Festivals

JIFF26 A Man Of His Time

Winner of Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, director Emmanuel Marre’s biopic of an engineer who slinks his way into the Vichy administration after the fall of the French government is based on his own great-grandfather's life and uses real letters between his great-grandparents as its basis. In September 1940, Henri Marre arrives in Vichy broke and estranged from his family as the authoritarian regime settles in. Carrying copies of his self-published manifesto ‘Notre Salut’ (‘Our Salvation’, also the film’s French title), he is determined to secure what he believes to be his rightful position in the new administration, using a methodology that melds his patriotic convictions and engineer’s mind: efficiency above all. Grounded by an astounding performance from Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall), A Man of His Time blends period accuracy with distinctly modern camerawork and anachronistic needle-drops to create a slow-burn portrait of the banality of evil in the vein of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.

JIFF26 Block 10

This unflinching drama lays bare the brutality of Auschwitz and the harrowing medical experiments that took place within its walls, told through the story of a Jewish inmate who is forced into complicity. It’s 1943, and over 400 Jewish women are imprisoned in Auschwitz’s Block 10, an isolated section where Nazi doctor Carl Clauberg tests painful methods of forced sterilization. When Jewish gynaecologist Dr. Maximilian Samuel arrives at the camp, he is blackmailed with the gassing of his 20-year-old daughter if he refuses to participate in the brutal experiments. Trapped in a moral dilemma, he seeks his own path. With immense sensitivity – and glimmers of humanity – director Marcus O Rosenmüller and screenwriter Alice Brauner (a consultant at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) use existing court records and survivor testimony as the basis of this account which sheds new light on the horrors of Auschwitz. Each session will be preceded by a video introduction from Dr Simon Holloway from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

JIFF26 Cancelled

Acclaimed director Danny Ben-Moshe turns his lens to Australia’s arts sector in Cancelled, examining the experience of Jewish creatives following October 7.   With urgency and compassion, the film follows musician Deborah Conway, visual artist Nina Sanadze, writer Joshua Dabelstein and circus artist Talia Sofizade as they navigate a rapidly shifting environment, culminating in the Bondi terror attack. Documenting their artistic practices and resilience in real time, the film forges an intimate portrait of a community and a wider reflection on the proliferation of antisemitism in the arts sector, exposing its implications on cultural life, freedom of expression and social cohesion.   Cancelled is the only feature film to document this subject in Australia and proudly makes its world premiere at JIFF. 

JIFF26 Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls

While much is known about the iconic poet and folk balladeer Woody Guthrie, who wrote ‘This Land is Your Land’ and influenced Bob Dylan, less is known about the vital role that Jewish culture played in shaping his private life, worldview and art.  In this delightful and inquisitive documentary, director Steven Pressman ventures beyond the Oklahoma hills of Guthrie’s youth and into the streets of New York City in the 1940s, where Guthrie is introduced to a vibrant Jewish culture that he wholeheartedly embraced. There, we learn about people like the prominent Yiddish poet (and Guthrie’s mother-in-law) Aliza Greenblatt, record producer Moses Asch, and entertainment manager Harold Leventhal, whose work and friendship would have a profound impact on Guthrie’s songwriting.    Utilising revealing interviews – including with Guthrie’s children Arlo and Nora – and rich with extensive archival footage, Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls weaves an inextricable thread between the story of American Yiddish art and culture and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

JIFF26 Elena's War

Based on true events, this Italian historical drama tells the true story of how one woman’s defiance challenged the fascist regime and saved lives during the Nazi occupation of Rome’s Jewish ghetto.  Between 1938 and 1943, Elena Di Porto—branded “the madwoman of Piazza Giudia” for her independence and scandalous rejection of social norms—repeatedly rebelled against the fascist forces occupying her community, earning her several arrests and forced psychiatric hospitalisation.   Working with the resistance as the Nazi regime tightens its grip on Rome, Elena uncovers intelligence of an impending roundup of the ghetto, threatening hundreds of lives. Faced with her greatest challenge yet, Elena must warn her neighbours of the impending horror.  Elena’s War celebrates the rebellion and resilience of a woman who dared to stand alone against a tyrannic regime, and whose extraordinary bravery became an act of heroism that history nearly forgot.

JIFF26 Ethan Bloom

This delightful coming-of-age comedy set in Miami navigates the perils of first love, religion and grief through the eyes of a 13-year-old Jewish boy who is determined to become Catholic.   After losing his mother, Ethan Bloom lives a double life. Despite his widowed father Gary’s heroic attempts to keep him grounded in his Jewish faith, Ethan is secretly finding solace in the Catholic church and seeks to convert. Gary strikes a deal: Ethan must begin studying for his bar mitzvah with the unconventional Rabbi Dani if he wants to continue to spend time with Father Diaz at the church.  Torn between shabbat dinners with his complicated family, his first romance with a headstrong Catholic girl, and his newfound faith, Ethan comes to the realisation that faith isn’t about choosing sides, it’s about honouring the messy, beautiful pieces of who we are. 

JIFF26 Frontier

During World War 2, around 35,000 Jews snuck across the French border into Spain, fleeing Nazi oppression. This riveting Catalan thriller tells of this perilous but little-known crusade, and reveals how the ghosts of the still-recent Spanish Civil War affected the plight of Spaniards and Jews alike in the midst of intersecting conflicts.   In 1943, General Franco had blocked the path of Jewish refugees fleeing over the Pyrenees mountains. At a small border town, civil servant Manel Grau decides to go against the orders of his superiors and smuggle as many Jews as possible across the border. With the help of fellow Spaniard Juliana and French smugger Jerôme, and garnering the support of the villagers, they find themselves embroiled in a dangerous odyssey that jeopardises the safety of their families and the people they set out to help.  Shot in the stunning Pyrenees, Frontier is a powerful moral tale about the disasters of war and the power of solidarity. 

JIFF26 Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

One of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century, the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt transformed her time as a political prisoner during World War II into daring insights about the human condition, the banality of evil and totalitarianism.  This new documentary tells the story of Arendt’s life and work using first person accounts from Arendt, brought to vivid life with voiceover from acclaimed actress Nina Hoss, plus accounts from her friends and colleagues and new interviews with scholars and students of Arendt. They trace her resistance against the Nazi regime, her work to help Jewish children escape to Palestine, her complex 50-year relationship with German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and her time in a prisoner of war camp before fleeing to the United States.  Today, as authoritarianism rises and threatens democratic institutions, Arendt’s works, including the landmark The Origins of Totalitarianism, have topped best seller lists around the world, and her warning that “we must face what is happening now” rings truer than ever.

JIFF26 Influenced

In this sharply funny social media satire, Jill Kargman (Odd Mom Out) plays sassy Upper East Side yenta Dzanielle, a know-it-all influencer with the ultimate goal of reaching one million followers.   Newly divorced and in the midst of bar mitzvah planning chaos, Dzanielle juggles a coterie of faux friends and attends lunch after lunch, desperately clawing her way to social media infamy. But when a chance encounter gives Dzanielle a rare view behind the beauty filter, she’s forced to consider what really matters in a world of fakes.   This fast-talking, New York comedy features an irresistible all-star ensemble including Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore, Matt Damon, Justin Bartha and Jason Biggs. Director Rachel Israel and Kargman, who also wrote the script, perfectly skewer the millionaire milieu, for whom obscene wealth, performative philanthropy and transactional clout is the norm, and offer an uproarious and surprisingly redemptive take on the world of social media fame.

JIFF26 Holofiction

Constructed of clips from over 3,000 films and television shows produced between 1938 and the present, Holofiction is an astounding audiovisual collage exploring cultural representations of the Holocaust and how these have shaped and permeated our collective memory.   Taking Claude Lanzmann’s famous statement on the impossibility of Holocaust representation in fiction – “Fiction is a transgression. It is my belief that the depiction of certain things is prohibited” – as its point of departure, Polish-German filmmaker Michael Kosakowski’s cinematic supercut of reconstructs the chronology of the Holocaust through repeated motifs and narrative patterns.  Kosakowski’s hypnotic visual essayist approach invites audiences to query the ethics of depicting atrocities in fictional cinema, and to consider how the endless cinematic reproduction of certain representations shapes collective imaginations and historical memory.  Each session will be preceded by a video introduction from Dr Simon Holloway from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

JIFF26 Just an Illusion

A lively, crowd-pleasing comedy from the directing duo behind The Intouchables, and starring French icons Louis Garrel and Camille Cottin, Just an Illusion is a deeply authentic and relatable story about family, friendship, and growing up.  It's 1985. Vincent, on the precipice of his bar mitzvah, lives in the suburbs of Paris with his middle-class Jewish family, caught between an older brother who brushes him off and parents who never stop arguing. No longer a kid but not yet an adult, Vincent fumbles through life's big questions about identity, friendship and first crushes, and tries to find his own rhythm in a family that is out of sync.  A major box office hit in France, this nostalgic trip through the era of mixtapes and first computers is alive with the vibrant pop spirit of the 80s and soundtracked by the likes of The Cure and Imagination, but will resonate across all generations. 

JIFF26 Labors of Love: Henrietta Szold

One of history’s most consequential and under-recognised Jewish women, Henrietta Szold left an indelible mark on the 20th century with her compassionate leadership founded on equality.   In 1912, Henrietta Soldz established Hadassah, forging a vital link between American woman and communities in Palestine and spearheading the region’s first modern healthcare system, built upon a mandate that Jewish and Arab patients would be treated equally. Her crowning achievement came later, when she created Youth Aliyah and successfully rescued 11,000 Jewish children from Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s and transported them to safety in Palestine.  This powerful documentary by Peabody award-winner Abby Ginzberg brings a compassionate new insight to a woman who reshaped history and become mother and mentor to thousands of young Jews with her rare blend of logistical genius, hands-on dedication and an unwavering belief in the power of humanity.

JIFF26 Lansky: The Jewish Godfather

The untold story of the infamous Jewish-American gangster Meyer Lansky, and the gripping political dilemma he ignited when he fled to Israel in the 1970s.  Emerging from New York City’s Jewish underworld, Lansky – or “Little Man” – would strike fear across the United States for his illicit activity in gambling and money laundering. Less is known about Lansky’s fight against antisemitism during the rise of Nazism, his dramatic contribution to the establishment of the State of Israel, or his attempt to flee the United States as the FBI sought to investigate his involvement in the mafia.   Landing in Israel in the early 1970s, his presence presented Prime Minister Golda Meir with a profound dilemma: help him as a Jew seeking refuge, or hand him over to the Nixon administration as a fleeing criminal.  Constructed around the only interview he ever gave and the testimony of his secret mistress, this documentary reveals a mafioso mastermind with complex Jewish connections.

JIFF26 Mariana's Room

Based on Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld’s acclaimed novel ‘Blooms of Darkness’, this masterful World War II drama revolves around an 11-year-old Jewish boy who finds refuge in a brothel, and the intimate and complex bond he forms with a sex worker played by Mélanie Thierry in a career-defining role.  After escaping a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, Hugo finds himself separated from his mother and seeking shelter in the unlikeliest of places: a brothel run by Mariana. Hidden away in a closet, Hugo's world is confined to murmurs and shadows, but as Mariana coaxes him from his hiding place, an extraordinary bond forms between them, one that will challenge Hugo's understanding of love, sacrifice, and the capacity for both evil and profound humanity.  Raw, sensitive and emotionally complex, Mariana’s Room paints a portrait of the Holocaust through a child’s eyes and a powerful meditation on how we preserve innocence in impossible circumstances.

JIFF26 My Underground Mother

In this absorbing and intimate documentary, New York journalist Marisa Fox delves into her mother’s secret past, discovering revelations about her life as a spy and freedom fighter against the Nazis.   Twenty years after her mother’s death, Fox uncovers that the woman she knew as Tamar, a redheaded freedom fighter in British mandate Palestine, began her life as Hela, a Polish-born survivor of a Jewish women’s forced labour camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland. Discovered hidden within a journal written by the camp’s teenage prisoners, Fox must reckon with a shocking, untold story of sexual trauma and post-war shaming which fuelled her mother’s reinvention.  Spanning Israel, Poland and beyond, over 15 years of relentless sleuthing, this gripping, first-person narrative weaves together testimonies including interviews with Gabersdorf survivors living in Australia, striking animation, and absorbing vérité footage of a daughter’s attempt to learn and come to terms with a parent’s unreconciled legacy.

JIFF26 Nuremberg 45

As Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi war criminals stand trial in Courtroom 600 at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, 22-year-old Holocaust survivor Ernst Michel stands amongst the journalists covering the trial. Haunted by the horrors he survived, he is caught in an internal struggle between his personal desire for justice and accountability, and his journalistic objectivity.  When Ernst meets Polish Auschwitz survivor Seweryna Szmaglewska, who is scheduled to appear in the trial as a witness, they bond over their traumatic memories as they confront their unnerving proximity to Göring, whose defence attorney makes Ernst a disturbing offer: a private interview with the trial’s chief defendant. This spurs a tormented moral choice in Ernst between his sense of duty and his personal anguish.  Using newly restored and colorised footage, evocative reenactments and eyewitness reflections, Nuremberg 45 delivers a new perspective on one of history’s most important trials.  

JIFF26 Proud Jewish Boy

On November 7, 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan shot Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris. This action triggered the horrors of Kristallnacht, one of the worst pogroms in history, which in turn developed into the events of the Holocaust.   For centuries, the life and identity of this mysterious boy assassin who the Nazis blamed for WWII has remained a relative mystery, but documentarian Isri Halpern was determined to dig deeper. Using rare interviews, archival footage, and new illustrations by the artists who brought Waltz with Bashir to life, Halpern investigates the intricate layers of Grynszpan’s private life, including a hidden chapter involving a clandestine relationship with a male German diplomat.  This gripping detective story, full of unexpected twists and turns, presents Grynszpan’s full story for the first time, revealing why his name was later erased from collective memory.  Each session will be preceded by a video introduction from Dr Simon Holloway from the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

JIFF26 Tell Me Everything

This deeply moving family drama set amid the ‘80s pop frenzy follows a young boy's journey to rekindle his relationship with the father he reveres after discovering that he is gay, and received a record 16 nominations at the Ophir Awards.  Boaz is a 12-year-old boy nearing his bar mitzvah and manhood, and who idolises his father Meir. During an idyllic ‘80s summer, Boaz uncovers a startling revelation about Meir that threatens to tear their relationship apart, and causes him to question his preconceptions about masculinity, family and the man he has shaped himself after. Over several years, Boaz seeks to heal the rift between them and heal the bond that he never stopped yearning for.   With his second feature, director Moshe Rosenthal perfectly captures the experience of adolescence, blurred by confusion and fear and heightened by the paranoia of the AIDS era. Propelled by incredible performances, Tell Me Everything is an intimate and richly detailed film about familial love, and the difficult act of seeing people as they truly are. 

JIFF26 Sapiro v. Ford

In the 1920s, Henry Ford used his slew of newspapers to incite anti-Jewish hatred across the USA, testing the limits of hate speech long before laws existed to protect against it. This documentary tells the riveting true story of Aaron Sapiro, a young Jewish lawyer who risked everything to take on one of America’s most powerful man and stand up against antisemitism.  From his humble beginnings as an orphan in San Francisco to his leadership of a national movement empowering farmers, Sapiro’s life was a testament to courage, vision, and justice. In this documentary, Sapiro’s words are presented in their entirety through actor Ben Shenkman, filmed as if speaking directly to a modern audience, interspersed with historical footage which illuminates the stakes of his confrontation with Ford.  Today, as antisemitism rises and the struggle to balance free speech with protection against hate continues, Sapiro v. Ford examines the enduring question: how can societies confront power, prejudice and propaganda while upholding justice?

JIFF26 The Heroes of the Louvre

As a lover of the arts, Jewish man Babi Maklouf Benhamou has the best job in the world: he’s the night watchman at the Louvre Museum. When World War 2 breaks out and a German invasion looms, Jacques Jaujard, the museum’s curator, organizes a secret operation to rescue the artworks before they fall into Nazi hands.   Entrusted with transporting the Louvre’s masterpieces out of Paris, Babi agrees on one condition: that he is allowed to bring his family with him. So begins an epic, perilous family journey across occupied France, one that will bind the fate of the Louvre’s treasures to Maklouf and his family.  Directed by Maklouf’s real-life grandson, Elie Chouraqui, this historical drama tells the extraordinary story of an ordinary man who put his life at risk to quietly and anonymously helped preserve some of the world’s greatest works of art for generations to come. 

JIFF26 The Mad Dog of Europe

You might know him as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Citizen Kane, but ten years before Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote The Mad Dog of Europe, a groundbreaking anti-Nazi film which depicted the implosion of a German-Jewish family and anticipated Hitler’s rise to power. It was his most daring, most political and perhaps finest work – but it was never produced.   In this new documentary which spans the 1930s, filmmaker Rubika Shah shines a light on Mankiewicz (also the subject of David Fincher’s 2021 film Mank), his revolutionary screenplay, and the myriad reasons it was never produced by Hollywood. It reveals the precarious ties between the political and entertainment spheres in a world on the brink of war, and unveils antisemitism in the United States at this time, with dangerous resonances to our own cultural and political moment. The Mad Dog of Europe is a tribute to cinema’s outsiders and truth-tellers, and a passionate cri de coeur against the rise of nationalism, then and now.

JIFF26 Think Good

A gripping marital thriller that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, French-Canadian director Géraldine Nakache’s Think Good is about the quiet, psychological coercion that occurs within a marriage, and the abuse of religion as a means of control.   Anchored by powerful performances from Monia Chokro as Gil and Nils Schneider as Jacques, the film follows this observant Jewish couple – she a camera assistant and he a businessman – through the course of their relationship after they meet in Dubai and embark on a whirlwind romance.  Jumping between time periods and utilising intimate close-ups, Nakache deals respectfully with the couples’ faith whilst expertly teasing out the subtle pathologies of Jacques’ manipulation, and crafts a masterful portrait of a couple whose social and religious rituals and responsibilities weigh upon their marriage.

JIFF26 To Kill A Nazi

Narrated by Jason Alexander, this riveting documentary thriller tells the story of a French businessman who sets out to uncover the truth about his father’s death, and finds himself playing a crucial role in one of history’s most audacious hostage rescues: the Entebbe raid.    Upon discovering that the Nazis murdered his father in Auschwitz, Michel Cojot spots the signature of Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie – the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon’ – on his arrest papers. Digging further, he learns that Barbie worked for the CIA after WWII, escaped to Latin America, and now works for the Bolivian government. Posing as a journalist, Michel flies to La Paz to ‘interview’ Barbie.    Following Barbie through the city’s winding streets with a pistol under his coat, Michel is given a once-in-a-lifetime chance at redemption, but falters. This moment of mercy, a moral reckoning which asks us to question the difference between vengeance and justice, will shape his actions during the Entebbe hostage attack.