Jewish Film Institute Awards $80,000 in 2024 Completion Grants to Six Projects that Articulate Nuanced, Contemporary, and Bold Depictions of Jewish Life and Identity
San Francisco, CA, July 11, 2024 — The Jewish Film Institute (JFI), the San Francisco-based nonprofit media arts organization and presenter of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), announced today the recipients of its fifth cycle of JFI Completion Grants. Five independent film projects, and a sixth project that was awarded a discretionary grant, will receive a combined $80,000 in finishing funds. The grantees were revealed publicly at the Closing Night of the 44th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, July 28 at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. The SFJFF44 Closing Night film, Sabbath Queen by Sandi DuBowski, was a 2023 JFI Completion Grantee and winner of the Harvey Goldberg Memorial Award. SFJFF44 runs July 18 — August 4, 2024. JFI, which champions bold films and filmmakers that expand and evolve the Jewish story for audiences everywhere, has distributed $415,000 to 33 projects since 2020.
“The JFI Completion Grant for Sabbath Queen came at a critical time during our rough cut when we needed to support our extensive editing team to take the film to completion. This was a 21-year work with an enormous amount of material — 1800 hours plus 1100 hours of archival! — so I was grateful for as much resource as possible,” said Sandi DuBowski, director of Sabbath Queen. “JFI is at the forefront of rebuilding the philanthropy necessary for the field of us storytellers to translate the Jewish experience to the world during these challenging and sensitive times. JFI is making it possible for our diverse voices and stories — in all their complexity, joy, pain, and critique — to be urgently heard. And JFI being both funder and presenter is crucial as works need to get made and seen. I had a Bay Area Premiere of my first feature Trembling Before G-d in 2001 at SFJFF and now, 23 years later, I’m returning to the Festival with Sabbath Queen as Closing Night.”
Netalie Braun’s Oxygen, an Israeli narrative feature, and Nicole Teeny’s Bulletproof Stockings were each awarded completion grants. Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass! is the recipient of the 2024 Envision Award, which provides significant support to a project that explores the complexities of shared society by combating prejudice and antisemitism. Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces was awarded this year’s Albert & Judith Goldberg Award for Jewish Arts & Culture while Ondi Timoner’s All God’s Children received the 2024 Harvey Goldberg Memorial Award. The latest film from Timoner, a two-time Sundance Grand Jury winner, will have a “work-in-progress” screening on Saturday, July 20 during SFJFF44 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. A sixth project, Marlene McCurtis’ Wednesdays in Mississippi, was awarded a discretionary grant by JFI staff.
The twelve finalists reviewed by the jury were chosen from a pool of 92 applicants. The jury for the 2024 funding round included: Lisa Fruchtman, an Academy Award®-winning editor and documentarian; Meredith Lavitt, founder of Swirl Production and veteran executive of the Sundance Institute; and Su Kim, an Emmy® and two-time Peabody Award-winning producer. The jury released the following statement:
“As jurors, we are honored and aware of our privileged position. As we journeyed through these films, we found beautiful visions, opening windows into the heart of our universal shared humanity. Stories that connect us to the lives of others vividly with intimacy and respect. We considered many questions about nuanced and surprising Jewish identities, histories, and culture. We were impressed by the quality and innovation of all these superbly crafted films.”
The 2024 JFI Completion Grants are made possible thanks to the support of the Albert & Judith Goldberg Foundation, Sandee Blechman and Steven Goldberg, Michelle Marcus, the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Nancy P. & Richard K. Robbins Family Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, and Sheri Cohen and Charles Green. More details about each supported project are available below and online at jfi.org/grants.
“We are proud of this strong new slate which features intimate human stories of Israelis and Palestinians, African Americans, Jewish Americans, and religious and secular communities working towards co-existence and understanding against the backdrop of an extremely polarized world,” says Lexi Leban, Executive Director, and Marcia Jarmel, Director of Filmmaker Services. “We believe this slate of films has the powerful ability to deepen empathy and understanding, articulate complexities, and open hearts and minds. At a challenging time for the distribution of independent Jewish films, JFI remains committed to providing a continuum of support throughout a film’s life-cycle.”
Filmmakers may learn more about upcoming opportunities at jfi.org/filmmakers.
2024 JFI Completion Grant Winners
All God’s Children
Ondi Timoner, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by David Turner
Winner, Harvey Goldberg Memorial Award for a film that impacts our understanding of Jewish history, life, and culture.
To combat the rising tension in their Brooklyn communities, a Rabbi and a Reverend team up to unite their congregations. As their faith is shaken, both congregations struggle to not let their differences drive them apart.
Bulletproof Stockings
Nicole Teeny, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Nicole Teeny
Perl and Dalia make waves creating “Bulletproof Stockings,” the first all-female Hasidic rock band. They challenge gender normsin their Hasidic community as their global attention increases but their diverging visions and ideologies threaten the band’s unity and future.
Coexistence, My Ass!
Amber Fares, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Amber Fares, Rachel Leah Jones
Winner, Envision Award for the film’s singular ability to envision a world free of prejudice and hate.
Coexistence, My Ass! follows Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi as she struggles to create a one-woman comedy show called “Coexistence, My Ass!” about racism, sexism, war, peace and… her ass. With hatred and violence in Israel/Palestine turbo-charged like never before, “co-existence” already a problematic term now sounds like a bad joke — so where does she go from here?
Monk in Pieces
Billy Shebar, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Billy Shebar, Susan Margolin
Winner, Albert & Judith Goldberg Award for a film that celebrates Jewish arts and culture.
Meredith Monk — Jewish-American composer, performer, and director — is one of the unsung creative geniuses of our time. Featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces illuminates Monk’s wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery.
Oxygen
Netalie Braun, Israel, Narrative Feature
Produced by Adi Bar Yossef, Aviv Ben Shlush
With the outbreak of a new war in Israel, a soldier is about to enter Lebanon. His mother refuses to wait for bad news and decides to take matters into her own hands.
Wednesdays in Mississippi
Marlene McCurtis, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Marlene McCurtis, Joy Silverman
Discretionary Grantee
Wednesdays in Mississippi is the little-known story of the first-ever all-women national civil rights program. The film traces the efforts of multifaith Northern Black and White women activists who flew into deadly Mississippi during the Freedom Summer in 1964, clandestinely supporting integration efforts and local Black women’s leadership to seed community economic and educational empowerment.
About the JFI Completion Grants
The JFI Completion Grants provide critical resources for filmmakers to accelerate the final stages of their films as the funding landscape for independent filmmakers — particularly those seeking to reflect the full spectrum of Jewish experiences, identities, and histories — becomes ever more challenging. The Grants support and elevate films that challenge stereotypes and conventions, spark impactful conversations about Jewish life, and innovate storytelling forms. They are a signature piece of JFI’s support for filmmakers from incubation through exhibition. Emerging and established filmmakers benefit from peer-to-peer and industry-leading mentorship and workshops in JFI’s year-long Filmmaker Residency, the only U.S. based residency of its kind, while JFI’s vast live and online exhibition platforms, including the annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, deliver finished works to audiences throughout the Bay Area and the United States.
The JFI Completion Grants have garnered an excellent track record for advancing compelling and provocative films that go on to critical and theatrical acclaim. Previous grantees include: Tessa Louise Salomé’s The Wild One, which won the award for Best Cinematography at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival; Ran Tal’s 1341 Frames of Love and War which premiered at the 2022 Berlinale Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, and DocAviv, where it won Best Director, Best Editing, and the Kedar Foundation Awards; Nancy Buirski’s A Crime on the Bayou, which was nominated for a 2021 Critics’ Choice Documentary Award; and Kit Vincent’s Red Herring (a 2022 Discretionary Grantee), which was workshopped as part of the 2022 JFI Filmmaker Residency, premiered at True/False in 2023, and screened at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, where it was honored with the Human Values Award. The 2023 Momentum Award, a collaborative grant by JFI and Los Angeles’ Jewish Story Partners, went to Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice which where it won the Sundance Film Festival’s Directing Award for U.S. Documentary premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Festival’s Directing Award for U.S. Documentary and was shortlisted for an Academy Award®.
For a complete list of JFI-supported films, visit jfi.org/supported-projects.
As the premier exhibitor of Jewish-content filmmaking, JFI delivers early looks at its supported films for thousands of Bay Area filmgoers. All We Carry by Cady Voge (’22 Grantee) screened at JFI’s 11th annual WinterFest in February 2023, while SFJFF44 present screenings of six JFI-funded films: All God’s Children by Ondi Timoner (’24 Grantee); Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round by Ilana Trachtman (’22 Grantee); Jews by Choice by Justyna Gawełko and Tomer Slutzky (’23 Grantee); A Photographic Memory by Rachel Elizabeth Seed (’22 Grantee); The Return from the Other Planet by Assaf Lapid (’22 Grantee); and Sabbath Queen by Sandi DuBowski (’23 Grantee). In addition, SFJFF44 presents a sneak preview of Varda Bar-Kar’s Janis Ian: Breaking Silence and the World Premiere of Yael Bridge’s Los Últimos Judíos de Guantánamo, both of which were workshopped in JFI’s Filmmaker Residency programs in 2022 and 2023.
The Jewish Film Institute (JFI) champions bold films and filmmakers that expand and evolve the Jewish story for audiences everywhere. As the presenter of the annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the world’s first and most revered event for independent Jewish storytelling, JFI celebrates the spirit of film, inquiry, independence, collaboration, community, and inclusion to turn conversation into action, reframe understanding of Jewish cultures and identities, and nurture networks of filmmakers and artists. The Institute’s filmmaker services include the competitive, year-long Filmmaker Residency and the JFI Completion Grants, which provide finishing funds to jury-selected projects. www.jfi.org
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) is the largest and longest-running festival of its kind and a leader in the curation and presentation of new film and media exploring the complexity of Jewish life and identity around the world. Since its founding in 1980, SFJFF has cultivated and championed emerging and established filmmakers throughout their careers, helping to launch new artistic voices on a national and international scale. www.sfjff.org
