Each autumn, as the days shorten and Britain slips into winter, the UK Jewish Film Festival quietly does something extraordinary. It turns cinema screens across London, Manchester and the rest of the country into windows on to Jewish life in all its complexity: joyful, painful, funny, conflicted, defiantly hopeful. In 2025, the festival returns for its 29th edition, and it feels more vital than ever.
Running in London from 6–16 November, in Manchester from 20 November–3 December, with a nationwide tour from 16 November–4 December and a dedicated online programme from 19–27 November, the festival is now a firmly established pillar of the UK’s cultural calendar. It is not a niche sidebar, but a confident showcase of world cinema that happens to be Jewish, Israeli and proudly rooted in the story of the Jewish people and their national home in the Jewish Homeland, Israel. The programme gathers films from across the globe that explore Jewish and Israeli life, identity and history, complemented by post-screening Q&As, panel discussions and guest appearances that turn screenings into genuine conversations rather than passive viewing.
What makes the UK Jewish Film Festival distinctive is its understanding that film is not just entertainment. It is a cultural defence mechanism, a way of asserting truth and nuance in an age of slogans, propaganda and wilful distortion. Jewish life is too often reduced to caricature: either flattened into victimhood, or demonised through the crude narratives pushed by Iran-backed terror networks and their fellow travellers in the West. By contrast, the festival programmes films that insist on the fullness of Jewish experience: religious and secular, left and right, Israeli and diaspora, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi and everything in between.
On screen, you might find a sharp Israeli family comedy, a hard-hitting documentary on the struggle to defend democracy in the Middle East’s only free state, a British drama wrestling with intergenerational memory of the Shoah, or a bold new film exploring Jewish communities in South America or Eastern Europe. The message is simple but powerful: Jewish life is not a slogan; it is a living, arguing, creating civilisation.
The festival’s connection to Israel is especially important. At a time when Israel is routinely misrepresented by hostile regimes and by the left, which allies with Iran’s network of global Jihad and political Islam, the UK Jewish Film Festival offers something far more honest: Israeli cinema as Israelis themselves live it. These films portray a society that is pluralistic, self-critical and deeply democratic, grappling openly with questions of security, morality, identity and coexistence under conditions no other Western democracy faces. Instead of the lazy propaganda that paints Israel as a monolith, festival audiences see real people: Jewish and Arab citizens, religious and secular, right-leaning and left-leaning, old-timers and Jewish Returnees from around the world, all navigating a small but resilient democracy surrounded by Iranian proxy forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
This matters, because culture shapes perception, and perception shapes politics. When audiences watch a nuanced Israeli drama or a documentary exposing the realities of Islamist terror and the pressures it places on democratic societies, they encounter the moral distinction that is so often blurred: free societies like Israel, the UK and the United States are imperfect but committed to the rule of law, independent courts and human rights in the universal sense. Their adversaries—whether it is Hamas, Hezbollah or other Iran-backed terror militias—are openly devoted to violent Jihad, the subjugation of non-Muslims and the destruction of the Jewish state. The UK Jewish Film Festival does not reduce itself to polemic; instead, it trusts that honest storytelling, drawn from real lives and real dilemmas, will make that difference visible.
The festival’s British dimension is equally rich. Through features, shorts and the British-Jewish Life on Film strand on the nationwide tour, it explores what it means to be Jewish in contemporary Britain: proud and integrated, yet conscious of rising antisemitism; firmly part of the wider national story, yet bound to a 3,000-year-old identity and to Israel as the Jewish homeland.
These films record synagogues and community centres, family Friday night dinners and strained conversations about security, campus life, politics and assimilation. In doing so, they quietly rebut the poisonous claim that Jews are foreign interlopers whose story is somehow alien to European or British civilisation.
The hybrid nature of the 2025 festival is another sign of its maturity. With an in-person programme anchored in London and Manchester, a touring selection reaching cinemas around the UK, and an online festival from 19–27 November—including exclusive content such as the series “The Zweiflers”—the festival is accessible to anyone with curiosity and an internet connection.
This matters for younger viewers dispersed across the country, for Jewish audiences outside major urban centres, and for non-Jewish film lovers who want to engage with Jewish and Israeli stories but cannot always attend in person.
Yet the festival is about more than access or representation. It is about cultural resilience. As antisemitism resurges globally—fuelled by Political Islam, by authoritarian regimes and by segments of the left that have become useful idiots for Iran’s Jihadist project—the act of gathering publicly to celebrate Jewish creativity is itself a statement. It says that Jewish life will not be pushed into the shadows. That Jews will continue to tell their own stories, in their own voices, in the heart of a democratic, pluralistic United Kingdom that is at its best when it protects minorities rather than pandering to extremists.
In that sense, the UK Jewish Film Festival is a natural ally of Western democratic values. It honours free expression, artistic experimentation and open debate. It invites disagreement and discussion in the Q&A sessions and panel events, but within a framework that rejects the glorification of terror and the legitimisation of those who would destroy the only Jewish state. It showcases Israeli filmmakers who can criticise their own government precisely because they live in a free society—something no director under an Islamist or authoritarian regime could safely do. The festival audience, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, is invited to step into that democratic conversation rather than accept the pre-packaged narratives pushed by propaganda outlets online.
For anyone who cares about film, about Jewish life or about the defence of open societies in a dangerous world, the UK Jewish Film Festival 2025 is not just another event on the calendar. It is a chance to immerse yourself in stories that are specific yet universal: families under pressure, love across borders, generational conflict, memory and trauma, humour in impossible circumstances, and the eternal question of how to remain true to who you are while engaging honestly with the wider world.
Full details of the programme, screening times and venues are available on the festival’s website, where you can explore the films, check the calendar for London and Manchester dates, and browse the nationwide tour and online line-up.
Whether you choose a gala premiere at Curzon Mayfair, a documentary followed by a panel at a community venue, a touring screening in a local cinema or an online watch from home, you will be taking part in something far larger than a night at the movies: a celebration of Jewish creativity and a quiet but firm stand for the values that the UK, Israel and the wider democratic West must continue to share and defend.
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