Jacob Burns Film Center Jewish Film Festival

The films in the 23rd edition of the JBFC's Jewish Film Festival offer close encounters with remarkable individuals in a wide range of fiction films and documentaries. In all of these films, personal stories lead to broader perspectives on history, culture, and society.

Schedule of Events:

1:00pm - ADA–My Mother the Architect

Q&A with Director Yael Melamede
2025. 81 m. Yael Melamede. Film First. Israel/US. English/Hebrew with subtitles. Rated NR.

Ada Karmi-Melamede is one of the greatest architects in Israeli history. Her breathtaking modern buildings, including Israel's Supreme Court, Ben Gurion Airport, and the Open University, helped forge the nation's identity. We are fortunate that her daughter Yael, who started her career as an architect, decided to become a filmmaker. Her documentary about her mother is a refreshingly candid encounter between director and subject. It is also one of the most revealing studies of the creative process in recent memory, and one that is keenly sensitive to the perseverance and sacrifice required of a woman who strives to excel in a male-dominated field.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

4:00pm - The Heiresses

1980. 105 m. Márta Mészáros. Janus Films. France/Hungary. German/Hungarian/Latin with subtitles. Rated NR.

This recently restored gem by the great Hungarian director Márta Mészáros is a multilayered melodrama set in Budapest as the Nazi threat is rising. Among its many virtues is a wonderful performance by a young Isabelle Huppert. She plays Irén, a Jewish shopgirl of modest means who is befriended by Szilvia (Lili Monori), an heiress who is unable to give birth, and who pays Irén to conceive a child with her husband (Jan Nowicki). The situation is fraught with class distinctions and moral dilemmas, and evolves into a twisted emotional triangle complicated by the clear homoerotic tension between the women. Emotionally absorbing and exquisitely crafted, it is also an incisive study of prewar European decadence.

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

7:00pm - Midas Man
2024. 112 m. Joe Stephenson. Menemsha Films. UK. English. Rated NR.

The life story of Brian Epstein, the entrepreneurial Liverpudlian who discovered The Beatles, managed them to meteoric global superstardom, and died at 32, has not had a proper feature-film treatment… until now. With an absorbing lead performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Midas Man shows how Epstein escaped his fate working in his family's retail furniture business to help launch Beatlemania, changing the world of music forever.

"Brian deserves an honest film that celebrates everything he did and was. Through an honest film we can celebrate him without sugar coating the difficult subjects. An honest film can remind people what a society that oppresses people for who they are does on a personal level." —Director Joe Stephenson

Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers)

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