Jerusalem Film Festival to host Jennifer Jason Leigh as guest of honor

The acclaimed American-Jewish actress Jennifer Jason Leigh will be the guest of honor at the 41st Jerusalem Film Festival and she will receive an award at the opening ceremony, which will be held at the Sultan’s Pool Amphitheater on July 18. 

The festival, which will include hundreds of new movies from around the world and from Israel, will run at the Jerusalem Cinematheque until July 27. 

This year, due to the war, 1,000 tickets to the opening will be given to those who have been evacuated from the South and the North, soldiers and their families, and the families of those who were kidnapped and murdered.

Leigh, who was nominated for an Oscar for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, has won a number of awards for her work, including the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress Award for the movie, Georgia. She mostly works in the indie film world, and her best-known roles include Robert Altman’s Short Cuts; Margot at the Wedding, which was directed by her former husband, Noah Baumbach; Uli Edel’s Last Exit to Brooklyn; Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square; and Ulu Grosbard’s Georgia.

Her breakthrough role came in Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, and she went on to play a sexy psycho in Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female in 1992 and a reporter whose mother is accused of murder in a 1995 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, Dolores Claiborne. In 2001, she and actor Alan Cumming directed, wrote and starred in The Anniversary Party. 

She is currently starring in the latest season of Fargo and had a key role in the series, Weeds. She has also had an extensive stage career.

The line-up 

The festival announced that the opening-night movie will be Thelma, Josh Margolin’s comedy starring the delightful June Squibb, who appeared in the movies Nebraska, About Schmidt, and Inside Out 2, and many television series, including Good Girls and Glee. In Thelma she plays an elderly woman who has been scammed out of her savings by someone pretending to be her grandson and who is determined to get revenge. The film features the final performance of Richard Roundtree, the actor best known for Shaft, who died last October. Thelma just opened in the United States to rave reviews and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. The film will be released in theaters in Israel later in the summer. 

The festival will feature the best of recent international cinema, and as well as the Haggiag Competition for Israeli feature films and the Diamond Competition for Israeli documentaries. 

The Jerusalem Film Festival was established by Israel Prize winner Lia van Leer and is currently overseen by the Jerusalem Cinematheque CEO Roni Mahadav-Levin; the newly appointed artistic director, Orr Sigoli; and the outgoing artistic director, Elad Samorzik. The festival is held with the support of the Culture and Sport Ministry, the Jerusalem Foundation, and the Van Leer Foundation. The full program and tickets will be available soon at jff.org.il/en