French films on screen @The National Center for Jewish Film
Film Festival
Still from The Safe House (2025), by Lionel Baier.
The National Center for Jewish Film will hold their Annual Film Festival from April 12 until April 23, 2026, in Boston. On this occasion, three french films will be projected.
Program
- Tuesday, April 14, 2026, at 7:00PM – ALL I HAD WAS NOTHINGNESS
Guillaume Ribot | 2025 | 94′ | English and French, German, Hebrew & Polish with English subtitles
Forty years after Claude Lanzmann’s monumental 9-hour film Shoah reshaped how the world remembers the Holocaust, filmmaker Guillaume Ribot returned to Lanzmann’s original materials and created a profound and riveting documentary all his own. A surprisingly propulsive and suspenseful film, All I Had Was Nothingness draws on 220 hours of previously unseen outtake film footage Lanzmann shot in the 1970s recently digitized by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ribot revisits Lanzmann’s 12-year odyssey, providing a fuller picture of the personal, ethical, logistical, and financial strain behind the monumental work. More than a “making-of” documentary, All I Had Was Nothingness stands as a moving meditation on memory, testimony, and the power of cinema to confront history.
New England premiere – Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance Day Screening, register here.
Venue: Coolidge Corner Theatre (290 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA)
- Thursday, April 16, 2026, at 7:00PM – THE SAFE HOUSE
Lionel Baier | 2025 | 90′ | French with English subtitles
In May 1968, while his parents take part in the student and worker protests on the streets of Paris, 9-year-old Christophe (the delightful Ethan Chimienti) stays with his eccentric grandparents, uncles and great-great grandmother in the Boltanski family’s charming and mysterious Parisian apartment. A bulwark against the world, the apartment–and the family–are a universe unto themselves, propelled by creativity and politics, joy and love, but also the scars of wars passed down through the generations and the enduring weight of antisemitism and the Holocaust.
New England Premiere, register here.
Venue: Museum of Fine Arts (465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA)
- Sunday, April 19, 2026, at 7:00PM – ONCE UPON MY MOTHER
Ken Scott | 2025 | 102′ | French with English subtitles
In this exuberant, colorful drama based on an incredible-but-true story, the matriarch of a bustling Moroccan-Jewish family living in Paris will do anything to give her youngest son the best possible life despite his physical setbacks. French Algerian actress Leïla Bekhti (Paris, je t’aime) delivers a radiant, powerhouse turn as Esther Perez, a spirited immigrant whose world is upended when she’s told her newborn son has a severe clubfoot and will never walk. Refusing to accept such a fate, she launches a relentless—and often riotously funny—campaign: storming clinics, sparring with specialists, and invoking medical miracles and divine intervention to give her child the future he deserves. A fiery adaptation of Ma mère, Dieu et Sylvie Vartan, the best-selling autobiographical novel by French writer and radio personality Roland Perez set in the 1960s-1970s.
Upcoming projection, register here.
Venue: Coolidge Corner Theatre (290 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA)
In partnership with
The National Center for Jewish Film
Since 1976, the Center has rescued, restored and exhibited films that document the diversity and vibrancy of Jewish life. NCJF’s archive of Jewish-interest films is one of the world’s largest. The Center’s collection of rare and endangered materials includes silent and Yiddish feature films, vaudeville shorts, newsreels, institutional films, and home movies, the earliest films dating from 1903. These films now screen worldwide and appear in hundreds of documentaries and museum exhibitions.