WinterFest, the one-weekend counterpart to the summertime San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, seeks to offer audiences a respite, according to the Jewish Film Institute.
“We invite the entire Bay Area population to come experience WinterFest 2026 as a space for entertainment, engagement and refuge from the polarization and bigotry that is so prevalent in our society right now,” JFI executive director Lexi Leban said in a press release.
This year’s WinterFest films include a documentary that looks back at the acclaimed classic “Shoah,” a drama about an Israeli musician tasked with writing a new national anthem post Oct. 7, a short about a Jewish convert and a Muslim circumciser, and the winner of best film in the 2025 Ophir Awards aka the Israeli Oscars.
In “All I Had Was Nothingness,” director Guillame Ribot explores “Shoah,” the famed nine-hour Holocaust documentary, four decades after its release. It follows “Shoah” director Claude Lanzmann, who died in 2018, as he seeks to make his film. The documentary uses his own words and previously unseen footage.
“Yes,” a satire from Israeli cultural critic Nadav Lapid, follows a fictional Israeli composer given the impossible task of writing a new Israeli national anthem for a post-Oct. 7 world.
In “The Sea,” Israel’s 2025 Ophir winner and Oscar submission, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the West Bank attempts to travel to the Mediterranean, which he has never seen before. The Arabic-language film, a collaboration between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli filmmakers, was criticized from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for accepting Israeli government funds and for its portrayal of Israeli soldiers.
In total, this year’s WinterFest will present six feature films. There will also be screenings of short films. Stand-out shorts include “Snipped,” a Danish film about a Jewish convert who must seek a Muslim doctor’s help for his circumcision; “Children No More: Were and Are Gone,” an Academy Award-nominated look at activists as they holda weekly vigil in Tel Aviv for children killed in Gaza; and “Kfar Aza — 95% Heaven” about residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza along the Gaza border wrestling with whether to return after the devastation of Oct. 7, 2023.