Your Guide to the 2025 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

The 25^th edition of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival includes a number of strong selections that deal with historical and contemporary issues, embracing the diverse array of Jewish experiences across the globe. Awards Buzz had the chance to screen a handful of films covering a range of themes.

The festival’s opening and closing night films represent upbeat depictions of Jewish cultural life in very different ways. Bad Shabbos is a sincerely entertaining and funny send-up of religious observance and the hijinks that follow when things go very wrong during the first meeting between a Jewish family and their Catholic soon-to-be-in-laws (check out our interview with director Daniel Robbins here). Cheers to Life is an even less serious comedy about a Brazilian woman who travels to Israel hoping to find the grandparents she didn’t know she had and get an inheritance, at least at first. The Jewish knowledge is abundant in the former and almost entirely absent in the latter, but it’s nice to see these positive and enjoyable films bracketing a bevy of more stoic content.

The memory of the Holocaust and the decimation of earlier European Jewry shows itself in dramatic and poignant ways, highlighting untold stories about the way in which people were forced to hide their identities and explore unplanned paths to survival. The Polish Women finds its main character fleeing persecution in Europe during World War I, arriving in Brazil where she is forced into prostitution in order to care for her son, exposing a devastating industry that took advantage of many with no other options. The Most Precious of Cargoes, from Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), is an animated film that follows a woman desperate to have a child who saves a Jewish infant thrown from a train headed to a concentration camp and raises him as her own. Blind at Heart traces the impossible decisions made a young German woman who conceals her Jewish identity to survive during the Nazi invasion but still tries to hold on to her individuality in the face of formidable odds. Soda travels to an early Israeli community of Holocaust survivors whose residents suspect that a new arrival was a Nazi collaborator.

Modern-day Israel plays an interesting role in much of this year’s slate. Nor by Day, Nor by Night follows an eager young boy whose parents’ non-religious upbringing threatens to hold him back from studying at the most prestigious yeshiva. Pink Lady explores the shame cast upon homosexuality within the ultra-Orthodox community and one woman’s efforts to have her husband truly see her. Halisa, set outside the religious world, is a compelling story of a nurse who works at a health center seeing and evaluating babies trying to start her own family. Highway 65 is a more unexpected drama about a detective searching for a missing woman with complicated family relationships. Eid doesn’t deal with Jews at all, but instead a Bedouin artist searching for purpose as he enters an arranged marriage that couldn’t interest him any less.

Israel’s modern-day international relations are also at the forefront of some of these films in somber and heartfelt showcases. Tatami follows a judo champion from Iran who is told by her government that she must fake an injury in a competition to avoid having to face an Israeli athlete, with strong performances from American actress Arienne Mandi and Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, recently seen in Holy Spider and Shayda and who directed the film along with Guy Nattiv (Golda). Confronting the events and aftermath of October 7^th may be too raw for some viewers, who should exercise caution when approaching Of Dogs and Men, a docudrama about a teenage girl searching for her lost dog in Kibbutz Nir Oz just after the attacks. Similarly, the documentary Torn, which explores the phenomenon of people ripping down hostage posters, may be too hard to watch after the heartbreaking return of the bodies of the Bibas children, but it does contain a hopeful message of coexistence that the world would do well to hear.

Jewish identity is key to the framing of certain films that take on lives of their own. Midas Man features real-life figures audiences know well – the Beatles – and puts their manager Brian Epstein, played by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, at the center of the story. Guns & Moses stars Mark Feuerstein as a Chabad Rabbi in the California desert fighting to protect his community from unknown threats, mixing religious devotion with a bit of comedic action. Centered: Joe Lieberman is an eye-opening look at the one-time vice-presidential candidate’s life and legacy, and how his Jewish faith guided him to take and uphold positions that sometimes courted controversy.

The 2025 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival runs from February 19^th through March 16^th at multiple venues throughout Atlanta and with select films available to screen virtually in Georgia.