Back for its 21st year, the 2025 Houston Jewish Film Festival offers movie buffs two weeks of new and classic Jewish and Israeli documentaries, features, shorts, and family fare.
Photo courtesy Gary Dan and the Dan Family
The Catskills is part of the 2025 Houston Jewish Film Festival and tells the story of the popular vacation spot's heyday and decline.
Events and screenings are hosted at the Evelyn R. Rubenstein Jewish Community Center, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Holocaust Museum Houston between this Saturday, March 22 and Saturday, April 5. Tickets are available for individual films, or via a Houston Jewish Film Festival subscription that offers access to every film in the series.
“We look for a really good variety that will appeal to many different segments of the community,” Matt Stein, chair of the festival, tells CultureMap. “One of the things that we really look for is to bring films to the audience that show the incredible diversity of Jewish life and culture around the whole planet.”
Stein notes that many people think of the Jewish experience as being either that of those living in the Middle East or of those of Ashkenazi descent. While some films in the festival definitely feature those backgrounds and experiences, the films the committee has selected also offer a broader range of subject matter.
The Blond Boy from the Casbah, showing on Sunday, March 23, for example, focuses on a boy living in Algiers with his Sephardic family, right before the country makes its claim for independence.
“[It shows how] the Jewish community was intimately intertwined with this chapter of French history, when France was a colonial power in Algeria and what that looked like,” says Stein. “There was a thriving Jewish community in Algiers and other cities in Algeria for much of the 20th century and before. And not only was it thriving, but it was peacefully coexisting with Muslim neighbors and Christian neighbors.”
Filmgoers can also expect selections such as the beloved 1986 Steven Spielberg animated film, An American Tail, which follows Russian mouse Fievel Mousekewitz and his family on their journey to America in 1885; the 1986 romantic comedy Crossing Delancey, starring Amy Irving as Izzy Grossman, a bookstore worker whose bubbe and a matchmaker are cooking up plans to get her wed; October H8te, a 2024 documentary exploring the eruption of antisemitism on college campuses across the U.S. following the events of October 7; and All About the Levkoviches, a 2024 dramedy about a Hungarian boxing trainer reuniting with his estranged son.
The Catskills, a documentary directed by Lex Gillespie, spotlights the heyday and decline of the resorts and bungalows that gave rise to “Borscht Belt” comedians and were a part of the fabric of mid-century Jewish-American life.
“The Catskills sort of looms large as this place that [Jews could go] before Jews were welcome to go to country clubs and other places,” says Stein. “So it's sort of embedded in an older generation of Jews. We know that it's nostalgic for [people], either for themselves or they know that growing up their parents did this.”
Stein and his committee are all volunteers. They work with a few staff members from the JCC to curate the festival by spending hours throughout the year screening movies and discussing what makes a good fit for the festival. This year, the group decided to also include several short films. Some will play ahead of feature films, but four films will be shown together at An Evening of Shorts on March 30.
“I just think it's a wonderful medium and Americans aren't used to watching five minute films or 20 minute films,” Stein says, pointing out that he hopes audiences will think differently about how short films can encapsulate stories.
Storytelling is at the heart of the films selected for the festival, and Stein thinks festival goers will have great choices to fit a variety of tastes.
