New York Jewish Film Festival 2025

[Chris Knipp]

OF DOGS AND MEN

New York Jewish Film Festival 2025
January 15 - 29, 2025

Midas Man
Joe Stephenson 2024 U.K. 112 minutes
Opening Film | New York Premiere
This empathetic biopic directed by Joe Stephenson and written by Brigit Grant stars a deeply moving Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (The Queen’s Gambit) as the mythic Brian Epstein, the Jewish and gay music lover who discovered and then managed the Beatles in the 1960s before his tragic death at age 32.
Showtimes
January 16
2:15 PM 8:00 PM

Of Dogs and Men
Dani Rosenberg 2024 Israel/Italy 82 minutes Hebrew with English subtitles
Centerpiece | New York City Premiere
Filmmaker Dani Rosenberg dives headfirst into the psychological horrors of our contemporary world with this experiential account of a teenager searching for her missing dog in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attacks in Israel, shot in late October 2023. Note: some images may be disturbing.
Showtimes
January 23
8:30 PM

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round
Ilana Trachtman 2024 U.S. 90 minutes
Closing Film | New York Premiere
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. Features a voice-over cast that includes Mandy Patinkin, Jeffrey Wright, and Dominique Thorne, among others.
Showtimes
January 29
1:00 PM 7:00 PM

Ada: My Mother the Architect
Yael Melamede 2024 Israel/U.S. 81 minutes English and Hebrew with English subtitles
In her heartfelt and elegantly made new documentary, Yael Melamede tells the personal story of her mother, Ada Karmi-Melamede, a pioneering architect known throughout Israel, inquiring into a family life and professional career that have consisted of difficult choices.
Showtimes
January 22
8:30 PM

Blind at Heart
Barbara Albert 2023 Germany/Switzerland/Luxembourg 137 minutes 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 in this gripping adaptation of Julia Franck’s internationally renowned, German Book Prize–winning novel, The Blindness of the Heart. Note: some images may be disturbing; contains a depiction of sexual assault.
Showtimes
January 20
6:30 PM
January 22
2:00 PM

Breaking Home Ties
Frank N. Seltzer, George K. Rowlands 1922 U.S. 78 minutes Silent with English intertitles
New York Premiere of New Recorded Score
In this classic silent melodrama once believed lost, a Russian émigré in New York 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. Featuring a new recorded score.
Showtimes
January 19
12:00 PM

Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
Oren Rudavsky 2024 U.S. 88 minutes English and French with English subtitles
New York City Premiere
In this enthralling new documentary, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky digs deep into the philosophically abundant inner life of Holocaust survivor and Night author Elie Wiesel, depicted with nuance and tenderness, and enriched by access to his personal archives.
Showtimes
January 19
2:30 PM
January 21
4:30 PM

Full Support
Michal Cohen 2024 Israel 68 minutes Hebrew with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The poignant and revealing Full Support is an entertaining work of nonfiction that 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. Preceded by Kineret Hay-Gillor’s Tattooed4Life.
Showtimes
January 23
5:30 PM

The Glory of Life
Georg Maas, Judith Kaufmann 2023 Germany 98 minutes German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This deeply emotional and elegantly realized romantic historical drama sensitively sketches 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.
Showtimes
January 27
4:00 PM
January 28
5:45 PM

The Heiresses
Márta Mészáros 1980 Hungary/France 100 minutes Hungarian with English subtitles
The luminous Isabelle Huppert stars in this recently restored drama from Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros, set in 1936 Budapest, in which she plays a young Jewish seamstress recruited by a much wealthier friend (Lili Monori) to conceive a baby.
Showtimes
January 26
7:30 PM

Hester Street
Joan Micklin Silver 1975 U.S. 89 minutes
50th Anniversary Screening
One of the most beloved American films of the 1970s, this exquisitely wrought drama from Joan Micklin Silver brilliantly recreates Jewish immigrant life on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, and features Carol Kane in a delicate, Oscar-nominated performance.
Showtimes
January 18
7:00 PM
Lost City

Willy Lindwer 2024 Netherlands 91 minutes Dutch with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
This documentary by Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer reveals that the Amsterdam Transit Authority, even in the years after World War II, was soliciting payments from Germany for the public city trams that deported 48,000 Jews, including Anne Frank, to their deaths. Preceded by Yoav Potash’s A Great Big Secret.
Showtimes
January 19
5:30 PM
January 21
1:00 PM

Neither Day Nor Night
Pinhas Veuillet 2024 Israel 105 minutes Hebrew with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Set in Israel’s Bnei Brak, this new film from Jerusalem-born filmmaker Pinhas Veuillet centered around a conflict between the patriarch of a French Sephardic family and the Ashkenazi headmaster at his son's school.
Showtimes
January 27
1:00 PM 7:00 PM

Nina Is an Athlete
Ravit Markus 2024 Israel/U.S. 72 minutes 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—while weighing the possibility of having a baby in her late thirties.
Showtimes
January 16
5:30 PM

The Other
Joy Sela 2024 U.S. 104 minutes English, Hebrew, and Arabic with English subtitles
Following Israeli and Palestinian subjects working toward connection and hope rather than division and bloodshed, Joy Sela’s documentary 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. Note: some images may be disturbing.
Showtimes
January 22
5:30 PM

Sixty and the City
Nili Tal 2010 Israel 70 minutes Hebrew with English subtitles
Presented in memory of Nili Tal
In this delightful and humorous personal documentary, Nili Tal defiantly traces her own mission to find new romance as a sixtysomething divorcée with grandchildren. NYJFF presents this retrospective screening in tribute to its veteran director, who died in March 2024.
Showtimes
January 20
1:00 PM

The Spoils
Jamie Kastner 2024 Canada 104 minutes 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 WWII form the center of Jamie Kastner’s absorbing documentary about the legacy of Max Stern, a German Jewish art dealer who escaped to Canada in 1937.
Showtimes
January 21
7:30 PM
January 29
3:30 PM

This Is My Mother
Julien Carpentier 2023 France 104 minutes French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
French writer-director Julien Carpentier’s searing family comedy stars a fierce Agnès Jaoui as a woman who reunites with her 33-year-old son after having escaped from a clinic where she was being treated for bipolar disorder.
Showtimes
January 23
2:30 PM
January 25

Torah Tropical
Ezra Axelrod, Gloria Nancy Monsalve, Jimmy Ferguson 2024 Colombia 100 minutes Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Living precariously in a beautiful but dangerous city in Colombia that has been rocked by escalating unrest and drug war violence, Orthodox Jewish converts Isska and Menajem desire to emigrate to Israel with their two young daughters.
Showtimes
January 20
3:30 PM

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival
Julie Rubio 2024 U.S. 96 minutes
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, Julie Rubio’s film provides an essential and riveting account of a woman who defied all rules.
Showtimes
January 28
3:00 PM 8:30 PM

The Zweiflers
Anja Marquardt, Clara Zoe My-Linh von Arnim 2024 Germany 300 minutes German, English, and Yiddish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Presented in six episodes, this novelistic, expansive 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 that maintains a vivid, humorous tone throughout.
Showtimes
January 26
12:15 PM


AIN'T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND