Barcelona Jewish Film Festival 2025
Holocaust survivor and cellist Anita Lasker Wallfisch meets Auschwitz director Rudolf Höss’s son in the documentary "The Commandant’s Shadow," directed by Daniela Völker (USA, 2024).
Barcelona’s Festival Cinema Jueu is one of the most anticipated events of its kind in Europe dedicated exclusively to celebrating the artistry and creativity of Jewish culture, which is itself inextricably bound to the city and to Spain.
Every year since 1999 the festival has delivered a new and diverse series of cinematic and artistic projects to the public. No stone is left unturned in this impressive collection, as a variety of genres and topics are explored in great depth: from documentaries and feature films to independent shorts and audiovisual pieces.
2025 Program
Highlights in the 2025 program include Eva Neymann's When Lightning Flashes Over the Sea (Ukraine, Germany, 2025), a stark documentary on a handful of people in Odesa who are searching for dignity and dreams between war, loss and hope; Aleksander Ford's Ulica Graniczna (Border Street) (Poland, 1948) tells the story of a group of children from Jewish and Polish families living on Border Street in Warsaw, offering a poignant, sensitive and unsettling look at relations between communities during the Nazi occupation; Daniela Völker's The Commandant’s Shadow (USA, 2024) reveals the long shadows cast by heinous crimes that impact generations in an historic film that captures the moment the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz meets a Holocaust survivor; and Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin's Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (USA, 2024), which traces Spiegelman's eclectic and radical career from his beginnings in the 1960s as co-creator of the Wacky Packages to his provocative New Yorker covers created between 1993 and 2003.
Films are screened in original version with Catalan subtitles. You can purchase tickets directly at the Filmoteca de Catalunya for €4 a session.
October Film Festivals in and around Barcelona
October’s calendar is packed with an impressive list of film festivals in and around the city. Check out our article October Film Festivals in and around Barcelona where you'll find gritty investigative documentaries, hair-raising fantasy and horror flicks and everything in between!