UK Jewish Film Festival comes back to Brighton, where it began, for its 30th year

The UK Jewish Film^2,3,4 Festival is coming back to Brighton for its 30th anniversary, with two screenings at Duke’s at Komedia in November. The festival started in the city in 1997, founded by Judy Ironside, and she will introduce both evenings. The Argus¹ first reported the news.

On Sunday 22 November at 6pm, British-Jewish Life on Film is an evening of new mini-documentaries and short dramas commissioned this year by UK Jewish Film’s Film Factory. All of them are world premieres. Oslo Court is about the 1970s-style London restaurant and its waiter, Neil. Fish, Chips & Faith follows a Leeds restaurant that serves kosher and halal food under one roof. Rambling follows The Pennine Wayfarers, a community 50 years in the making, along a route with British-Jewish history. In The Last Jewel, 89-year-old Joseph Ullmann keeps his grandfather’s Budapest antique jewellery business going in Hatton Garden. Mizrahi Mismatch meets Judith and Menahem, who married within weeks of meeting in 1959.

On Thursday 26 November, also at 6pm, the festival shows The Soundman, its Brighton premiere. Frank Van Passel’s film is set at a Brussels radio station in May 1940. Elza, a voice actor, is secretly a Jewish refugee from Vienna, and Berre is the sound engineer who makes the effects for the station’s radio plays. They fall in love as German forces mass on the border.

“In 1997 we could not have dreamt that UK Jewish Film and the Festival would grow and develop in so many ways,” Ironside said.

Michael Etherton, chief executive of UK Jewish Film, said: “We are delighted to return to Brighton, where it all began, and hope everyone, Jewish or not, will join us.”

The festival opens in London on 5 November and then tours 14 more cities. Tickets for The Soundman cost £14.50, or £10.99 for students and over-60s. Both screenings are booked through ukjewishfilm.org, which passes you on to Picturehouse.