New York Jewish Film Festival 2026

In the Opening Film of the festival, Once Upon My Mother, an inspiring, emotionally charged, and often humorous drama directed by Ken Scott and based on the autobiographical novel by Roland Perez, the matriarch of a bustling Jewish immigrant family from Morocco in the Parisian suburbs in the 1960s will do anything to give her youngest son the best possible life. This upbeat and miraculous film beautifully demonstrates the complex nuances of a mother’s devotion.

This year’s Centerpiece Film is All I Had Was Nothingness, a new documentary by filmmaker Guillaume Ribot paying tribute to Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 epic, Shoah. The film tells the story of how Lanzmann accomplished the groundbreaking feat of creating an over nine-hour-long masterwork focusing on the evils of the Holocaust, revealing never-before-seen excerpts from more than 200 hours of unreleased footage.

The Closing Film, Fantasy Life, is a captivating comic drama of modern anxiety by Matthew Shear starring Amanda Peet as a wealthy but depressed middle-aged mom whose life intersects with a recently laid-off paralegal (played by Shear) hired to babysit her three daughters while her husband chases his dreams of living the rock-star life. The brilliant cast also includes Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban, Jessica Harper, and Zosia Mamet.

Also featured are two historic films highlighting the famous Polish comedy duo Dzigan and Schumacher. I Have Sinned (Al Khet), a long-unseen, genre-defying gem of the 1930s and the first Yiddish sound film made in Poland, mixes melodrama, comedy, and music to tell the story of Esther, a rabbi’s daughter who, during World War I, becomes pregnant by a German Jewish officer, abandons her baby, and flees to the U.S. Set in an orphanage and school near Łódź, Our Children (Unzere Kinder), is a fascinating, rarely seen classic from post–World War II Poland. The film combines fiction and documentary to address the then-recent suffering of a group of children who had survived the Holocaust and explores the potential of artistic expression as a method of processing trauma.

Additional notable highlights in this year’s festival include:

• Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause, an eye-opening documentary shedding light on the career and life of actor Charles Grodin and revealing his off-screen accomplishments as a social activist devoted to fighting for the wrongly imprisoned
• The Last Spy, a fascinating documentary centering on CIA spymaster Peter Sichel—aka the “Jewish James Bond”—who sat down for a wide-ranging interview about his singular life before he died in 2025 at age 102
• A Letter to David, a deeply personal documentary essay in which filmmaker Tom Shoval pays tribute to his friend David Cunio, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz and taken hostage on October 7, 2023
• Maintenance Artist, the first feature documentary about pioneering public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who became a staple of the 1960s New York avant-garde art scene
• Mazel Tov, an alternately touching and raucous drama about the fragility of family ties and the importance of tradition
• Orna and Ella, a poignant—and mouthwatering—documentary following the two women who owned an iconic Tel Aviv restaurant during the final days of its operation as they reflect on their partnership
• Sapiro v. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford, an enlightening documentary that tells the story of Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro, who brought a libel suit against automobile tycoon Henry Ford in 1927, a landmark moment in our nation’s judicial history as the first time a Jew fought antisemitic slander in an American court.