The Jewish Museum And Film At Lincoln Center Announce The 34th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival

This January, the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center collaborate once again for the annual New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF), spotlighting the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, NYJFF will feature in-person screenings for its 34th edition at Film at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, from January 15 through January 29, 2025.  

The NYJFF lineup showcases nearly two dozen features, documentaries, and shorts (eight narrative features, 11 documentary features, one miniseries and two short films), including the latest works by dynamic voices in international cinema. Also featured are two historic films including: the 50th anniversary screening of the beloved, recently restored 1975 period drama, Hester Street, directed by Joan Micklin Silver, which brilliantly recreates Jewish immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century, and features Carol Kane in an Oscar-nominated performance; and Breaking Home Ties, a 1922 classic silent melodrama, once believed lost, which has been digitally restored by the National Center for Jewish Film, and is now presented with a newly recorded score performed by Grammy Award-winning musicians. 

The Opening Film of the festival, Midas Man, is an empathetic biopic on Brian Epstein, the Jewish and gay music lover and visionary man who discovered and then managed the Beatles in the 1960s before his tragic death at age 32. The seismic impact of the Beatles on popular culture continues to reverberate 60 years after they took The Ed Sullivan Show by storm in February 1964. Yet that revelatory TV appearance never would have taken place—and the band may never have been discovered—if not for Epstein. Directed by Joe Stephenson and written by Brigit Grant, the film features a deeply moving Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (The Queen's Gambit) as Epstein, with a cast that includes Jonah Lees as John Lennon, Blake Richardson as Paul McCartney, Emily Watson and Eddie Marsan as Epstein's parents, and Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan.  

In this year's Centerpiece Film, Of Dogs and Men, filmmaker Dani Rosenberg dives headfirst into the psychological horrors of our contemporary world with this experiential account of a teenager named Dar (Ori Avinoam), who returns home to her kibbutz searching for her missing dog in the aftermath of Hamas's October 7 attacks in Israel, filmed in late October 2023. Of Dogs and Men takes a humanist approach to the ongoing conflict, reckoning with both the horrifying losses within her Jewish community and the imminent tragic violence of retribution in Gaza. 

The Closing Film, Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round, is 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. Ain't No Back to a Merry-Go-Round reminds viewers of the importance of collaboration and humility in the face of injustice and features a voice-over cast that includes Mandy Patinkin, Jeffrey Wright, and Dominique Thorne, among others.

Additional notable highlights in this year's festival include: Blind at Heart, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, Full Support, The Glory of Life, The Spoils, and The Zweiflers.

In Blind at Heart, directed by Barbara Albert, Mala Emde portrays Hélène, an aspiring doctor who tries to hide her Jewish Identity after arriving in Weimar-era Berlin as a young woman. Spanning the late 1920s to the darkest days of World War II, this gripping adaptation of Julia Franck's internationally renowned and German Book Prize-winning novel, The Blindness of the Heart, is an exacting moral tale about the difficult choices people make during times of turmoil.

In this enthralling new documentary, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, 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. Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire stands as a crucial testament to an extraordinary man who helped shape our collective memory of the darkest chapter of the 20th century.

The funny and revealing Full Support 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. Director Michal Cohen's film analyzes something that is so seemingly mundane—and often cast into cheap hierarchies of size and desirability—from a crucial female perspective to an entertaining and poignant work of nonfiction that, in giving women voices about their bodies, functions as its own form of resilience and liberation.

The deeply emotional and elegantly realized romantic historical drama, The Glory of Life, by filmmakers Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann, sensitively sketches the last year in the life of novelist Franz Kafka, stricken by tuberculosis, and the love he experiences with Dora Diamant, a Polish Jewish woman he meets on holiday at the Baltic Sea. 

The ongoing dilemmas around the reclamation, ownership, and exhibition of art looted by the Nazis during World War II form the center of Jamie Kastner's absorbing documentary, The Spoils, about the legacy of Max Stern, a German Jewish art dealer who escaped to Canada in 1937 after he was forced to liquidate his gallery. In Montreal, Stern became a successful collector, dealer, and gallerist renowned for his generosity. Kastner's film shows how a series of failed attempts by the city of Düsseldorf to honor Stern opens up many issues around the restitution of Nazi-looted art.

Presented in six episodes, the award-winning, novelistic miniseries, The Zweiflers, is a comic-dramatic, multigenerational saga, set in Frankfurt and Berlin, 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 its five, gripping hours.

Details for in-person appearances to be announced at nyjff.org and filmlinc.org.

The films for the 2025 New York Jewish Film Festival have been selected by Rachel Chanoff, Founding Director, THE OFFICE performing arts + film; Lisa Collins, director, writer, special correspondent, programmer, and events/film producer; Indigo Sparks, performance artist and producer; and Aviva Weintraub, director, New York Jewish Film Festival, the Jewish Museum; with assistance from Cara Colasanti, film festival coordinator, the Jewish Museum.

TICKETS 

Tickets will go on sale December 19 at noon, with an early access period for Film at Lincoln Center and Jewish Museum Members on December 17 at noon. Tickets can be purchased at nyjff.org. Tickets are $19; $17 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $14 for FLC and JM Members. See more and save with 3+ Film Package ($17 for GP; $14 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $12 for FLC Members; (excludes Midas Man). Opening Film tickets are $25; $23 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $20 for FLC and JM Members