The Jewish film festival in Contra Costa County started small in 1995, with just four movies. Thirty years later, the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival is set to screen more than 20 films in theaters and online in February and March.
“We pick films that will be remembered and talked about for long after the festival is over,” said longtime festival director Riva Gambert.
In-person screenings will take place at the Century 16 in Pleasant Hill from Feb. 22 to 27, and at Vine Cinema in Livermore on March 16. Sixteen films, including some not shown in person, will be available online from March 9 to 20.
For nearly two decades, the festival was affiliated with the Jewish Federation of the East Bay and the Contra Costa JCC. In 2016, it spun off into an independent entity.
This year, the film festival kicks off with 2024’s “Midas Man,” a fictionalized account of the life of Brian Epstein, the first manager of the Beatles, starring Jewish actor Jacob Fortune-Lloyd. Epstein “discovered” the Beatles, secured their first record contract and managed them until his death from an accidental overdose in 1967 at age 32.
“We’re delighted to open our festival with ‘Midas Man,’ a British light drama, and close the in-theater part of our event with the Israeli drama ‘Soda,’” Gambert said. “They’re both new films that our audience will be glad they saw.”
“Soda” stars Lior Raz, of “Fauda” fame, and Rotem Sela. The story is set in the 1950s and is based on director Erez Tadmor’s own family. Raz plays a tough but haunted former anti-Nazi partisan, now living in Tiberias. When he meets a beautiful new neighbor, played by Sela, he falls for her — but begins to suspect she collaborated with the Nazis during her time in a concentration camp.
Another highlight in the festival comes from Nir Bergman, the esteemed Israeli director known for the TV show that later became the American series “In Treatment.” His new film, 2025’s “Pink Lady,” tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox couple after the husband is blackmailed for his homosexuality and the wife must confront her feelings, both about him and the values she has taken for granted. It was written by Mindi Ehrlich, who was raised in the haredi community.
“When I realized how unimaginable it is that gay Orthodox live in a community that offers them no legitimacy, that they live invisible, in deep suffering, and that, in a tragic cycle, this brings pain to the women who love them, making those women invisible too, I knew this film had to be made,” Ehrlich told Variety.
“Auction: The Stolen Picture,” a 2024 film directed by Pascal Bonitzer, is described as a “thrilling satire about the highbrow art world of Parisian auctioneers.” When an up-and-comer at an auction house finds a hidden piece of looted art, he embarks on a race to find a buyer before the truth about its origins derails a sale.
Also showing in theaters is a new documentary about songwriter Diane Warren. With Grammys, an Emmy and 15 Oscar nominations, Warren has been one of the music industry’s biggest hitmakers, writing for artists as diverse as Aerosmith and Celine Dion. Jewish film festival favorite “Sabbath Queen,” about Amichai Lau-Lavie, a rabbi and drag queen, will screen at the fest, as will “Mazel Tov,” an Argentine comedy about a family coming apart at the seams at a bat mitzvah, and “The Glory of Life,” a fictionalized account of the love story between Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant.
Festivalgoers will also have a rare chance to see “Turn Left at the End of the World,” a well-loved Israeli movie from 2004 about Indian families who immigrated to Israel in the 1960s. Expecting a cosmopolitan lifestyle, they are settled in a village in the Negev, where they must learn how to forge a new life and new connections with the Moroccan Jews who already live there.