What to Know About the 2026 Jerusalem Film Festival

A quick guide to the 43rd Jerusalem Film Festival: buzzy films, festival guests, and the practical details, from Palme d’Or winners to where to park.

A festival film isn’t the Marvel movie playing at the mall. It’s the kind you’re still thinking about days later, sometimes months, in my case almost a year since I saw Sentimental Value at JFF2025. I still think about Gustav casting his own daughter Agnes as a child in a film about wartime trauma, and about Agnes, years later, refusing to let him do the same to her son. For the next ten days, Jerusalem has 200 more films lined up, and one of them might do the same thing to you.

During the day, the Cinematheque’s outdoor area turns into a scene of its own, filmmakers, theatergoers, guests, all of them eating, drinking, and (loudly, in at least one case I overheard) disagreeing about whatever they just watched. I like it when they’re loud, honestly, it’s the best free industry gossip you’ll get all festival. I’ll be out there too, coffee in hand, still arguing with myself about the last film while I wait for the next one.

Before You Go

Dates: July 9–19, 2026

Opens: Thursday, July 9, 8pm, Sultan’s Pool

Venues: Jerusalem Cinematheque and Lev Smadar Cinema, about a 15-minute walk apart

Tickets: Single tickets 49 NIS. Festival passes are also available. See jff.org.il for options.

Parking: Limited near the Cinematheque due to nearby construction. Mamilla, Mt. Zion Hotel, and Liberty Bell Park lots are your best bets, though last year I still ended up circling for twenty minutes, so budget the time. 

International Films With Buzz

Start here if you only have time for a few titles.

Fjord (dir. Cristian Mungiu). This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. A devout Romanian-Norwegian couple, played by Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan, resettle in a remote Norwegian village, until a teacher notices bruises on their daughter, and their traditional parenting collides with the community’s own values around freedom and tolerance.

Yellow Letters (dir. İlker Çatak). Winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, from the director of the Oscar nominated The Teacher’s Lounge. It follows Derya and Aziz, a celebrated Ankara artist couple whose lives unravel after an incident at their own play’s premiere, forcing a move to Istanbul and a slow fracture in their family.

Fatherland (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski). The Cold War and Ida director won Best Director at Cannes for this one, a road trip drama following Thomas Mann through the rubble of postwar Germany, so yes, another heavy one, but Pawlikowski earns it.

Paper Tiger (dir. James Gray). Jewish-American director, Cannes competition, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. I’ve already got my ticket, hoping to write a full piece on this one once the festival wraps.

Israeli Films With Buzz

Closer to home, and this is where it gets personal.

What Is to Come (dir. Ruthy Pribar). Fresh from Tribeca. After her husband dies in a suicide pact she survives, Yehudit flees the debts he left behind for the resort city of Eilat, where she takes a job, makes an unlikely friend in a hotel manager, and falls in love again, on her own terms this time. Full disclosure: Ruthy was my teacher, and I’m curious to see what she’s made.

Heart of Gold (dir. Efrat Corem). A bus inspector in Ashkelon takes in an abandoned baby. Her brother, a prison guard, gets pulled into it too, and into more of their own childhood than either of them wanted to revisit.

Yup. Debt, alcoholism, an abandoned baby. Three films in a row.

Where To? (dir. Assaf Machnes). Berlin at 3am, a stranger who keeps getting back in your car, you already know this isn’t really about the Uber ratings. 

Worth a look, too, in the Israeli Shorts program: I Once Saw a Train Passing By, from Bar Misochnik, a fellow Minshar classmate, about a father who won’t stop crying, and a daughter caught between being his mother and his child. Also keep an eye out for Based on a True Dream, from Ori Arthur Wolf: twenty-five years after a childhood nightmare about his parents turning into monsters, Ori sets out with his father to recreate the dream on camera and confront what it meant.

Classics Worth Revisiting

Sometimes the best thing at a festival isn’t new at all.

This year’s Cinemania program includes Roberto Rossellini: Living Without a Script (dir. Ilaria De Laurentiis, Andrea Paolo Massara, Raffaele Brunetti), a documentary on the neorealist master’s 1956 personal and artistic crisis, and the trip to India, at the invitation of Prime Minister Nehru, that pulled him out of it. It screens alongside a run of his own films in the Classics section: Journey to Italy, Fear, and Germany Year Zero.

Also in Classics: the original 1957 3:10 to Yuma (dir. Delmer Daves), the Elmore Leonard adaptation the recent remake was chasing.

Guests Worth Watching For

This is who’s actually in the room this year, or at least who I’m most excited to see in it. Fair warning: our headliner does not do light programming.

This year’s guest of honor is Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian director who has made both documentaries built from Soviet-era archival footage and fiction films about memory and state violence. He will receive an Achievement Award at the opening ceremony and preside over the jury for the Israeli Feature Film Competition. His latest film, Two Prosecutors, a Stalin-era thriller that premiered in competition at Cannes, screens at JFF in the presence of its producer. It’s worth knowing his 2021 documentary Babi Yar. Context too. Built from archival footage and made with the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, it examines Ukrainian civilian participation in the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, not as a single atrocity but as something built out of ordinary complicity. He’ll be judging Israeli films this year with that same question in mind: what does ordinary complicity look like from the inside.

Beyond Loznitsa, more than 25 international guests are flying in with their films: a French-Jewish directing duo (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, Just an Illusion), a Pole (Rafael Kapelinski, Budapest Days), an Armenian (Tamara Stepanyan, In the Land of Arto), a Czech (Ondřej Provazník, Broken Voices), and more. Half the festival’s screenings come with a Q&A tacked on after, and that’s my favorite part, hearing how much of the story is autobiographical, what the genesis of the film actually was, where the whole thing started for them. Check the schedule before you commit to a seat.

Events Beyond the Screenings

The festival opens this Thursday, July 9, and if you’ve never done it, a fair warning: seating at Sultan’s Pool is basically the ground, an amphitheater with none of the comfort that implies. Gal Gadot was the guest last year and, presumably, still had to sit through it like the rest of us. Bring a cushion. This year’s opener, at 8pm, is the Israeli premiere of Tell Me Everything (dir. Moshe Rosenthal), which had its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year, the first full-length Israeli feature to screen there in a decade.

If you want to sit in on the conversations filmmakers have when the cameras aren’t the point, Industry Day is a single Sunday: at 1pm, a panel called “Filming Partnership: Jewish and Arab Directors in an Open Conversation” puts Jewish and Arab filmmakers in a room to talk about what it actually takes to keep working together right now, followed at 3pm by producer Elad Peleg’s session, “The Software Every Producer Needs,” where he walks through the AI tools he built so budgets, contracts, and chasing invoices stop eating the time he’d rather spend on the film itself. Both at the Mediatheque.

This is just the preview, I genuinely don’t know yet which of these films will end up mattering to me most, ask me again in two weeks and I’ll probably have a different answer. I’ll be figuring it out in real time over at my Substack, Go With Yo. I hope you’ll join me.