Film Festival

Film has the magical power to bring people together, to inspire, to educate, to help us explore our identities, and uncover new and forgotten stories.

For 30 years JCC Sonoma County has fostered a strong appreciation of Jewish Cinema within the communities of our county. Continuing the tradition of superior cultural programs, the festival brings the newest and best of Jewish-themed films that are rarely if ever featured on our local silver screens.

Since the Fall of 2000, JCC SoCo has partnered with Rialto Cinemas to give a home for its annual Jewish Film Festival. A partnership we are proud to be a part of, and thank our friends at Rialto for their support over the years.

The Rialto theatre in Sebastopol pictured at night looking into the bright and welcoming interior.

COMING UP

ELIE WEISEL - SOUL ON FIRE

TUESDAY, JAN 27TH • 1 & 7PM

As perhaps the world’s most eloquent witness to the Holocaust, writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s legacy would seem to be firmly attached to the singular horror that he both experienced and spent his life memorializing—the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. But this poetic and powerful documentary reveals that Wiesel’s astounding moral clarity and his outspokenness against the indifference that humans can display to suffering are deeply resonant in our own time. Wiesel’s clarion call to remember the victims and to resist hate wherever it appears feels not a matter of history, but urgent today. Part chronological biography—reconstructing crucial episodes from Wiesel’s private and public life, including his rebuke of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to a cemetery where SS soldiers were buried—the film is also a moving evocation of Wiesel’s dawning consciousness of his calling, as he wrestled with both the gift and the burden of being humanity’s witness. Wiesel’s story is told largely in his own words and testimony, and is hauntingly illustrated by Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animations.

—Peter Stein, Jewish Film Institute

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2026 Film Fest

This year's film festival runs April through November, screening one film a month. Screenings take place on a Tuesday and run at 1:00 PM and 7:00 PM that day.

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