The 28th Festival’s major evenings consist of Opening Night, Closing Night, the WJFF Visionary Award Ceremony, and our Spotlight selections.
Joining together our three loves—good people, good movies, and good drinks—we present a cinematic pub crawl featuring films from the JxJ short series Diverse or Di-Tryin’.
“Isle of Klezbos tests the elasticity of the genre” –The New Yorker
“Alicia Svigals’ fiddle ruled…” –The New York Times
“[The Guy Mendilow Ensemble] explode with artistry, refinement, and excitement” –Hebrew Union College
“[Beyond the Pale are a] mind-blowing flight into a very new Jewish-Balkan sonic atmosphere” –LA Weekly
“[Yemen Blues] sound like an Arabic pop orchestra accompanying serpentine melodies, or a North African trance group driving a modal riff” –The New York Times
“[Nani is a] breathtaking artist, her ballads go under your skin” –Frankfurter Allgemeine, DE
Dynamic filmmaker Aviva Kempner delivers the first feature-length documentary about Moe Berg, the enigmatic and brilliant baseball player who turned spy for the OSS during WWII.
The arc of Benjamin Netanyahu’s career is tracked using archival footage of his media performances, which contextualize his evolution from Israel’s great political hope to a controversial and divisive figure.
The story of Soviet ‘Refuseniks’ told through the prism of Natan Sharansky’s heroic life. The premiere screening features a post-show conversation with Natan Sharansky and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer.
One of the leading lights of contemporary Israeli cinema, Joseph Madmony (Restoration), returns for this spiritually rousing, emotionally intelligent story of exhilaration and faith.
The full-length version of the short film that just garnered Guy Nattiv the first Israeli Oscar win since 1978 centers on the true story of Bryon Widner, a young man raised by skinheads, now desperately trying to turn his back on hatred.
A tender tale of a young man’s friendship with Sigmund Freud (Bruno Ganz) during the Nazi occupation of Vienna.
The underdog story of the founding of the Sephardi Haredi political party, Shas, is a crowd-pleasing comedy-drama with a powerful message.
In this dystopian drama from Shtisel creator Yehonatan Indursky, Israel is divided by a wall separating the secular “State of Israel,” with Tel Aviv as its capital, and the “Haredi Autonomy” in Jerusalem, run by the ultra-Orthodox.
