NYJFF 2024 Shorts Program

Post-screening discussion with Shabbos Goy co-director Adam Goott, How to Make Challah director Sarah Rosen, Anyuka director Maya Erdelyi, and The Speed of the Distance Between Us director Yuval Shapira & co-producer Ilya Marcus

Shabbos Goy
Adam Goott and Alex Szlezinger, 2022, U.K., 5m
U.S. Premiere 

This charming documentary short profiles Terry Neville, the non-Jewish, Irish caretaker at a synagogue in Hertfordshire, England. Using interviews and animation, the directors pay tribute to this lovable, spirited man, who found an embracing community of people in an unlikely place.

How to Make Challah
Sarah Rosen, 2023, U.S., 12m
World Premiere

In her moving short documentary, Sarah Rosen intercuts video taken in 1975 of her aunt Jane’s 97-year-old immigrant grandmother baking challah in her Upper West Side kitchen with newly filmed footage of Jane, now 80, attempting to bake her own challah for the first time. From this simple premise, Rosen expresses the complex ways that history, knowledge, and family legacies are passed down through the generations, from one woman to another.

Anyuka
Maya Erdelyi, 2023, U.S., 21m
World Premiere

Maya Erdelyi’s marvelous short film interweaves a variety of media—animation, super-8 home movie footage, and other archival images—to tell the deeply personal tale of her Hungarian-born grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who helped raise her. Economically exploring questions around Jewish identity and diaspora, immigration and motherhood, Anyuka (which means “mother” in Hungarian) spans three continents in its story of one woman’s remarkable life.

The Speed of the Distance Between Us
Yuval Shapira, 2023, U.S./Israel, 19m
Hebrew with English subtitles
World Premiere

In this intimate documentary short, filmmaker Yuval Shapira sits down with 10 sets of parents who lost their children during their Israeli army service. This series of interviews delicately reveals the pain of endurance and the ongoing struggle of living after the death of a loved one.

A Message from the Future: Bosnia Greets Ukraine
Edward Serotta, 2022, Austria, 17m
Bosnian with English subtitles
New York Premiere

This internationally acclaimed documentary short is an urgent reminder of the lingering scars of history, sending a message of hope and solidarity to contemporary Ukrainians from the Jewish Holocaust survivors, Bosniak Muslims, Serbian Orthodox, and Catholic Croats who worked together in a synagogue to help feed and care for the people of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s when they were under attack.