The 41st Haifa International Film Festival, to be held October 5-14, has announced its international program, which features much-awaited films by master filmmakers such as László Nemes, Rob Reiner, Gianfranco Rosi, Ildikó Enyedi, Kirill Serebrennikov, Park Chan-wook, and Richard Linklater, as well as some well-reviewed movies by newcomers.
The festival will present the Israeli premiere of The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, Barry Avrich’s documentary about Noam Tibon’s harrowing journey to rescue his family on October 7. The film stirred controversy when it was invited and then disinvited from the Toronto International Film Festival – Avrich was told he needed permission from Hamas to use the video clips they filmed and broadcast – and ended up being shown and winning an Audience Award.
Reiner’s cult classic This Is Spinal Tap returns for a celebratory double feature alongside the brand-new sequel Spinal Tap II, reuniting England’s loudest band for one last concert.
Composer Eran Baron Cohen, whose credits include scores for his brother Sacha Baron Cohen’s films, arrives from the UK to lead a masterclass on scoring for the screen.
A musical treat will be Disney’s The Lion King with Hans Zimmer’s Oscar-winning score played live by Yaron Gottfried while the film is shown on the big screen. Anime devotees will enjoy the first Israeli theatrical presentation of Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, Hayao Miyazaki’s debut feature.
The festival will open with Nemes’s Orphan, inspired by his father’s childhood memories, a coming-of-age portrait of a boy after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which is Hungary’s Oscar submission. Nemes made Son of Saul, the 2016 film that was developed in the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab in Jerusalem and which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Festival's Israeli and international program
The festival previously announced its Israeli program, which will feature new films by some of Israel’s most acclaimed directors, including Eran Kolirin, Dani Rosenberg, Shady Srour, and Marco Carmel.
Gala movies this year include Linklater’s Blue Moon, which stars Ethan Hawke in a drama about Lorenz Hart when he was writing Oklahoma! Emmanuel Finkiel presents Mariana’s Room, adapted from Aharon Appelfeld’s Flowers of Darkness, about an 11-year-old hiding in the wardrobe of a prostitute during World War II. The Count of Monte Cristo is a lavish new adaptation of the classic tale that has been a box-office hit around the world.
The festival’s main international competition, Carmel, will include A Pale View of Hills, directed by Kai Ishikawa and based on the bestselling novel by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. The film, which premiered at Cannes 2025, traces decades of a mother-daughter relationship in Japan and England.
Living the Land by Hou Meng, which won the Silver Bear for Best Director in the Berlin International Film Festival, will be shown, as will Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams, the final installment in his Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy, which will be shown alongside Sex and Love.
Enyedi’s Silent Friend, which stars Tony Leung and Léa Seydoux, tells its story from the point of view of a tree. Chan-wook’s darkly satirical No Other Choice, which is an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s The Axe, won TIFF’s Audience Award for Feature Films. Serebrennikov’s The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is a docudrama about the notoriously sadistic Nazi doctor, starring August Diehl. Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child is a tough critique of Iran’s patriarchy, which received a huge ovation at Cannes.
Another competition, The Golden Anchor, features movies from around the world that won acclaim at film festivals.
A new program, Off the Beaten Path: Cinema That Does Things a Little Differently, showcases original voices. The films in this section include Rosi’s Below the Clouds, a documentary shot over three years at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, which won Venice’s Special Jury Prize.
Documentaries and classics
The Haifa Docs section features Christoph Weinert’s Jewish Voices: Resurrected Songs, which uncovers a lost musical chapter from pre-war Germany. Between 1933 and 1938, two small labels defied boycotts to record Yiddish folk, klezmer and cabaret and the film revisits the vanished artists and the treasure of sound that outlived them.
Katherina Otto-Bernstein’s The Last Spy, which will be screened in the presence of the director, traces the extraordinary 102-year life of CIA master operative Peter Sichel, from a Jewish childhood in Nazi Germany to the murky currents of the Cold War.
The late Claude Lanzmann’s A Visitor from the Living, drawn from an interview shot during the making of Shoah, confronts Red Cross official Maurice Rossel’s chilling report on Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, which has been shown at festivals around the world, mines Lanzmann’s archives to create a portrait of the director as he made Shoah.
The festival’s Classics program includes René Clément’s Joy House, with Alain Delon opposite Jane Fonda, a rediscovered noir gem. There will also be a tribute to the films of Bertrand Blier.
There will be a Midnight Movies section and animated films.
The final day of the 2023 program was on October 7 and had to be canceled, and a new international program called Back to Life looks at movies about grief. It features Cole Wibley’s Sundance debut, Omaha, starring John Magaro as a father terrified of parenting alone.
Yaron Shamir is the artistic director of the festival. The event is supported by the Israel Film Council, the Culture and Sport Ministry, the Tourism Ministry, the Ministry for Regional Cooperation, and the Municipality of Haifa; it is being produced by ETHOS – Haifa Arts, Culture and Sports Company.
The full lineup will be published shortly at haifaff.co.il