In 1976, Aulcie Perry was playing basketball in Harlem when scouts from Maccabi Tel Aviv spotted and signed him. A year later, he led the team to their first European Championship, converted to Judaism, and become an Israeli citizen. Dani Menken’s documentary tells the story of this legendary athlete.

Anouk Aimée and August Diehl star in this astounding autobiographical drama by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, an iconoclastic filmmaker and memoirist from France who passed away in 2018. The film follows an Auschwitz survivor who returns to the camp to confront her past and the young descendant of an SS guard she meets there.

When a world-famous conductor (played by Toni Erdmann’s Peter Simonischek) accepts the job to help establish an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, he steps into a firestorm of conflict and mistrust. Can the two factions of young musicians come together in harmony?

This long-lost 1919 silent gem, based on the same Sholem Aleichem stories as Fiddler on the Roof, follows Tevye the milkman’s daughter Khavah, who falls in love with the gentile boy Fedka and must navigate the reverberations from this with her community and her family. Restored by the National Center for Jewish Film. With live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

When the adolescent daughter of a prominent Tel Aviv veterinarian expresses a wish to end her life, father and child embark on a journey of mutual discovery in this tender debut feature.

After a terrorist attack in Rome leads to anti-immigrant hysteria, a freethinking Jewish Nobel Prize–winner living in Tuscany boldly speaks out against the European perspective, and her comments wreak unexpected havoc.

This essential documentary tells the stories of the Jewish partisans who took up arms against Hitler’s war machine in World War II. The last surviving partisans tells their stories to director Julia Mintz who shines a spotlight on their bravery through interviews, archival footage, and historic war records.

This classic, Oscar-winning drama, set amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, chronicles the plight of the wealthy, intellectual Finzi-Contini family, whose estate serves as a gathering place for the local Jewish community amid growing anti-Semitism.

A concert pianist from a respected musical family with the dream of raising a musical prodigy is devastated when her son is born deaf. When she doubles down on her expectations for him, her obsession threatens to crush her child.

A young office clerk meets a charismatic man from a bourgeois family, and amid their whirlwind romance a daughter is born. Over the next 50 years, mother and daughter attempt to preserve their love, despite an absent and abusive father.

This gripping historical drama, Israel’s submission for the 2020 Academy Awards, follows the radicalization of Israeli ultranationalist Yigal Amir in the year leading up to his assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The year is 1940, and the French-Jewish socialist reformer Prime Minister Leon Blum has been imprisoned at Buchenwald. This touching drama tells the story of Jeanne Reichenbach, who has loved Blum since they were teenagers and risks everything to reunite with him in prison.

This beautiful documentary tells the story of Yiscah Smith, who was living as an ultra-orthodox married man with six children and deep ties in the Hasidic community before abruptly leaving Israel. Twenty years later, Smith returned—as a woman. Screens with Butterflies in Berlin: Diary of a Soul Split in Two.

A young Jewish woman in Mexico City struggles to do the right thing as she navigates a forbidden love in this heartfelt, dramatic, and contemporary take on a timeless love story.

The Israeli transit camps of 1948-1952 were built to accommodate the surge of immigrants following World War II. This documentary explores the controversial initiative, in which over 300,000 immigrants lived in tents, tin huts, and contributed to the divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Israel.

The effervescent and brilliant French director, author, producer, and actress Marceline Loridan-Ivens dazzles in this documentary portrait, which dives into her life as a radical filmmaker, Holocaust survivor, and loving partner.

The Gottex swimwear empire was founded by legendary designer, Holocaust survivor, and larger-than-life character Lea Gottlieb. Her unyielding vision and complex relationships with her daughters are on display in this inspiring documentary. Screening with Gurit Kadman.

When two French newlyweds take their honeymoon in Poland, the home of their Jewish grandparents, excitement about their families’ histories gives way to anxiety and culture clash in this dark romantic comedy.

Yom Kippur War veteran Amos Nachoum is one of the greatest underwater photographers of all time, but he has struggled to safely photograph one beautiful predator: the polar bear. Picture of His Life is the breathtaking portrayal of Nachoum’s search for the formidable bear and, with it, some semblance of inner peace.

This synthesis of archival footage, animation, and interviews chronicles the 1964 Rivonia Trial in apartheid South Africa, which led to Nelson Mandela and his nine other black and Jewish co-defendants being sentenced to life imprisonment. There were no cameras in court, but this rousing documentary puts 256 hours of newly discovered audio to brilliant use.

This moving and timely documentary tells the story of Tamar Manasseh, the African-American rabbinical student who is combating gun violence on the South Side of Chicago with magnetic, self-assured energy through her organization MASK, or Mothers Against Senseless Killing.

The 42-year-old Aldo lives a solitary life in Budapest in the years following his imprisonment and the loss of his wife and child during the Holocaust. When he meets 16-year-old Klara, whose family was also murdered by the Nazis, they form a father-daughter connection that helps them both heal. Screening with Life Is All There Is.

This stunning drama, based on the best-selling novel by Judith Kerr, tells the story of a 9-year-old girl and her family’s jarring dislocation, experienced by so many German Jews who fled the country before the war.

These five compelling shorts directed by women offer bold, incisive, and darkly funny looks at contemporary Jewish femininity.

Join Yaron Zilberman, writer and director of NYJFF selection Incitement, for a master class on screenwriting and directing. In addition to Incitement, Israel’s submission for the 2020 Academy Awards, Zilberman is the award-winning writer-director-producer of A Late Quartet and Watermarks.