Australian Premiere

Boys of Terezin

Earlier this year, The Boy Choir of Seattle USA premiered a new oratorio telling the story the Jewish lads of Terezin House 1, who created Vedem, the covert weekly “newspaper” hand-made between 1942-1944, to keep up their more...

Australian Premiere

Bright Night

Placing her late father’s stethoscope to a window, Nissan listens for the heartbeat of her world, the one in which her successful father was a departmental head and healer. On his Jahrzeit she is eager to venerate his memory. But more...

Australian Premiere

Chametz

Ayala has stuff to deal with: not just studying in her orthodox girls-only boarding school, not just adolescence, not just having to go home to help her widowed mum with cleaning for Passover. Back home from school, this ingenue finds more...

Australia 2008

Close Distance

As a student director, Richard Vilensky and his crew compressed the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Israel and the Palestinian Territories by playing out an episode in the suburbs of Sydney. What are guilt, right and justice? more...

Australia Premiere

Comrade Goldberg

June 12, 1964, Pretoria, South Africa: Nelson Mandela and seven others await their verdict in the Rivonia Trial for sabotage. The only white man is a Jewish revolutionary, Terrorist to the whites, Freiheitskampfer - Freedom Fighter to more...

Australia Premiere

Crime after Crime

A California real estate lawyer, Joshua Safran prays the daily blessing matir asurim, which asks for the release of captives. Safran could not have known that when filmmaker Yoav Potash took him into USA’s largest women’s more...

Deluxe/Kodak Restoration

Father

The Jewish Film Festival returns Father to the screen following its restoration in the Deluxe/ Kodak collection of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Susanne Haydon – who will be a guest at our screenings - worked on more...

Australia Premiere

The Fire Within

When Jewish businessmen followed the Amazon, they began families with native women. A century later, a scholar studying their history aroused new awareness of their Sefardi origins and captured the heart of one of those Iquitos more...

Australian Premiere

Heart of Auschwitz

On December 12th 1944, a tiny birthday gift appeared at Fania's  workbench at the Krupp munitions factory in Auschwitz and - if she is to be believed - she concealed it, carried it with her on the death march and brought it with her more...

Australia Premiere

In Bed at 10.00 pm

Rachel is a librarian; she knows all about how language works. When her lover’s mobile phone rings twice during a sleep over in her flat, he informs her of its meaning. His wife needs him, it is urgent and overrides their more...

Australia Premiere

In Heaven Underground

Since 1989, families from all over the world have made pilgrimages to find their ancestors among Berlin’s Weissensee Cemetery’s 115,000 Jewish graves. Melbourne families, including one Festival Patron and Director, have been more...

Australia Premiere

Joanna

Save one life and you save the world. Catholic Joanna (Urszula Grabowska) prays for her husband. After a Nazi roundup, she finds 8 year old Roza hiding in her church. Joanna’s parents, sister, workmates and neighbours cannot be more...

Australian Premiere

La Camara Oscura

When their baby girl is born on the gangplank of her parents’ migration vessel, rather than on terra firma, she can’t be registered as Argentinean – a bad omen for life in the “new country”. Thus begins the more...

Croatia 2011 Branko Ivanda 101 mins

Lea & Daria (Lea i Darija)

True stories don’t always make good movies, but in the hands of Branko and Lidija Ivanda this recreation of childhood rivalry is an artistic blend of feel good dance flick and edge-of-the-seat nail biter. The undisputed star of the more...

Australian Premiere

Lenin In October

Grisha dreams of opening a restaurant and uses his father and son to taste his recipes. When a legacy arrives from Russia to enable him to realize that dream, he must fulfill one critical condition before the restaurant can open. more...

Australian Premiere

Lia

The woman who presides over the Israeli Film Archive and International Film Festival, who had Mayor Teddy Kolek give the land for the Jerusalem Cinematheque and who received the Berlinale Camera Award in 2011 for her “contribution more...

Australia Premiere Czech Republic 2011

Nicky's Family

At the time of going to press, Nicholas Winton, creator of the Czech Kindertransporte was 102. In 1939 he ordered stationery and rubber stamps in the name of The British Committee for Refugees In Chechoslovakia - Children’s more...

Australian Premiere

No 4 Street of Our Lady

Francisca Halamajowa was banished from Sokal, Poland, when unmasked for her risk taking in hiding Jewish families. As urvivors and their children return to the actual pig-sty hideaway with her daughters and grand-daughters, spine more...

Australia Premiere

Playoff

Eran Riklis’s (Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, Human Resources Manger) story of Ralph Klein, top Maccabi Tel Aviv basket ball star and 70’s coach of Israel’s team who died in 2008, is recreated for the screen through the more...

Sydney Premiere

Precious Life

Shlomi Eldar has seen it all as an Israeli war zone correspondent. Given the opportunity to capture a more life-affirming story, he turned his camera to a documentary on the precious life of a baby from Gaza who will die without complex more...

Australia Premiere USA Poland 2011 Anna Justice

Remembrance

Anna Justice (Max Minsky and Me) captures survival, love, courage and their consequences in a “must see” adaptation of this true story.

Hannah Levine, her husband David and daughter have a comfortable life in 1970s

more...

Australia Premiere UK 2011 Yoav Factor

Reuniting the Rubins

Did you hear about Clarity the Buddhist, Danny (James Callis) the atheist, Andie (Rhona Mitra) the social activist and Yona the rabbi who all go home for Pesach? It’s never going to happen!!

Using many tried and tested

more...

Australia Premiere

Salsa Tel Aviv

Green Card Israel? Tequila vs grape juice? Salsa vs Jewish family life? Will Yoni marry chilly Dafna or spicy Vicky?

Mexican Vicky, warm and vivacious, passes through immigration wearing a nun’s habit under the

more...

Australian Premiere

Tony Curtis - Driven to Stardom

If he’d had a bar Mitzvah, Bernie Schwartz’s speech might well have included “Thank you to my crazy parents for putting on this function. I just want you to know that my ambition is to grow up to be an internationally more...

Australia France Israel 2011

Toy Soldier

On the surface this is a deliberately generic tale of the battles that soldiers continue to carry after their active duty is done. Retreat to France is not necessarily the cure for what ails you. But something lurks in Magnus’s more...

Australian Premiere

Trace

Su Goldfish’s professional interest and personal testimony catch the final glimpse that her escaping father photographed and captures it once again. The daughter traces the photograph, superimposing hers on his original. By making more...

Australia Premiere

The Tribe

There are many kinds of Jews and Judaism. Tiffany Shlain chronicles almost as many as there were different kinds of Barbies (created by Jewish toy genius Ruth Handler) in the 18 (Chai) minutes which are an assault on lots that you know more...

Festival Reprise

Wrong Side of the Bus

Sidney Block graduated medical school in Cape Town, went to Israel where he met and then married an Aussie girl and settled in Melbourne. Professor Block has been responsible for the training of psychiatry students for decades and has more...

Australian Premiere

Wunderkinder

Ukraine 1941: in an uneasy alliance, Max Reich and his wife Helga arrange for Jewish children Abrascha, Larissa and their teacher Irina to provide music lessons for their own daughter Hanna. The communists hate the German Reichs and the more...

erdigroup Gelatissimo Umbrella Entertainment Arnold Bloch Leibler