The New York Jewish Film Festival is an annual festival in New York City that features a wide array of international films exploring themes related to the Jewish experience. The Jewish Museum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center work in partnership to present the NYJFF every January. Since its creation in 1992, the festival has more than doubled in size and scope. Screenings are typically followed by discussions with directors, actors and film experts. Audience participation is encouraged. The festival celebrates the richness and diversity of the Jewish experience and explores Jewish identity. The NYJFF seeks to broaden perceptions of the Jewish experience from a multitude of perspectives and nationalities. It presents an opportunity to discover new and challenging films that are often otherwise hard to find.
Festival highlights
Key works and noteworthy presentations of the past few years have included:
The N.Y.C. premiere of Koch, directed by Neil Barsky
Pierre Grimblat's Lisa, featuring Jeanne Moreau and Marion Cotillard
History
The birth of the NYJFF was linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union. On the heels of liberation, a torrent of cinematic work—new films by young directors as well as long-suppressed older works—flooded into the West. Recognizing an extraordinary opportunity to bring untold stories to New York audiences for the first time, the New York Jewish Film Festival was launched in January, 1992 in a lasting partnership between The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The festival includes feature-length and short films, documentaries, and animated and experimental films.
Special presentations
The Festival has also featured sidebar presentations such as premieres of restored archival prints and screenings of rarely viewed films. The 2013 Festival hosted filmmaker brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, for an evening of conversation and presentation of five of their short films, followed by their 2009 filmDaddy Longlegs. The festival also featured a sidebar presentation organized by the film critic and author J. Hoberman, which included clips from what he considers compelling Jewish horror movies, along with a screening of Edgar G. Ulmer's 1934 classic The Black Cat. The 2011 Festival presented three restored films: Lies My Father Told Me, a 1975 film about a boy living in a Montreal Jewish community in the 1920s; the 1956 film Singing in the Dark, one of the first American feature films to dramatize the Holocaust, starring Moishe Oysher as a concentration camp survivor; and the 1930 Tevye, restored with new English subtitles. The 2010 Festival presented N.Y. premieres of restored prints of Falk Harnack's The Axe of Wandsbek about a man who was a paid executioner for the Nazis; and Henry Lynn's classic 1935 Yiddish melodrama, Bar Mitzvah, which features vaudeville jokes, songs, and dancing, and stars legendary actor Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance.
