The Haifa International Film Festival is celebrating its 40th edition, running from 31 December 2024 to 11 January 2025. Featuring the year’s most acclaimed films, both international and from Israel, the festival will also showcase an array of new titles and include a special day of festive opening events.
As the festival will open during the week of Chanukah, the opening will see the lighting of Chanukah candles, followed by several special screenings, including a singalong version of the popular musical Wicked, plus A Better Man – a docudrama about Robbie Williams – and, later in the evening, Tim Burton’s wonderful film The Nightmare Before Christmas, where the audience is encouraged to come along in costume, which will be followed by an alternative rock music party.
The opening night will also feature a screening of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, which introduced the world to Chevy Chase and John Belushi. The new docudrama Saturday Night, about the early days of the series, will also be shown.
This year’s guest of honour is Michel Hazanavicius, Oscar-winning director of The Artist, whose latest film, the animated The Most Precious of Cargoes, will be shown at the festival. The movie, which was in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival, is set during the Holocaust and tells the story of a rural couple who adopt a Jewish foundling.
The official opening film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, by Iranian dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, is a psychological thriller about how a Tehran judge begins to suspect his wife and daughters are involved in the protest movement.
The closing night film will be Nir Bergman’s Pink Lady, which won the Best Director award at the recent Tallinn Black Nights Festival.
Other highlights include Jesse Eisenberg’s latest movie, A Real Pain, which tells the story of two cousins visiting Warsaw to honour the memory of their late grandmother, who was born there; September 5, a drama by Tim Fehlbaum that tells the fact-based story of how an American sports broadcasting team ended up covering the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics; The Brutalist, by Brady Corbet, which stars Adrien Brody as a pioneering Hungarian architect; Israeli director Savi Gabizon’s English remake of his film Longing, which stars Richard Gere as a man who learns late in life that he had a son; Edward Berger’s The Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, about the selection of a new pope; and Eran Riklis’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, about a group of women who gather in that city to read literature forbidden by the regime.
The vibrancy and colour of the incredible Haifa International Film Festival spills over into events and happenings that take place in and around the festival site, including outdoor events and fairs in the adjacent gardens.
