The New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) returns for its 33rd year this month with a lineup of 28 feature, documentary, and short films. The event, a collaboration between the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, will run from January 10 through 24 at the latter’s Walter Reade Theater with screenings followed by discussions with the filmmakers.
The two-week showcase will kick off with director James Hawes’s One Life (2023), starring Anthony Hopkins. The narrative feature tells the story of Sir Nicholas Winton, a British man who rescued 669 predominantly Jewish children from Sudetenland (the current-day Czech Republic and Slovakia) after the region was annexed by the Nazis in 1938. The “centerpiece” film this year, which will be shown in two screenings on Wednesday, January 17, is Valeria Is Getting Married (2022), the fictional tale of two Ukrainian sisters who decide to marry Israeli men they meet through an arranged marriage service online. After one gets cold feet, the sister who has already married and moved to Israel, Christina, faces repercussions that illuminate the power imbalances present in her new life and the gender dynamics of arranged unions.
Other highlights include the personal documentary Fioretta (2023), in which lawyer and genealogist E. Randol Schoenberg and his son trace their ancestry to a centuries-old ghetto in Venice. In 2000, Schoenberg represented Maria Altmann when she successfully sued the Austrian government for ownership of Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (1907), which the Nazis had stolen from Altmann’s family over 60 years earlier. The case was the subject of the star-studded 2015 movie The Woman in Gold.
The NYJFF will also screen a restored version of the 1939 melodrama Mothers of Today. The movie, shot in the Bronx, follows a Jewish immigrant as she navigates assimilation and neighborhood change.
Among the festival’s seven shorts is Sara Yacobi-Harris’s “Periphery” (2022), an exploration of multiethnic Jewish identity in Toronto, the city that the Black and Jewish director calls home. “How to Make Challah” (2023) will make its world premiere at the NYJFF on January 23. The 12-minute documentary follows director Sarah Rosen’s 80-year-old aunt in her attempt to make the braided bread for the first time. Interspersed with footage of Rosen’s great-grandmother making challah in 1975, the film reflects on the passage of cultural traditions across generations.
The festival will close on January 24 with Remembering Gene Wilder (2023). Directed by Ron Frank, the documentary explores the life of the comedic actor who died in 2016. (Wilder perhaps most famously played the role of Willy Wonka in the 1971 classic.) The film is narrated with clips from Wilder’s audiobook recording of his memoir. Tickets to individual screenings and festival passes are available on Film at Lincoln Center’s website.
