The Boston Jewish Film Festival returns this week for its 37th year showcasing contemporary films on Jewish themes, and as always, Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre is front and center, screening a curated selection of films.
“We always do our opening celebration at the Coolidge,” says Joey Katz, artistic director of the BJFF and organizer of most of the festival programming. “It wouldn’t feel like the Boston Jewish Film Festival without starting things off in Brookline.”
The festival as a whole runs in person from Nov. 5-16 and online Nov. 17-19. It will screen 14 feature films, 11 short films and host 36 guests for programs and discussions.
This year the festival kicks off in Brookline on Nov. 5 with “The Most Precious Cargoes,” a French drama about a Polish couple living in a rural village during World War II. When a baby is thrown from a train heading towards Auschwitz, the couple chooses to raise it as their own, despite the rising local tensions and antisemitism around them. After the screening there will be a conversion between lead actress Dominique Blanc and Professor Nancy Harrowitz, Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University.
Also screening at the Coolidge are “All God’s Children,” on Nov. 12, a documentary film about two congregations, one Black and one Jewish, coming together in a quest for mutual support and understanding and “From Darkness to Light,” on Nov. 13, a documentary film about Jerry Lewis’s 1970s crusade to narrate the Holocaust for the first time in a big-screen fictional film. That film, “The Day the Clown Cried,” never got made, and this documentary explores why.
For the fifth year in a row, the festival will also partner with Brookline Booksmith to offer a selection of books related to the 2025 film screenings. The Booksmith will be selling thematically related books at the Coolidge before the screening of “All God’s Children” on Nov. 12.
The BJFF is becoming more experiential each year. In the 2025 program lineup, cinema lovers can movie feature film screenings and shorts, listen to panel discussions and hear behind-the-scenes stories from directors. But they can also rub elbows with filmmakers in more personal settings, for example at the “From Dough to Dogs: The Making of BABKA” event at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern in Somerville, where guests can enjoy a casual meet-and-greet and conversation with the makers of the film “BABKA,” while munching on actual chocolate babka. Lerhaus collaborated with Brookline Booksmith to stock books off their reading list in the tavern as well.
New this year, the festival is diving into the narrative realm of video games. In “What Even is a Jewish Video Game?” Katz will chat with podcaster, writer and video essayist Jacob Geller about the intersection of video games, art and storytelling. Katz says this is part of a larger effort to attract new, younger audiences and to illustrate the diversity of Jewish narratives.
“It’s important to showcase that Judaism is not a monolith,” says Katz.
With the aim of illustrating as many perspectives as possible, the festival will show films from 10 different countries including Argentina, Colombia, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Poland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Susan Adler, executive director of the film festival and a fourth generation Brookline resident, hopes the festival fosters community among everyone who attends.
“We want the Jewish community to feel seen and we want non-Jewish attendees to feel welcome,” she says. “The festival is for everybody.”
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