Ten New Films To See at the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival
In France they call it La Rentree, “The Reentry,” the season when the country goes back to school, back to the city, back to work and back to reality. In light of increasing and increasingly intractable polarization, rising global antisemitism and a cooking planet, reality would seem to be the last place to which anyone would want to return as 2025 winds down. Yet, if the selections of the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival can be said to indicate any sort of a trend, the opposite would appear to be the case.
Of the ten selections to be screened, only one is neither a documentary nor adapted from, based on or inspired by a true story. Fully half of those stories are Holocaust-related, mostly, but not entirely, directed by second or third generation survivors. Two of the documentaries deal, at least partially, with October 7.
The festival headliner, Eleanor the Great, is the directorial debut of actress Scarlet Johansson. Then 94-year-old June Squibb, who, like her character, converted to Judaism in the 1950s, stars as a widow who moves from Florida to New York after the death of her best friend, a Holocaust survivor. Due to an initial misunderstanding at a support group, she adopts the story of that friend’s life as her own. (You don’t have to go to the movies to know that that sort of thing never works out well.) Released in September, the drama, which explores aging, grief, loneliness, truth and betrayal, has been favorably received by audiences. Multi-award-winning Ms. Squibb, whose career began in 1951 and encompassed film, television and theater, has received universal accolades in this role.
While Ms. Johansson is not a direct descendant of Holocaust survivors, she was deeply affected by the discovery, through the PBS television show Finding Your Roots that her great granduncle Moishe and his two children, her cousins, had been killed in the Warsaw Ghetto, and she deliberately cast several Holocaust survivors partially as a result. The character of Eleanor is based on scriptwriter Tory Kamen’s grandmother, Elinore, who moved from Florida to New York, but the film’s plot is entirely fictitious.
Eleanor the Great will be shown along with Shari Albert and Laura Levin’s short Double Happiness. It is a love story between a recent Jewish widow and the Chinese restaurateur who came to know her as he had served her and her husband at his restaurant every Christmas.
Besides Eleanor the Great, two Holocaust-related films that take place roughly in the present are comedy/dramas that trace their origins to true stories. The Property is based on the graphic novel by Rutu Modan, a co-writer of the script with her sister Dana Modan, the director. It is also a fictional film adapted from a family story.
Holocaust survivor Regina and her granddaughter Mika return to Poland after the death of Regina’s son and Mika’s father to attempt to reclaim property previously seized by the state. Both granddaughter and grandmother experience romantic entanglements complicated by family secrets and history. Voted Best Narrative Feature at the 2025 Toronto Jewish Film Festival and nominated for numerous awards by the Israeli Film Academy, the movie addresses grief, but deals with romance, self-discovery and reconciliation as well.
The Ring, which takes place in the early 2000s, also involves a return to Europe. Arnon Noble, a middle-aged religious man, is close to his mother, a Hungarian survivor. When she breaks her hip, he decides to return to Hungary to attempt to reclaim a ring his mother had used to bribe a Nazi to allow her to escape with her infant son, the now-grown Arnon, who brings his estranged lesbian daughter along on the trip. Arnon is played by Adir Miller, for whom the film marks his debut as writer and director.
Having started out in standup in 1999, Miller has worked since in comedy and especially television comedy and whose sitcom Ramzor (“traffic light”) won the International Emmy Award for best comedy series in 2010. Yet, the “drama” aspect of comedy/drama is not neglected. The issues of reconciliation between parent and child and between past and present underlie the journey throughout.
Soda in Hebrew can mean either “soda” or “her secret.” Either translation fits this thriller based on a true story involving writer-director Erez Tadmor’s grandfather, a Polish resistance fighter and later community activist in Israel. In the early 1950s, a beautiful young survivor of Auschwitz moves with her daughter to a kibbutz of Holocaust survivors supported by a soda factory. She is accused of having been made a kapo as a result of a liaison with a German doctor, but not before she has captivated Shalom, a married former resistance fighter and kibbutz leader. Multiple questions of loyalty arise as does the nature of truth.
Finland has always bragged that it never turned any of its Jews over to the Germans, which is true if you understand that what is meant by “its Jews” are Finnish nationals. Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, on the other hand, lost their protection when Finland became an ally of Nazi Germany against Russia in 1941. Never Alone is the true story of Finnish Jewish businessman Abraham Stiller, who took increasing risks to protect these refugees. Writer-director Klaus Haro has won numerous awards at various festivals beginning in 2020. Never Alone has received multiple film festival award nominations, was named Best Feature Film at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and received the Best Screenplay Award from Septimus Awards in Amsterdam.
David Cunio and his twin brother Eitan appeared in Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval’s 2013 film Youth about twin brothers involved in a kidnapping. On October 7, David was abducted by Hamas along with seven members of his family. Eitan was able to escape. A Letter to David is Shoval’s documentary about David and about the connections between art and life and the devastation the attack has wrought. David Cunio was returned to Israel in October after the completion of the film, which won the Israeli Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The other documentary dealing with Israel is Venezuelan filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz’ Soul of a Nation. Jakubowicz canvasses a vast spectrum of Israeli society from Nobel laureates and government ministers to activists of all persuasions to chronicle the polarization that exploded into view with the proposed reform of the judiciary and the seismic shift brought about by the events of October 7. He was awarded the 2020 German Film Peace Prize for Resistance, the story of Marcel Marceau’s time in the French Resistance.
Back in America, you’ve no doubt heard of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Selma, and the Freedom Riders. How did they get their start? In1960, fully three years before the March on Washington, five Howard University students were arrested for riding a whites-only carousel in Maryland. Ilana Trachtman’s documentary Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round tells the story of this foundational protest that turned into a movement when local Jewish communities joined in. Among other awards, the film was named Best Documentary at the DC Black Film Festival in 2024 and won the Audience Award at the Boston Jewish Film Festival the same year.
In September of 2014, Canadian comedians Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman began a YouTube web series of five-minute sketches in Yiddish entitled Yidlife Crisis. In taking their act to Stockholm, they discover a center of Jewish culture in Sweden, where Yiddish is officially a protected language. Throughout their comic travelogue, Swedishkayt:Yidlife Crisis, they examine 250 years of Jewish life in Sweden and introduce the audience to a surprisingly vibrant Swedish Jewish community, all through a comedic lens.
The one wholly fictional film in this year’s lineup is The Floaters. Billed as an offbeat comedy, it deals with a competition involving a Jewish summer camp on the ropes financially and run by a young woman and a friend whose music career has just tanked. The rival camp is run by an entitled jerk. Emphasizing the diversity within the Jewish population, the film touches on issues of identity and belonging. Audiences and critics alike have described it as heart-warming.
Although many film festivals, including this one, have filled out their schedules with older films, the 2025 edition of the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival has not. Whether seeking insight, entertainment or a sense of which way the winds are blowing, you can find it here.
SUE KLEINBERG is a contributing writer to Jlife Magazine.
