Why is this UK Jewish Film Festival different from all other years?

Where it’s gone is, to be sure, a far cry from where it began. Enkin, a former American oil company worker who started writing as a retirement hobby during Covid, was on the verge of giving it up altogether when he submitted the screenplay for Beshert to UK Jewish Film’s (UKJF) annual Pears Short Film Fund. The contest, which awards two grants of up to £15,000 for the production of short films that feature British Jewish stories and premieres them at the annual UKJF Festival, generally requires screenplay submissions to come with director and producer already attached, but Enkin didn’t know anyone in the industry.

A lot of films about Jews end up being about quite extreme stuff such as people leaving Charedi communities. but there isn’t very much about the Jewish everyday

“I called [head of UK Jewish Film Lab] Benjamin [Till] and I said, I was going to enter this script, but maybe I should just forget it,’” Enkin says. “‘Why I am I wasting my time writing? I’m going to play golf instead.’”

But Till encouraged Enkin to send his script to the judges anyway, and they fell in love with Beshert’s story of an unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man in a Leeds care home and a reluctant bar mitzvah boy; it was precisely the sort of British Jewish story the Pears fund – and UKJF at large – seeks to propagate.

“One of the main things that appealed to me with Beshert is it felt very grounded in Leeds Jewish culture,” said the film’s director, Lewis Rose, who won the Pears fund himself in 2016 and came on board to direct Beshert after reading Enkin’s script. “In the States, people are much more au fait with Jewish culture, especially because of the links to Hollywood and shows like Seinfeld, whereas I think British Jews have always been much more private about being Jewish – there’s been a lot more assimilation and a ‘don’t rock the boat’ kind of feeling, I think, throughout British Jewish history.

“But at the same time, a lot of shows or films about Jews end up being about quite extreme stuff, like people leaving really strict Orthodox communities, and there’s not very much about what Jewish life just is,” said Rose.

Hence the effort by UKJF producers and festival coordinators Till and Michael Etherton to encourage the production of homegrown Jewish stories, the sort that depict what British Jewish life really is – in all its universal joys, sorrows and simplicities. And while Enkin’s road to Jewish film-making has been unusual by any measure, he stands alongside other emerging film-makers whose work similarly illuminates unexplored corners of British Jewish life, and whose visions have been championed by UKJF’s short film funds.

To Fly or Float, the other winner of this year’s Pears grant, explores childhood grief in 1979 Birmingham, where an estranged uncle connects with his orphaned niece through the healing rituals of faith. The short film, starring Ben Caplan and directed by Charlotte Peters, is set during the UK’s Winter of Discontent, which screenwriter Olivia Maiden said was key to telling a different kind of story about British Jews.

“We really wanted to portray the working-class Jewish experience, because we felt we saw a lot on screen that stereotyped the Jewish experience and we wanted to step away from that,” she said.

Maiden, who interned for UKJF, understands Etherton and Till’s push for more films about the varied British Jewish experience as a “deliberate move away from what we see in the headlines at the moment and the political context that comes with that”.

“They want to showcase a side of Jewishness that’s sort of flown under the radar, which is this universal sense of community and family that’s often forgotten when we just see what’s in the headlines,” Maiden said.

Peters added that the type of story told in To Fly or Float is under-represented in the canon of Jewish film, which tends to centre Jewish stories around crucial political or historical moments: “Whether it’s the Holocaust or a particular period of persecution or something that’s going on in the Middle East, it’s never about the everyday life of Jewish people,” she said.

“What’s been so wonderful for us is the opportunity to highlight that, and to explore everyday Jewish life within the lens of the 1979 winter, because even then they’re still sitting down for Shabbat or going to shul on Saturday morning or making challah. These are things that Jewish people have been doing for generations and continue to do today.”

For other short film-makers bringing their work to the UKJF festival, the task of capturing British Jewish life is more rooted in the contemporary – and the non-fictional.

Enter the winners of the Dangoor Short Doc Fund, which supports film-makers in the production of four-to-five minute, micro-budget documentaries on diverse aspects of contemporary British-Jewish life. From Fighting Back, the story of an Orthodox martial artist named Miriam (directed by Sally Patterson), to Primordial Chicken Soup, exploring the enduring friendship between a group of Scouse Jewish women (directed by Barney Pell Scholes and Daisy Abboudi), to the tale of a new start for an 89-year-old Jewish East Ender (directed by Ronald Denning), the documentaries go beyond the bounds of canonical Jewish stories.

We realised that not only are a lot of Jews getting tattoos, they’re expressing their Jewish identity through them

One such short doc is Ink, directed by Priya Basra and produced by Leah Pennisi-Glaser, which explores the longstanding taboo around tattoos in Jewish culture through the story of Jewish tattoo artist Tal.

“I remember being shocked to find out that Tal was a British Jewish tattoo artist – I didn’t think that they existed here,” said Pennisi-Glaser, 24. “But what we realised is that in the 21st century this taboo is kind of going away, and a lot of Jews now are not only getting tattoos but they’re expressing their Jewish identity through them.”

From Hebrew inscriptions to symbolic October 7 memorials, Ink delves into the ways some British Jews have begun boldly wearing Jewishness on their skin, and what this rejection of an old taboo says about evolving diaspora culture.

Another Dangoor doc, Liorah, approaches British Jewish culture through the world of the contemporary artist Liorah Tchiprout. Marcos and Michelle Wolodarsky, the sibling directors behind Liorah, were drawn to Tchiprout not only for her haunting, Yiddish theatre-inspired puppet dolls, but because her expression of Jewishness is simultaneously British and diasporic.

“Liorah is very British and yet her story also spans different continents, different points of time, and that is also what it means to be a British Jew: our identities can come from all of these different places,” said Michelle, 29.

As you get older, your experiences change, your viewpoints alter, and you’ve actually got more to give. I couldn’t have written this script when I was 30

The siblings, who are from Madrid and have studied and worked in the arts, offer a unique outside perspective on the British Jewish community, whose culture they believe has been largely dominated by religion – something that hasn’t been helped by the post-October 7 wave of antisemitism pushing Jewish expression outside of UK arts circles.

“I think British Jews are grappling with these issues now in a fresh way, for the first time in a very long time,” said Michelle. “In America, it’s not mutually exclusive: you can be an American and Jewish, that’s completely compatible, but in Europe and the UK, it’s not always completely compatible to have a European nationality and be Jewish because of the extreme historical antisemitism.”

Despite the recent flurry of antisemitism, Marcos, 26, said that they “wanted to highlight the fact that there are still Jewish artists who are succeeding and are a part of cultural life in the UK – and Liorah’s work is explicitly, unapologetically Jewish”.

While the documentary sees Tchiprout examining where her distinctive Jewish artwork fits in British culture, its creation itself was an opportunity for the Wolodarsky directors to undergo a similar process of personal discovery.

“I think that this documentary is not only Liorah finding her voice, but it also gave us the chance to find our voice in a very public sphere,” said Michelle.

Such is the opportunity afforded the winners of the Pears and Dangoor funds, the up-and-coming Jewish film-makers with short films debuting at the UKJF festival in November. For Enkin, whose only readers prior to winning the Pears fund had been his wife of 44 years and his two daughters, the prestigious commendations for his screenplay Beshert led to the same moving realisation that the Wolodarskys had: “I finally found my voice.”

“You think that once you retire, you haven’t got anything creative to contribute any more,” Enkin says. “But as you get older, your experiences change, your viewpoints alter, and you’ve actually got more to give. I couldn’t have written this script when I was 20 or 30 years old.”

According to Beshert director Rose, who said the film’s famous lead actor Anton Lesser “read the script once and fell in love with it”, the real strength of the piece is that it tells a universal message – something vital that has, perhaps, been missing from British Jewish stories all along.

He said: “Although Judaism is very much at the heart of the film, really it’s just a story about two normal Jewish people, forming a friendship that could happen in any community.”

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The Pears Short Film Fund premiere and the Dangoor Short Doc Fund premiere take place on November 10 and November 11 www.ukjewishfilm.org