This year’s UK Jewish Film Festival will be a “celebration” of Jewish life, and the film-makers who tell the community’s stories, organisers have promised ahead of the event’s 30th anniversary.
Kicking off on November 5, the ten-day festival will showcase more than 70 films, including 50 world or UK premieres.
Its opening gala on at London’s BFI Southbank will feature a screening of When the Night Falls, directed by and starring Daniel Auteuil – one of France’s most celebrated actors – which exposes the extent of French collaboration in the Second World War.
There follows a programme of films curated to illustrate “the humour, the warmth, the music, the challenges, and the extraordinary diversity” of Jewish life, organisers said.
Among their number is The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan), part comedy of errors, part modern Jewish folktale, about an out-of-work badhan (chasidic wedding entertainer) attempting to get the money together to pay his daughter’s dowry; and Shalom, winner of the special jury prize at this year’s Docaviv Film Festival, a documentary that follows a Palestinian Muslim zookeeper and an Israeli Jewish zookeeper at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo during the Gaza War as they care for a dying celebrity rhinoceros named Shalom.
Michael Etherton, the chief executive of UK Jewish Film, said: “Thirty years ago, the UK Jewish Film Festival began in Brighton as a modest but ground-breaking cultural event.
“Today, it is the home of Jewish cinema in the UK, with a nationwide reach.
“This 30th edition is a celebration: of the filmmakers who have been telling our stories for 30 years, of the audiences who have made us what we are, and of Jewish life in all its variety.
“We hope everyone, Jewish or not, will join us.”
As well as showing in cinemas, the films will also be available to stream online from November 18 to November 30 via the UKJFF platform.
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