Highlights of the Jerusalem Women’s Film Festival from heroines to humor

The Jerusalem Women’s Film Festival will spotlight heroines, humor, and heartbreak with a program of feature films, documentaries, and shorts from Israel and around the world that will run at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other venues around Jerusalem from December 9-13.

Many of the directors of the Israeli films will be present at the screenings. The festival will include some free events, and all of it is free of charge for evacuees due to the war.

The opening-night movie will be Lee, a biopic about the American photographer Lee Miller, who is played by Kate Winslet. The movie, which was directed by Ellen Kuras, tells the story of how Miller went from working as a model to becoming a war photographer during World War II, chronicling the blitz of London and the liberation of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.

Winslet has won rave reviews for her performance and has been mentioned as a contender for a Best Actress Oscar. Marion Cotillard, Andy Samberg, and Alexander Skarsgard co-star.

The theme of heroism and war will continue throughout the festival, particularly in a program of women’s films about the current war. These will include Paradise Shattered by Ronit Ifergan, who chronicled her family’s life in Kfar Aza before the war, and which also includes the story of how they survived October 7. There will also be short films by women who have experienced the war in different ways.

Short film programs

The festival will include several short-film programs, including films by students and ultra-Orthodox women.Female Israeli directors have dominated the industry this year as never before, and four feature films by Israeli women directors that have not yet opened in theaters will be shown.

Maya Kenig’s The Milky Way, which won the Ophir Award for Best Screenplay, is a darkly comic dystopian fable about a singer (Hila Ruach) who just had a baby. Struggling to support herself, she begins working for a strange factory that sells breast milk to wealthy women who cannot nurse their own babies. Hadas Yaron, who was in We Were the Lucky Ones, co-stars as a high-strung client of the breast milk company.

Maya Dreifuss’s Highway 65, which won a Special Mention at the Jerusalem Film Festival, is a neo-noir detective story with Tali Sharon as an awkward police investigator demoted from Tel Aviv to Afula, who becomes convinced that the disappearance of a beauty queen is murder. Idan Amedi, the singer and Fauda star who was injured in combat in Gaza, plays a suspect who is the son of an influential man.

Tova Ascher’s Haim’s Story tells the story of a security guard living with his mother who finds himself in a downward spiral in an uncaring society.

Dana Goldberg’s Debbie Was Here is about a mental patient and a student who is drawn to find out more about her.

There are several international feature films in the festival, in addition to Lee. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, tells the story of two Indian nurses who room together. One was married in an arranged match to a man who has gone abroad, while the other is in love with a young man.

Sandra Huller, who was so memorable in the movie Anatomy of a Fall, stars in the caper comedy Two to One by Natja Brunckhorst. It’s about an East German family that finds millions in soon-to-be-discontinued East German currency during the German reunification in the early 1990s. They carry off as much as they can, hoping to spend it before it becomes worthless.

Sultana’s Dream, by Spanish director Isabel Herguera, is an animated film that tells the story of Ines, a woman inspired by a feminist science-fiction story written in Bengal in 1905, who goes to India in search of Ladyland, a utopian land populated by only females.

Klaudia Reynicke’s Reinas (aka Queens) is set during the political upheavals in Peru in the 1990s. Two teenage girls are about to leave for a better life in America with their mother, when their estranged father comes back into the picture and doesn’t want them to go.

The Persian Version, an irreverent comedy about an Iranian-American family by Maryam Keshavarz, is about the lesbian daughter of a formidable real-estate broker mother, who gets pregnant after a fling with a drag queen.

Documentaries will also be represented at the festival. Lena Chaplin’s Francesca tells the story of the Polish-Jewish dancer Franceska Mann, who killed an SS officer at the entrance to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and who was rumored to have collaborated with the Nazis when she was in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Michal Cohen’s Full Support is a look at a bra shop in Jaffa, examining women’s love-hate relationships with both their bras and their bodies.

Dana Hacohen Naor and Firas Roby’s Acre Wall Jumpers is a look at a longstanding tradition among teens in the northern city – jumping off the walls of Acre’s Old City into the Mediterranean – and investigates what this rite of passage means to them.

In a film from the documentary series 770, about the Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, filmmaker Bruria Pasternak Sharvit looks at several creative, intellectual women who blend their artistic lifestyle with traditional Chabad observance.

An episode from the KAN 11 series Champions, by Michal Paran and Irma Adelman, is about the Hapoel Katamon women’s soccer team in Jerusalem, and shows how female athletes fight for recognition in a male-dominated sport.

The festival was created by the Women in the Picture Association, which was founded in 2004 by Anat Shperling and Naama Peresin Orpaz. Since its establishment, its flagship project has been the Women’s Film Festival, which is currently run by Shira Meishar and Lihi Sabag, with the support of the Jerusalem Film Creators Forum and the Jerusalem Municipality.

For more information, go to the festival website at jwff.co.il.