2025 Windsor Jewish Film
Festival Schedule

Responsive Schedule Table

A Real Pain

It has been rare over our many years to lead off the Windsor Jewish Film Festival with a popular major American studio release with well-known stars, but we are very happy to do it this year.  A Real Pain, with an acting Oscar for Kieran Culkin, an Oscar nomination for original screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg and film awards around the world, has been a huge success in theaters and Jewish film festivals.  It tells a story that is both intensely Jewish in its background and setting but also universal in the family dynamics of its protagonists and the human dynamics of its other characters on a heritage tour of Poland and its Holocaust history.

Though he is writer, director and lead actor, Eisenberg gives centre stage to Culkin, whose performance navigates between heartbreaking and hilarious. It is a movie which is about the Holocaust but mostly about America’s third-generation survivors’ attempts at coming to terms with ongoing trauma, at confronting what their parents and grandparents found too painful to revisit or necessary to forget to survive. It is also about any family, male friendship and growing older.

Monday, June 16, 2025 | 8:00 PM | Capitol Theatre

Comedy/Drama | 90 Minutes | English

The Blond Boy from the Casbah

In this semi-autobiographical film based on his childhood years in Algeria, French Jewish film director Alexandre Arcady creates the fictional persona of Antoine Lisner, a filmmaker who returns to Algiers with his adolescent son to screen his latest film and to show him the city of his early years.  Seen through the innocent eyes of youth, the Casbah, the poor multicultural old town separated from the wealthier European section of Algiers, is an exciting mixture of Arab, Jewish and Christian neighbours living in peaceful co-existence.  

Antoine immerses us in the moments of happiness, laughter, and tears of his childhood – spent between school, friends, and his Jewish family.  Arcady’s film cuts between the present with his 15-year-old son and the 15-year-old Antoine, as well as between the family’s hasty escape from Algiers and his celebratory return as a famous film director.  It is a beautiful look back with relevance to the Middle East today.

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 | 2:30 PM | Capitol Theatre

Comedy/Drama | 126 Minutes | French

Torn

Twenty months after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s military response, the unresolved war in Gaza continues to motivate protest and counter-protest activities on campuses and on the streets in Europe and North America.  This documentary film takes place on the streets of New York, the city with the largest population of Jewish and Muslim residents outside of Israel. It shows the intense debates ignited by the “Kidnapped from Israel” poster campaign, a grassroots effort to raise awareness of the plight of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas. These posters quickly became polarizing symbols, sparking intense clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine activists which turned New York City's streets into battlegrounds of ideology and emotion. The film explores the motivations behind activists putting up and tearing down the posters, unraveling the complexities of this intense paper proxy war, fought thousands of miles from the actual conflict.  Although the film is more able to interview Jewish friends and families of hostages, it tries to give the pro-Palestinian activists opportunity to show their support for the Gazans who are suffering as well, but mostly shows the wall of misunderstanding separating those putting up the posters from those tearing them down.  With an in-your-face street-level approach, Torn reveals the emotional depth behind every poster put up and taken down.

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 | 5:30 PM | Capitol Theatre

Documentary | 75 Minutes | English

Bad Shabbos

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 | 8:00 PM | Capitol Theatre

Comedy | 126 Minutes | English

Drop your Canadian reserve to enjoy this hilarious one-night-in-New-York story which turns a Shabbat family dinner into an unforgettable whirlwind. When two young couples, Abby and Benjamin, and David and (recently-converted-to-Judaism) Meg, gather at their parents’ upper west side apartment for what should be a normal Friday night dinner, the night spirals out of control.  

All the performances are perfect, but Kyra Sedgwick as the pushy mother and David Paymer as the peace-making father are superb, as is Cliff “Method Man” Smith as the building’s easy-going know-it-all doorman.  Bad Shabbos balances between the uncomfortable and the absurd and never sidesteps emotional vulnerability for the sake of a laugh. It’s no wonder that this film won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the most New York film festival of them all. 

Matchmaking 2

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | 2:30 PM | Capitol Theatre

Comedy | 110 Minutes | Hebrew

“Matchmaking 2” follows Baruch, still searching for love, as he develops feelings for Shira, a witty and charming newcomer. After a Sabbath encounter at the airport sparks a connection, Shira’s mother, Malki, interferes, seeing Baruch as unsuitable.  Simultaneously, Baruch is pushed into meeting Ruth, a baker, creating a love triangle and comedic chaos. The film explores the Haredi dating world, filled with love laughter and high-stakes choices, all while celebrating cultural traditions and talented actors.

Yaniv

You probably have never heard of Yaniv, but you will enjoy learning about this card game, as we did. This high energy comedy thriller is set in a gambling community in Hasidic New York.  Yaniv is an old Jewish card game, popular in Israel today, and the ultra-Orthodox communities in the USA.  In this movie, Ben, a desperate well-meaning high-school teacher from the Bronx needs money to make up for his school’s drastic cut in his drama budget.  He recruits a fellow teacher and together they conceive a highly unconventional and somewhat dangerous solution -- infiltrating the high stakes underground Yaniv game run by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group.

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | 5:30 PM | Capitol Theatre

Comedy/Drama | 85 Minutes | English

Pink Lady

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | 8:00PM | Capitol Theatre

Drama | 106 Minutes | Hebrew

Set in Jerusalem in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, Pink Lady is a heartfelt drama that explores love and identity in a world which has zero tolerance for homosexuality.  Those in the ultra-Orthodox world who are not heterosexual face a stark choice: either hide and deny their sexual urges and have a marriage of pretense, or leave the only world they have ever known. There have been movies touching this subject before from a male perspective, but this film is told from the wife’s point of view, boldly addressing the family’s problem from a uniquely female perspective.  

All About the Levkoviches

Thursday, June 19, 2025 | 2:30 PM | Capitol Theatre

Drama | 85 Minutes | Hungarian/Hebrew

Having shown few Hungarian films over the years, we are happy to present this poignant and bittersweet drama set in contemporary Budapest, which follows a Jewish family from estrangement to reconciliation.  Tamas', a generous but crusty boxing coach, gets along well with everyone except his own son.  When Tamas' beloved wife dies unexpectedly, he agrees to let his son sit Shiva in his house, as long as he brings his young grandson, Ariel.  Father and son face their old grievances and differences during Shiva.  Meanwhile, Ariel's grief, masterfully portrayed by a tremendous child actor, takes the form of an obsession that his beloved grandmother's spirit is still in the house.

With warmth, humour, and wisdom offered by those around them, the journey from sorrow to healing and reconciliation is completed in this poignant and heart-warming film.

Soda

Thursday, June 19, 2025 | 5:30 PM | Capitol Theatre

Drama | 96 Minutes | Hebrew

In the early sages of learning about generational trauma, we are fortunate to present Soda which tells a gripping and personal story of how Holocaust trauma continues to haunt survivors and their children for the rest of their lives. It reveals a tragic romance set in an Israeli working-class neighbourhood in 1954, just a few years after survivors settled in from refugee camps in Europe.  Soda draws on the director’s family ‘s experiences and is dedicated to his grandfather who survived as a Partisan in the forest.

Shalom a former Partisan leader, is torn between his passion for an enigmatic widow and his duty to uncover the truth about her past. The cinematic recreation of that place and those people in Israel is so competently done, that we are able to enter their lives.

If you think you know about the brilliant writer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, this profound film allows us to know him as a man who is deeper and much more complex that we realized. With unique access to his family and personal archives and original interviews, this film illuminates Wiesel’s biography as a survivor, writer, teacher, and public figure.  Rather than use only film clips as previously, this documentary incorporates original, hand painted animation to illustrate the unimaginable. This film examines the passions, struggles, and enduring impact of a man who became a powerful voice for human rights. 

The dilemmas he faced underline the relevance of his teaching in today’s increasingly hostile world, where the memory of the Holocaust is fading and authoritarian threats appear in places we would never have imagined. We are proud to conclude this year’s Windsor Jewish Film Festival with this masterful film from documentarian Oren Rudavsky, whose award-winning films on Jewish life and other socially relevant subject have been featured on PBS, Prime Time and other venues.

Thursday, June 19, 2025 | 8:00 PM | Capitol Theatre

Documentary | 87 Minutes | English

Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire