An Interview with Leah Galant, JFI Filmmaker in Residence
The Jewish Film Institute pleased to welcome six independent documentary filmmakers to its 2025 Filmmakers in Residence program. The year-long fellowship provides creative, marketing, and production support for emerging and established filmmakers whose projects explore and expand thoughtful consideration of Jewish history, life, culture, and identity.
Throughout the year, JFI will be diving deep into each Resident’s creative practice here on our blog. We’re kicking off 2025 with Leah Galant and her film Landscapes of Memory.
Jewish Film Institute: Hi Leah! Thank you for taking some time to answer our questions. To start off, what’s the genesis of this project? Why did you decide to take it on?
Leah Galant: For a long time, I’ve thought about how personal memories become collective memories — especially in light of my mother’s survival of 9/11. As a descendant of Holocaust survivors I also realized how memory of the Holocaust was made collective and political, and became curious to understand how memory work is created and maintained on a larger scale. This led me to doing a Fulbright Research project in 2021 in Germany- the self proclaimed “World Leader of Memory Culture.”
The film follows my journey, and the people I meet along the way — in particular, a Nazi descendant historian, a Holocaust survivor descendant artist and a Palestinian artist who are working through these questions that I set out to ask: What memories are preserved and which are ignored? Who are these memories for?
During my journey, I communicate with my father who was diagnosed with ALS via text to speech technology, to help narrate my discoveries and revelations.
“What memories are preserved and which are ignored? Who are these memories for?”
Where are you in the filmmaking process?
I’m currently in post-production, working with the wonderful editor Jeff Sterrenberg, who is part of the worker-owned production company Meerkat Media with me! We filmed between 2021–2024, with a few final shoots planned this year, and are planning to finish the film in the coming year.
How is the JFI Filmmaker Residency helping you develop your project?
Although we’ve only just started our residency it’s already proven to be incredibly helpful in terms of story development. Filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes who directed the beautifully moving film Sanson and Me came to speak with our cohort and helped inspire a writing approach with my film. The other Residents in the cohort are also incredibly kind and have offered advice and resources to each other. I’m excited to experience the rest of the year in which each session is specifically designed around an area of the film process, curated by Marcia Jarmel.
What will surprise your audience when they see your film? How does this story add to our collective understanding of Jewish life, culture, history or identity?
While this film documents my personal experience and journey, it is a universal story. All of us have family and legacy we must reckon with and nearly every community has a historical memory of an event whose shadow still lingers. By attempting to understand my own family legacy and place in the collective memory of the Holocaust, I want to inspire people to see memory work, not as something that can be relegated to a stone marker, but as an ongoing, fluid and ever-changing process. At this moment, I believe the Jewish communities could benefit from deep inquiry and dialogue about the legacy and future of Holocaust memory.
If you could screen your film as a double feature with any film, what would you choose and why?
I would love to screen with one of my film’s inspirations, News from Home by Chantal Akerman which is a minimalist documentary that consists of wide New York City landscape shots alongside voiceover of letters from her mother in Brussels. Akerman was able to expertly communicate a sense of displacement and tension between her new surroundings in NYC and the letters from her mother -which parallels my communication with my father while in Germany.
“All of us have family and legacy we must reckon with and nearly every community has a historical memory of an event whose shadow still lingers.”
Like my family, Akerman is a descendant of Holocaust survivors, and putting the two films into dialogue would bring out the shared themes of diaspora, legacy and familial responsibility.
Leah Galant is a Jewish director and Fulbright Scholar based in New York whose storytelling focuses on unexpected narratives that challenge perceptions. In 2022, she was recognized as one of DOC NYC’s 40 under 40. Leah’s directorial debut ON THE DIVIDE premiered at the Tribeca 2021 Film Festival and was broadcast on POV PBS on April 18th 2022. She was a Sundance Ignite and Jacob Burns Fellow where she created DEATH METAL GRANDMA (SXSW 2018) about a 97 year old Holocaust survivor named Inge Ginsberg who sings death metal which won “Best Documentary” at the American Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival, and is a NY Times Op Doc. While at Ithaca College in 2015 she was named one of Variety’s “110 Students to Watch in Film and Media” for her work on THE PROVIDER that follows a traveling abortion doctor in Texas (SXSW 2016, Student Emmy Award) and BEYOND THE WALL about a formerly incarcerated individuals re-entry process. She is currently a member-owner at Meerkat Media cooperative production company and working on her second feature length film on memory culture.
About the JFI Filmmakers in Residence Program: The JFI Filmmakers in Residence Program is a year-long artist residency that provides creative, marketing, and production support for emerging and established filmmakers whose documentary projects explore and expand thoughtful consideration of Jewish history, life, culture, and identity.
