A Serious Man
2025-09-10 19:30 - 21:30 (Europe/London) | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
USA 2009, 12A, 106 mins, English, Yiddish
Director Joel & Ethan Coen, featuring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind
Academy Award-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen return to their comedy roots with this original and darkly humorous story set in Minnesota about one ordinary man’s quest to become a serious man. Physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can’t believe his life – his wife is leaving him for his best friend, his unemployed brother won’t move off the couch, someone is threatening his career, his kids are a mystery and his neighbour is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family, delinquent behaviour and mortality. ‘The entire script is a mishmash: funny, droll, and anxiety producing, just like daily life in many Jewish families’ Ed Koch.
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Elena: A Hand Made Life
2025-09-17 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
Lives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Granny was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Dr Elena Zadik ran through the twentieth century without looking back. A refugee twice before she was 17, a GP in the NHS from 1948 to her retirement, Elena was an unintentionally hilarious woman, often difficult, always opinionated and deeply resourceful. Her hands were always busy and form the heart of this timely graphic story of the ordinary extraordinary resilience of women. It brings with it an unfathomable power and richness. Come to this illustrated talk to hear more about Elena’s life and Miriam’s creative journey making this book.
Art teacher and graphic novelist Miriam Gold lives and works in London, where she was born. She won a place on the Emerging Writer Programme at the London Library with Elena: A Hand Made Life, her first book, a memoir/biography of her maternal grandmother. An Observer Graphic Novel of the Month, it was also one of the Guardian‘s best of 2024, shortlisted for the Wingate Prize and longlisted for a World Illustration Award from the Association of Illustrators. She is currently working on her next book, also to be published by Jonathan Cape, a graphic novel set in Budapest in 1956 and London in 2024.
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Keeping the Faith
2025-10-08 19:30 - 21:30 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Edward Norton, Ben Stiller, Jenna Elfman, Anne Bancroft, Eli Wallach
USA 2000, 129 mins, English
Director Edward Norton, featuring Ben Stiller, Anne Bancroft, Edward Norton
In this romantic comedy, best friends since childhood, Rabbi Jacob Schram and Father Brian Finn are dynamic and popular young men living and working on New York’s Upper West side. When Anna Reilly, once their childhood friend and now grown into a beautiful and successful corporate executive, suddenly returns to the city, she re-enters both their lives and hearts with a vengeance. Sparks fly and an unusual and complicated love triangle ensues.

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It's About Time
2025-10-22 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
Why does Easter ‘move about’? And why doesn’t Christmas? Why might Muslims return from the mosque disappointed at the end of Ramadan? Why can you not find out the date of Chinese New Year 2028? Why does February only have 28 days in a normal year? Is the Jewish calendar really unreasonable? In this session, Clive will explore the variety of calendars from around the world, drawing from his past experience as editor and compiler of the seminal ‘Calendar of World Religions’ Festivals’. Proposing that calendars are one of the quickest routes to understanding a culture, Clive will look at a number of calendars in use around the world, set in context the Jewish calendar and consider whether or not it is one of the most obvious or strangest to be found on the globe.

Clive Lawton, currently CEO of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, a tribunal Chair for the NHS, scholar-in-residence at London’s JW3 Jewish cultural centre and a Presiding Justice on the Wiltshire Bench, became a leading calendrical expert through his work on world religions and their festivals back in the 1980s. With over a dozen books published and several degrees, most relevant here is a Master’s in Hinduism and Islam from the University of Liverpool. Clive is perhaps best known in the Jewish world as one of the four founders of Limmud and was responsible for its worldwide spread.
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Captain Guillon – The Cruel Price of Resistance in South West France
2025-11-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
This is the story of an ordinary human being who showed remarkable moral and physical courage in demonstrating solidarity and support for Jewish refugees who, mistakenly, thought they would be safe from Nazi persecution by fleeing to the “Free Zone” in Southern France. As Captain of the Gendarmerie in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Lucien Guillon risked his personal safety and that of his family by issuing visas, fabricating identity papers and warning Jews of pending roundups. He paid the price of dismissal, arrest and deportation to Neuenbürg and Ravensbrook concentration camps for his resistance activities. It was not until 1995 that France formally recognized its role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps. In 2012 President Hollande opened to the public the National Archives of WW2. This study has also benefited from testimonies from family, survivors, and archivists at the Neuenbürg Memorial Museum.

Hamish Macdonald taught History in Secondary Schools in and around Bristol and worked as an Education Adviser for Bristol Children and Young People’s Service. He also published several history books written for school students. Since 2010 he has lived near Villefranche-de-Rouergue in South West France where he continues to work as an historian and writer. Following his investigation of local and national archives, and other resources, he has just completed a biography of a Gendarme who was in the French Resistance during the Second World war.
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UK Jewish Film Festival - Once Upon My Mother / Beshert
2025-11-19 19:30 - 21:30 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
This UKJFF event presents two films – a main feature film, Once Upon My Mother and a short film, Beshert .
NOTE – Tickets to be booked from UKJFF box office: www.ukjewishfilm.org

Once Upon My Mother
Drama | Dir. Ken Scott | 102 mins | France, 2025 | French with English subtitles
Celebrating a mother’s love in its most profound form, and as Jewish tradition dictates, also its most passionate, Once Upon My Mother, based on Roland Perez’s bestselling autobiographical novel, is an absolute gem of a film: a big-hearted, colourful, emotional yet funny portrayal of excessive, boundless, parental love, spanning decades. France, 1963. Heartbroken to learn that Roland, her sixth child, was born with a clubfoot, Esther Perez, a Jewish immigrant from Morocco, refuses to accept her son’s disability, instead looking for alternative methods — as well as praying for a miracle — that would cure him. Esther remains utterly devoted to her son even after her prayers have been answered, and well into Roland’s adulthood. Accompanied by a nostalgia-inducing soundtrack of French pop classics — including some by Jewish icon, Sylvie Vartan (who also appears in the film) –— Once Upon My Mother, with its indomitable heroine, is a larger-than-life, not-to-be-missed, cinematic experience.

Beshert
Drama | Dir. Lewis Rose | 15 mins | UK, 2025
Written by Gary Enkin
Produced by Jason Solomons and Naomi Gryn
A poignant, tender drama about a grumpy old man in a Leeds care home and a reluctant Barmitzvah boy — and the unlikely friendship that changes their lives forever.
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UK Jewish Film Festival - Pink Lady / To Fly or Float
2025-11-26 19:30 - 21:30 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
This UKJFF event presents two films – a main feature film, Pink Lady and a short film, To Fly or Float .
NOTE – Tickets to be booked from UKJFF box office: www.ukjewishfilm.org

Pink Lady
Drama | Dir. Nir Bergman | 104 mins | Israel, Italy, 2024 | Hebrew with English subtitles
Set in Jerusalem’s strictly Orthodox community, this story centres on the marriage of a Haredi couple, Bati (Nur Fibak — Israeli Film Academy Best Actress nominee for Ahed’s Knee), and her husband, Lazer (Uri Blufarb, The Stronghold). When Bati discovers that Lazer is being blackmailed with photographs of him with another man, the couple navigates the community’s attempts to “cure” Lazer of his homosexuality with religious conversion therapy. Seen primarily from Bati’s point of view, as she attempts to save their marriage despite the ostracisation that she and her family experience, this film is utterly fascinating as we are drawn into the lives of the central characters. Pink Lady premiered in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival where it won the Best Director prize for its multiple-award-winning Israeli Director, Nir Bergman.

To Fly or Float
Drama | Dir. Charlotte Peters | 15 mins | UK, 2025 |
Written by and produced by Olivia Maiden

Birmingham, 1979. An orphaned girl and her estranged uncle try to navigate their grief, connecting through faith, and the creation of a kite.

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Yiddish Food Culture: And What About the Taste?
2025-12-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
Growing up in Lithuania and Israel before finally settling in England, where I have lived for more than 30 years, I ended up with a huge collection of recipes on scraps of paper in five different languages. Many of the dishes I cook today I learnt from my mother and mother-in-law at a time when recipes were transmitted by word of mouth. I have always been passionate about food and cooking, so in 2022 I wrote a book ‘And What About the Taste?’ to preserve and pass on this Jewish food heritage to my family. It is a domestic cookbook filled with recipes that reflect the seasons, the religious calendar, and Yiddish culture. In honouring the Jewish belief that food is a sacred focus of family life, the book is full of anecdotes about the people and places associated with the dishes. In this talk I will share many of these stories and recipes and hopefully encourage others to participate with their own memories from home.

Dr Sima Beeri was born in Lithuania, where Yiddish was her first language. As a teenager, she moved to Israel and eventually settled in London. Sima has a PhD from University College London (UCL) where she taught Yiddish culture and language. She recently retired from university but still teaches privately and at Ot Azoy, a Yiddish summer school in London. Sima has published two books and is working on her third.
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