2025 Atlanta Jewish Film Fest: Universal stories through a Jewish lens

A robust 25th Atlanta Jewish Film Festival is hitting screens next week, featuring responses to the Gaza War and other films from around the globe.

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The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival has a few notable milestones as it kicks off on February 19. First of all, it’s the 25^th year for the event, a solid quarter century for the city’s largest film festival. It also marks 20 years for Kenny Blank as executive and artistic director. And a Kenny Blank Initiative has been created: a $2.5 million growth campaign to further expand the nonprofit’s cultural programming year-round instead of just in February. 

“As director of the festival, I have to take a moment to pinch myself,” Blank said. “I never imagined I would be on this journey with the organization for as long as I have been. But there has been so much continuous evolution and surprise along the way that has kept it exciting for me.” 

He has overseen changes in the film industry and in the world, notably a pandemic that forced AJFF and other festivals to find new ways to serve audiences and survive. This year’s festival will be the first to respond through multiple films to the events of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that followed — more on that in a moment.

The festival features live, on-site screenings from February 19 through March 6. Remote screenings of some of the films will be available March 7 through March 16; at 16 days, it’s the longest festival yet. Venues include Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, The Springs Cinema & Taphouse, Georgia Theatre Company Merchants Walk, the Plaza Theatre, Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center and the Tara. 

“Part of what drives my passion about the festival is the necessity to continue to have film be this powerful art form, unlike anything else, that helps people make sense of their world, helps them understand themselves and each other — especially with our festival being international, with a global perspective,” Blank said. “The storytelling still moves people in ways that are unexpected and a tremendous gift to the community.” 

One of the largest Jewish film festivals in the world, this year’s iteration includes work from 22 countries, “from Iran to Germany to France to Israel to Brazil,” Blank said. But it’s also very much an Atlanta event. The AJFF boasts 400 volunteers supplementing the professional team and staff. Panels and Q&As built around screenings can draw on thought leaders from the city’s deep bench of cultural institutions: the Carter Center, the King Center, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and CNN, for instance. 

Though the featured films are shot through a culturally Jewish lens, many of the stories are universal. Blank said a quarter of the AJFF’s audience identifies as non-Jewish. This year, he noted a large proportion of films about the music industry and with LGBTQ content. (In some cases, as in the Janis Ian documentary, those categories overlap.)  

Last year’s festival opened only four months after Hamas invaded Israel, and only one film addressed the situation. This time around, AJFF received dozens of submissions offering different angles on the conflict. Blank names four of note.

The Bibi Files is a documentary about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Blank calls a provocative film that might prove divisive. “A hallmark of the film festival is that we do not shy away from airing all aspects of the Jewish experience and life in Israel,” he said. “Our audiences expect it from us.” 

A second film addressing the conflict is Torn, a documentary about the volatile reaction on New York’s streets to posters depicting hostages of Hamas. October H8te charts the surge of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests on U.S. college campuses. And Of Dogs and Men is the first feature made dramatizing the aftermath of the Hamas assault with a mix of fiction and documentary elements. “The filmmakers filmed the story on location in a kibbutz on the Gaza border within weeks of October 7, while the war was waging,” Blank said. 

“What we’ve seen is a real rallying of the film industry, bearing witness through film,” he added. “We are a cultural institution, so we see our unique role as uplifting and supporting film artists.”

Here are my brief thoughts about some of the films I had the chance to screen. 

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Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round. 

National calamity can bring unlikely folks together. Case in point: the joining of hands — on picket lines, in house parties and sometimes in bedrooms — of Black and Jewish activists who used their leverage to integrate Maryland’s Glen Echo Park in 1960. The film effectively shows us the cruelty to Black children of the time, who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t enjoy the rides of the amusement park. While more sturdy than exciting, Ilana Trachtman’s documentary features interesting details (like the backstory of the importance of showy hats among Black women), and it’s a story worth retelling. 

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Bad Shabbos.

An unexpected death disrupts a meet-the-goy-in-laws dinner in co-writer/director Daniel Robbins’ broad comedy (In Blank’s words, “We needed something that was pure escape for opening night.”) The scramble to hide or explain away the inconvenient corpse never quite makes logical sense. And the central dinner scene borrows gags from La Cage aux Folles. But the feel-good welter of it all comes together for a satisfying finale. (Stars Kyra Sedgwick and Milana Vayntrub are scheduled to attend the screening.)

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Bliss.

We don’t know at first why aging married couple Sassi (Sasson Gabay, of The Band’s Visit) and Effie (Assi Levy) spend every waking hour doing odd jobs. But in writer-director Shemi Zarhin’s intergenerational drama, the introduction of Sassi’s grandson and his feckless father fill us in. While Sassi and Effie are navigating his impotency issues, she contends with a romantic complication from her past, nicely complicating things. The real reason to watch is Gabay and Levy’s beautifully lived-in performances. Veteran Israeli actors, they worked together in 2006’s Aviva, My Love, and their skill and familiarity lift the film.

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Cheers to Life.

Just when you hoped the manic pixie dream girl was a permanently retired film cliché, here comes wacky Brazilian Gen-Z’er Jessica (Thati Lopes). Discovering a locket identical to the one left to her by her late mother, she steals some money to fly to Israel to track down the owner. She’s aided in her quest by Gabriel (Rodrigo Simas), who may be her cousin but probably isn’t because the actors’ cuteness means they have to wind up together. In this dated form of a romcom, we get lipo, plastic surgery and air turbulence jokes, along with a visit to the Wailing Wall. Does it work? Absolutely not. Does it serve as a sloppy, good-natured closing-night movie? You bet. 

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Come Closer.

In fictionalizing the sudden death of her own teenage brother, writer-director Tom Nesher gives a challenging, warts-and-all role to an actor who may or may not be her alter ego. Lia Elalouf plays Eden, big sister and self-appointed best friend to Nati (Ido Tako). When he’s killed in an accident, she digs through his belongings and uncovers a girlfriend named Maya (Daria Rosen) that he kept secret from everyone. Seductive, manipulative and overpowering, Eden upends Maya’s life, and the sexual politics get as unsettling as in a previous AJFF film, The Cakemaker. The film is a lacerating, fascinating character study (Israel’s official submission for this year’s Oscar consideration), beautifully played by its two leads.

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Guns & Moses.

From its title to its plotline, the movie begs for the sardonic touch of Mel Brooks. But this is a B-movie thriller, starring Mark Feuerstein as a Western U.S. rabbi pulled into murderous smalltown skullduggery. (You’ll guess quickly who the secret bad guy is.) The filmmakers called in some favors (Christopher Lloyd and Craig Sheffer, with bad accents, and Dermot Mulroney shows up in cameo.) And there’s some cheesy fun along the way. But personally, I don’t think “May God and your Glock protect you” is the sort of movie catchphrase we need right now. 

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Janis Ian: Breaking Silence.

An accidental companion piece to A Complete Unknown, this documentary reminds us that the remarkably long career of the singer-songwriter began even before Bob Dylan made it big. (One of the film’s talking heads, praising Ian, is Dylan ex Joan Baez.) Varda Bar-Kar’s engaging documentary follows the singer’s career from its start as a teen phenomenon to her current status as a globally admired songwriter and LGBTQ icon. 

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Midas Man.

Beatles manager Brian Epstein (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) narrates his own brief life story as the fellow who helped shoot the Fab Four to fame. Director Joe Stephenson’s film co-stars fine actors Emily Watson and Eddie Marsan. It’s an interesting attempt to spin a fresh story out of Beatles lore (Christopher Munch did it better in The Hours and Times). But Epstein died barely formed at age 32, so there’s no there there. 

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Moses Ezekiel: Portrait of a Lost Artist.

Jewish and gay, the monumental sculptor’s double-minority status didn’t inspire empathy in him toward the USA’s greatest minority: the formerly enslaved. Born in 1844 and a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, Ezekiel gained fame in his career for statuary celebrating the fictional “lost cause” of the fallen South. Until 2023, his monument to the Confederacy loomed over Arlington National Cemetery, when it was removed partly at the behest of horrified descendants. In our current cancel-culture, Steven Pressman’s documentary is an interesting look at the challenge of separating an artist from his art.  

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The Most Precious of Cargoes. 

Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) turns to animation in the fable of a woodcutter and his wife, who take in an infant tossed into the snowy woods from a passing train. We know where that train is headed, but the film, co-written by Jean-Claude Grumberg and the director, muffles the horror in naïve storybook imagery. Resembling woodcuts brought to life, the movie is visually beautiful but narratively unconvincing. 

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Never Alone. 

Based on a true story, director Klaus Härö’s crisp drama is about Finnish businessman Abraham Stiller (Ville Virtanen) of Helsinki who rallies fellow Jews to harbor refugees from Germany in the years just before WWII breaks out. In wartime, his battle with the local police chief, under the thumb of Nazi soldiers, grows more perilous. A little like the central figure in Schindler’s List, Stiller tries to save the lives he can but can’t escape the guilt of the loss of so many others. 

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Of Dogs and Men.

In this quietly moving mix of narrative and documentary filmmaking, we follow 16-year-old Dar (Ori Avinoam) into Kibbutz Nir Oz, her home before Hamas militants invaded only 11 days earlier. She hid under the bed while her mother was abducted across the nearby Gaza border. Where mom is now, she has no idea. Wandering through the fly-buzzed wreckage of the burned and looted houses, meeting survivors playing themselves, Dar focuses on a smaller, more emotionally manageable quest: to find Shula. That’s her dog, one of dozens running loose in hunger and confusion in the absence of their owners. Director Dani Rosenberg’s film reminds us that we deal with catastrophe by degrees; when your world explodes, you have to reassemble it piece by fragile piece. This is a film both delicate and deep. 

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous column here.