Every spring, for a few weeks, two suburban cinemas in Melbourne turn into the busiest Jewish cinema in the country. The Classic in Elsternwick and the Lido in Hawthorn become the home of the Jewish International Film Festival, and the queues on Gordon Street and Glenferrie Road are full of people who have come to see films that rarely reach an Australian screen any other way: an Israeli drama fresh from the Ophir Awards, a French courtroom film from Cannes, a documentary about a Melbourne football club, a Mel Brooks comedy on a big screen with a full house laughing in the dark.

The 2026 festival opened on 18 October and runs until 25 November in Melbourne, which leaves three weeks to catch up. There are 52 films in the program, from 13 countries, Israel, France, the United States, Germany, Belgium and Australia among them, including a seven-film Mel Brooks retrospective for the year he turns 100. The festival directors, Lindy and Eddie Tamir, describe it as the most comprehensive selection of Jewish-themed films in the country, built on three decades of Jewish film festivals in Australia, and nothing else on the Australian calendar comes close.

The spine of this year’s program is the international festival circuit. Women on Trial, which premiered at Cannes, stars Charlotte Gainsbourg as the French lawyer Gisèle Halimi. A Man of His Time, a portrait of a Vichy official, won Best Screenplay there. Visitation is the new film from Volker Schlöndorff, whose The Tin Drum also screens. The closing night film, Paper Tiger, is James Gray’s thriller about an American Jewish family and the New York underworld, with Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson. The opening night film, Just an Illusion, from the directors of The Intouchables, is a 1985-set comedy about a boy on the edge of his bar mitzvah, which the festival bills as one of the year’s biggest hits in France.

The Israeli line-up is drawn from the Ophir Award nominees: Tell Me Everything, about a boy who discovers his father is gay during the AIDS years, took Best Film, Director and Screenplay and goes to the Academy Awards as Israel’s entry; The Sea, last year’s entry, is here too; The Wedding Entertainer, with Shuli Rand of Ushpizin, is the crowd-pleaser; and Where To? follows a Palestinian Uber driver and a young Israeli in Berlin. Noga, from Tribeca, goes inside the life of the singer Noga Erez as the ground shifts under Israeli artists abroad.

Then there is the Australian strand, which this year is the festival’s heart. Cancelled, by Danny Ben-Moshe, follows four Australian Jewish artists, the singer Deborah Conway, the sculptor Nina Sanadze, the writer Joshua Dabelstein and the circus performer Talia Sofizade, through the two years after October 2023, and arrives at the Bondi attack of December 2025. Freedom Rides follows young Jewish and Aboriginal Australians retracing the 1965 bus tour through country New South Wales. Who Are We tells the story of the Ajax Football Club. Wish You Long Life, a drama by the Melbourne-born filmmaker Gideon Heine, has an exclusive preview at the Classic on Thursday 26 November, the night after the main Melbourne program closes. In their welcome note, the directors say Jewish representation in the arts now faces unofficial boycotts, and that Jewish film festivals have a vital role in showcasing the Jewish voice.

The documentaries alone would make a festival: Hannah Arendt, Henrietta Szold, Tovah Feldshuh, Herman Mankiewicz, Herschel Grynszpan, Woody Guthrie and his Yiddish-poet mother-in-law Aliza Greenblatt, and The Choice, with the survivor Edith Eger and Iris Haim.

And the Brooks films. The Producers and The Twelve Chairs played in October. Still to come at the Classic are Blazing Saddles (7 November), Young Frankenstein (11 and 14 November), History of the World, Part I (18 and 21 November), Spaceballs (25 and 28 November) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (2 December). Eddie Tamir, the festival’s artistic director, says Brooks wears his Jewishness as a badge of honour and treats it as the lens through which he sees the world, and that his voice is still fresh and still anti-establishment. The directors open their welcome note with a Brooks line: the people who had the greatest reason to weep learned more than anyone else how to laugh. It is as good a one-line case for this festival as anyone has made.

Tamir also says why this year matters more than most. Jewish representation in the arts, he says, is facing challenges, and in that landscape a Jewish film festival has a vital role in showing Jewish voices in all their variety. Everyone, he adds, is welcome.

Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, has been going to the festival for years and will be at several sessions this month. “Melbourne is lucky, and I don’t think we say that enough,” he said. “In a year when Jewish artists have been quietly shown the door at festivals and galleries around this country, here is a festival that throws its doors wide open and says, come and see who we are. Fifty-two films, two cinemas, five weeks. You will laugh at Mel Brooks, you will sit in silence through the Israeli films, and you will walk out onto Gordon Street or Glenferrie Road a little prouder than you walked in. Don’t let it pass you by. Go.”

“Here is a festival that throws its doors wide open and says, come and see who we are.Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission

Tickets are $28, or $22 for concessions and members, and a ten-film pass is $190. Audiences vote for the festival’s audience awards, measured, in the festival’s own unit, in pickles.