Having abandoned a film project when his father, cast in the lead role, succumbed to cancer, director Dani Rosenberg returned to the material with a meta-narrative about a filmmaker collaborating with his ailing father in this playful statement on cinema’s power to freeze a moment but not stop the flow of time.

Julie and Yuval, a couple living in Paris with their new baby, are parted when Yuval must return to Israel to renew his visa. Though made before the COVID-19 pandemic, The End of Love uncannily and poignantly foreshadows what would soon become a near-universal condition: reliance on screens to sustain relationships over prolonged separations.

From Where They Stood details the heroic efforts of prisoners in Nazi concentration and death camps to photograph the realities of their existence. Director Christophe Cognet scrupulously considers the individuals who took the photos—their methods and motives—and the figures populating their images, rescuing them from historical anonymity and endowing them with human dimensions.

Upon moving to a Berlin neighborhood rife with anti-Semitism, 16-year-old Iranian Jew Soheil hides his identity and joins a gang, where he rises in the ranks, but always with the constant threat of being found out. Damir Lukacevic’s thought-provoking film considers how the need to find one’s place can lead to self-denial and toxic reinvention.

In 1991, 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel in less than 24 hours’ time. Thirty years later, the full story of this covert mission is being told, as directors Aalam-Warqe and Kobi Davidian delve into details that have been suppressed for all this time and firsthand accounts lend nuance to a story heretofore viewed as black and white.

The son of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Yossi’s childhood was dominated by his father’s belief that the Shoah could recur at any time. Filmmaker Steve Brand spent five years chronicling the lives of the Klein family; the resulting film, Kaddish, shows us 1980s New York and activist Yossi Klein Halevi in his formative years.

Featuring films from Cynthia Madansky, Yoav Potash, Asali Echols, Eli Zuzovsky, Adrienne Gruben, and Rima Yamazaki

In Hadas Ayalon’s sensitive documentary, We Were the Others, six men recall their participation in Israel’s gay rights movement at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Ravit Reichman devotes her life to caring for others, but as this inspiring documentary, Alone Together, reveals, a great loneliness underlies her acts of altruism.

Nine women of divergent backgrounds enroll in a video production seminar with the common goal of self-expression through their cameras. Featuring a mix of seasoned and nonprofessional actors playing the students (all shooting and presenting their own footage), Cinema Sabaya offers a deft portrait of art’s capacity to unite disparate communities.

The late Edward Asner demonstrates his versatility yet again in one of his final roles: Samuel, a Holocaust survivor who develops an unlikely friendship with a troubled teenage runaway who sports a swastika on her jacket. Rafal Zielinski’s Tiger Within defies predictability with the genuinely surprising chemistry between its sublime leads, over 75 years apart in age.

The Spanish island of Mallorca has a long and shameful history of Jewish persecution, from the Inquisition of the 15th century to the “auto-da-fé” rituals where Jews were burned at the stake. Xueta Island considers the plight of their descendants, divested of basic rights and forced to internalize their trauma, and ponders the current state of Judaism on Mallorca. Screens with Anita Bruvere’s Home.

A celebrated film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor, Harlem-raised Pearl Bowser is a stalwart champion of independent film and filmmakers of color.

In The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua, A.B. Yehoshua, “the Israeli Faulkner,” shares his late-period reflections, emerging as a living testament to wholehearted engagement with the world. In Grossman, Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman speaks eloquently on the nexus of art and existence.

An invaluable record of tight-knit communities, Shtetlers offers a glimpse at the small but resilient Jewish towns (“shtetls”) dotting the former Soviet Union. Katya Ustinova’s documentary mourns their disappearance, but also, by archiving the memories of those who experienced them firsthand, preserves them.

In Mike Schaerer and Petra Volpe’s illuminating six-part miniseries, three young people with bold plans in post-WWII Switzerland are faced with the bitter realities of lingering anti-Semitism, unpunished war crimes, and the primacy of profit over human life, forcing them to acknowledge that war leaves no one untouched and prosperity nearly always comes at a price.

Six-year-old Sero and his family live in a Kurdish community near the Syrian/Turkish border in the early 1980s. He’s extremely fond of his Jewish neighbors, but perplexed when a new teacher propagates fiery nationalism and anti-Semitism. Director Mano Khalil mines childhood experiences with a welcome sense of humor, while drawing tragic parallels with the plight of contemporary Syria.

Adapted from a monograph by Sandra Schulberg, The Lost Film of Nuremberg retraces the hunt by brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg for film evidence that could convict the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trial. Seventy-five years later, Jean-Christophe Klotz uncovers never-before-seen footage and interviews key figures to unravel why the resulting film about the trial was intentionally buried by the U.S. government. Screens with Jane Wells’s A Kaddish for Selim.

The son of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Yossi’s childhood was dominated by his father’s belief that the Shoah could recur at any time. Filmmaker Steve Brand spent five years chronicling the lives of the Klein family; the resulting film, Kaddish, shows us 1980s New York and activist Yossi Klein Halevi in his formative years.

A salsa dance instructor and his girlfriend, a lawyer, who seek to escape Cuba by any means, ensnare an Iranian-Jewish woman in their plot. Writer/director/composer Kaveh Nabatian, himself Iranian-Canadian, offers a lyrical and deeply felt meditation on cross-cultural relationships, with their attendant gulfs of religion and background, further complicated by the hidden agendas of all concerned parties.

A Belgian Jew in a Nazi concentration camp escapes execution by claiming to be Persian, but his ruse grows complicated when he’s ordered to teach the language (which he does not speak) to an SS officer. He must somehow fabricate a language, complete with rules and extensive vocabulary, knowing that exposure will cost him his life in this suspenseful, performance-driven film.

This eye-opening essay film grew out of philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy’s journalistic coverage of places where human suffering predominates. Journeying from Mogadishu, Somalia, “a ghost town abandoned to the warlords,” to Nigeria, where Christians are massacred with impunity, Lévy spotlights locations the world cannot afford to keep ignoring.

Set on Wall Street in 2008, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff offers a singular perspective on devastating financial fraud. Musician/poet Alicia Jo Rabins plays herself in New York’s financial district, obsessing over Madoff and the capitalist system that enabled him, in this head-spinning hybrid of fantasy, music, and personal memoir.

Iconic Jewish-Moroccan singer Raymonde El Bidaouia is intimately and affectionately profiled by her daughter, award-winning actress Yaël Abecassis, as the pair journey from Israel to formative locales in Morocco, sharing their profound love of music, mutual grief and hardships, and indissoluble mother-daughter bond.

In The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua, A.B. Yehoshua, “the Israeli Faulkner,” shares his late-period reflections, emerging as a living testament to wholehearted engagement with the world. In Grossman, Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman speaks eloquently on the nexus of art and existence.

Suddenly widowed at 78, family matriarch Rose learns to pursue her desires, rejecting the societal pressure to “act her age” and fade into benign oblivion. A career-crowning turn from screen legend Françoise Fabian (onetime star of My Night at Maud’s) highlights this life-affirming reminder that it’s never too late to seek fulfillment.