. Join series curator David Schwartz as he leads a group of prominent critics to discuss these films.

Come 30 minutes early for complimentary coffee and bagels.

Tickets: $20 (members), $25 (nonmembers)

12:40pm - Duck Soup

Introduction by Film Critic J. Hoberman
1933. 69 m. Leo McCarey. NBC/Universal. US. English. Rated NR.

A scattershot satire starring Groucho Marx as the incompetent and lecherous autocrat Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup is comedy perfection, a 69-minute assault on the folly of dictatorships, war, and government in general. Released just as FDR took office during the deep Great Depression, Duck Soup was a flop at the time, and considered wildly irreverent. Yet has stood the test of time as the Marx Brothers' essential film, with one brilliant comic scene after another, climaxing with a wild musical number spoofing the insanity of war. Historian J. Hoberman, author of the BFI Film Classics monograph Duck Soup, will introduce the film and sign/sell copies of his book after the screening, courtesy of the Village Bookstore.

Children's tickets are available for Duck Soup and Avalon as part of the Jewish Film Festival's Family Day.

Tickets: $15 (members), $20 (nonmembers), $9 Children

2:30pm - Avalon
Presented in 35mm
1990. 128 m. Barry Levinson. Sony Releasing. US. English/Yiddish. Rated PG.

The unsentimental yet heartwarming saga of a Jewish family's immigration and assimilation in Baltimore from the 1910s through 1950s, Avalon is one of writer-director Barry Levinson's most personal films. The Krichinsky family, led by patriarch and wallpaper salesman Sam (Armin Muehler-Stahl), faces crises and changes large and small, all presented with gentle humor and a feeling of nostalgia that is captured with rapturous beauty by the cinematography of Allen Daviau (E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple). A celebration of family life that can be enjoyed by the whole family.

Children's tickets are available for Duck Soup and Avalon as part of the Jewish Film Festival's Family Day.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers), $9 Children

5:15pm - Brighton Beach
Followed by a Q&A with Co-Director Susan Wittenberg
1980. 60 m. Susan Wittenberg/Carol Stein. Independent. US. English. Rated NR.

Rediscovered and restored only recently by IndieCollect, Brighton Beach is a priceless and beautifully filmed portrait of the Brooklyn neighborhood that includes Coney Island and came to be known as "Little Odessa" for its substantial population of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants. Capturing the diversity and charm of an enclave that hasn't yet been homogenized by gentrification, Brighton Beach is a precious time capsule that combines wonderful archival footage and new photography to observe the quirks, charms (and occasional tensions between the Jewish and Puerto Rican communities), of this unique slice of New York City.

Tickets: $20 (members), $25 (nonmembers)

April 28, 2025

2:35pm - Of Dogs and Men

2024. 82 m. Dani Rosenberg. Menemsha Films. Italy/Israel. Hebrew with subtitles. Rated NR.

How is it possible to make a narrative film that addresses the massive horror of the October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel, and also acknowledges the tragedy of the inevitable retribution just across the border in Gaza? In the case of Dani Rosenberg's Of Dogs and Men, the answer is by going small. With deep humanism and sensitivity, he tells the story of a 16-year-old survivor who returns to her kibbutz searching for her lost dog. Remarkably, Rosenberg picked up his camera to start filming less than a month after the attacks. A touching, necessary, and poetic work.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

April 29, 2025

4:00pm - The Heartbreak Kid
1972. 106 m. Elaine May. Bristol Myers Squibb. USA. English. Rated PG.

Charles Grodin has never been better than in this starmaking performance as sporting goods salesman and all-around schmuck Lenny Cantrow, who leaves his new wife (Jeannie Berlin) during their honeymoon to pursue the shiksa of his dreams, the midwestern blonde Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd). A bracing and hilarious comedy of discomfort, The Heartbreak Kid is the product of three great creative talents, with the genius director Elaine May working from a screenplay by Neil Simon and Bruce Jay Friedman.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

7:00pm - Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause
Virtual Q&A with Director James L. Freedman
2025. 93 m. James L. Freedman. Independent. US. English. Rated NR.

Eternally sardonic, Charles Grodin had an ultra-dry wit and a laconic deadpan delivery that gave him a style all his own. Though his great performances include Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid and Martin Brest's Midnight Run, in which he co-starred with Robert DeNiro, Grodin was also beloved for his subversively funny late-night TV appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Somewhat surprisingly, Grodin turned towards social causes, most notably prison reform, with a CNBC talk show as his main platform. Filled with great footage spanning his career and celebrating his work as a comedian and as an activist, this is a fully rounded portrait of a unique performer and person.

Tickets: $20 (members), $25 (nonmembers)

Date: April 23 - 29, 2025

Location: Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Road Pleasantville, NY 10570

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