Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival 2025

Art Spiegelman: Disaster is my Muse is a portrait of an artist fully engaged with his past and his present who, with his chosen medium of comics, helps us to understand our turbulent world, and is testimony to the power of art to make sense of our personal and collective histories.

Set on Coney Island’s iconic boardwalk, this 1980 documentary captures Brighton Beach’s ever-changing immigrant communities. Through vérité scenes, it portrays newcomers and long-time residents mingling, observing each other, and coexisting, united by a shared sense of displacement and the neighborhood’s ongoing transformation.

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.

Eighty years after his liberation from Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire reveals the man behind the searing and widely read memoir, Night. Through Wiesel’s own words, rare archives, interviews, and hand-painted animation, the film explores his legacy as a Holocaust survivor and public figure.

After getting laid off, a thirty-something paralegal in New York starts babysitting his psychiatrist’s three granddaughters and falls for their mother, an actress in a rocky marriage. Matthew Shear’s refreshing directorial debut explores the uneasy, often darkly funny terrain of mental health and human connection.

Charlie Chaplin’s first talking film tells the story of a Jewish barber whose resemblance to the dictator Hynkel leads him to swap places with him. A bold satire and timeless masterpiece of classic comedy.

The film illuminates the extraordinary life and work of one of the most influential and fearless political thinkers of the 20th century. Arendt’s time as a WW2 political prisoner and refugee generated daring insights about the human condition and totalitarianism, which continue to resonate profoundly today.

A documentary series exploring the Third Reich through the perspectives of eight individuals from 1933 to 1945—victims and perpetrators, resisters and followers, supporters and bystanders. Alongside diary entries, the series combines exclusive film and photo archive material with graphic novel elements (4 eps., 52 min. each, Eps. 1+2 14.12 / Eps. 3+4 15.12)

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In 1912, Henrietta Szold founded Hadassah, 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.

Lola, a young woman with a hole in her chest, embarks on a journey through landscapes and characters. She learns healing is within, and must come to terms with her pain, accepting it to move forward.

The first feature documentary about groundbreaking public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s official artist-in-residence. After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage?