The Jewish International Film Festival returns for 2023 covering seven cities between Monday, October 23–Wednesday, December 6, making movie-filled dates with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Canberra, Hobart and Perth. On the just-announced full lineup is a hefty 55 Australian-premiere titles spanning both flicks and TV shows, including everything from box-office hits to new episodic efforts starring a big-name US talent.
This year the festival is particularly proud to present their biggest ever selection of new
Australian films. World premieres of three documentaries and five shorts. Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer by Danny Ben-Moshe and The Jewish Nazi? by Dan Goldberg are two of the films which explore ‘you can’t believe it’s true’ stories. They continue the tradition of funding new Jewish filmmaking voices via our short film fund with this year’s winners screening as part of an unique showcase shorts slot.
Its program is soaked in Yiddish culture. The line up includes the tour de force new Yiddish language SHTTL and Burning Off The Page, a documentary about erotic
poet Celia Dropkin.
There are bite size or binge watch opportunities of Chanshi, the hot new TV
series about a daring American Jewish woman who breaks boundaries and becomes
the adventurous woman that she was born to be when she runs away to Israel.
JIFF will be screening complete web series; the comedic, imaginative Less Than Kosher and audience award winner at the Toronto JFF. As usual there are critics darlings like The Goldman Case fresh from Cannes and Valeria Gets Married, as well as broad comedies like Matchmaking, and action/ thrillers like Tzadik and The Engineer.
A Compassionate Spy is an interesting companion piece to Oppenheimer one of the
films of the year. It tells the story of one of the youngest scientists on the Manhattan project who spied for the Russians. Two of the most powerful Holocaust films of the year Stella. A Life. and Filip. The new Israeli film Victory is one of those. It is an original
feature film made as a musical about the 6 day war.
Head to the films page for a digital deep-dive and enjoy JIFF.
