Ondi Timoner’s ‘All God’s Children’ Among Six Projects To Earn Completion Grants From Jewish Film Institute
EXCLUSIVE: The Jewish Film Institute has announced six projects that will receive a total of $80,000 in JFI Completion Grants, including the latest film from Oscar-shortlisted director and two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Ondi Timoner.
Timoner’s All God’s Children tells the story of a rabbi and a protestant minister in New York who unite their congregations to “combat the rising tension in their Brooklyn communities.” The rabbi, Rachel Timoner, is Ondi Timoner’s sister.
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The nonprofit JFI, which “champions bold films and filmmakers that expand and evolve the Jewish story for audiences everywhere,” has distributed more $400,000 in grants to filmmakers since 2020. Along with Timoner’s project, newly announced recipients include Amber Fares’ Coexistence, My Ass!, a documentary that follows Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi “as she struggles to create a one-woman comedy show called Coexistence, My Ass! about racism, sexism, war, peace and… her ass.” See below for the full list of 2024 grantees.
“We are proud of this strong new slate which features intimate human stories of Israelis and Palestinians, African Americans, Jewish Americans, and religious and secular communities working towards co-existence and understanding against the backdrop of an extremely polarized world,” JFI’s Executive Director Lexi Leban and Marcia Jarmel, JFI’s Director of Filmmaker Services, said in a joint statement. “We believe this slate of films has the powerful ability to deepen empathy and understanding, articulate complexities, and open hearts and minds. At a challenging time for the distribution of independent Jewish films, JFI remains committed to providing a continuum of support throughout a film’s life-cycle.”
Among past projects that earned JFI completion grants are A Crime on the Bayou, directed by Nancy Buirski; My Name Is Andrea, directed by Pratibha Parmar; A Photographic Memory, by director Elizabeth Rachel Seed, and Sabbath Queen, directed by Sandi DuBowski.
Sabbath Queen served as the closing night film on Sunday at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a program of the Jewish Film Institute.
“The JFI Completion Grant for Sabbath Queen came at a critical time during our rough cut when we needed to support our extensive editing team to take the film to completion. This was a 21-year work with an enormous amount of material – 1,800 hours plus 1,100 hours of archival! – so I was grateful for as much resource as possible,” said DuBowski. “JFI is at the forefront of rebuilding the philanthropy necessary for the field of us storytellers to translate the Jewish experience to the world during these challenging and sensitive times. JFI is making it possible for our diverse voices and stories—in all their complexity, joy, pain, and critique—to be urgently heard. And JFI being both funder and presenter is crucial as works need to get made and seen. I had a Bay Area Premiere of my first feature Trembling Before G-d in 2001 at SFJFF and now, 23 years later, I’m returning to the Festival with Sabbath Queen as Closing Night.”
The winning projects for 2024 were selected from among 12 finalists, narrowed from a pool of 92 applicants. The 2024 jury included Lisa Fruchtman, Academy Award-winning editor and documentarian; Meredith Lavitt, founder of Swirl Production and veteran executive of the Sundance Institute, and Su Kim, an Emmy- and two-time Peabody Award-winning producer.
“As jurors, we are honored and aware of our privileged position,” Fruchtman, Lavitt, and Kim noted. “As we journeyed through these films, we found beautiful visions, opening windows into the heart of our universal shared humanity. Stories that connect us to the lives of others vividly with intimacy and respect. We considered many questions about nuanced and surprising Jewish identities, histories, and culture. We were impressed by the quality and innovation of all these superbly crafted films.”
The 2024 JFI Completion Grants are made possible through support of the Albert & Judith Goldberg Foundation, Sandee Blechman and Steven Goldberg, Michelle Marcus, the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Nancy P. & Richard K. Robbins Family Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, and Sheri Cohen and Charles Green.
These are the 2024 JFI Completion Grant winners:
All God’s Children
Ondi Timoner, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by David Turner
Winner, Harvey Goldberg Memorial Award for a film that impacts our understanding of Jewish history, life, and culture.
To combat the rising tension in their Brooklyn communities, a Rabbi and a Reverend team up to unite their congregations. As their faith is shaken, both congregations struggle to not let their differences drive them apart.
Ondi Timoner is a critically-acclaimed American filmmaker and a two-time recipient of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival – for her documentaries DIG! (2004) and We Live in Public (2009). In 2022, Ondi was Shortlisted for the Oscar, Nominated for the Emmy for Exceptional Merit and the WGA Award for Best Documentary, and awarded the lifetime achievements for Excellence in Observational Filmmaking from DocNYC and The Humanitas Award for her film Last Flight Home (2023).
Bulletproof Stockings
Nicole Teeny, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Nicole Teeny
Perl and Dalia make waves creating “Bulletproof Stockings,” the first all-female Hasidic rock band. They challenge gender normsin their Hasidic community as their global attention increases but their diverging visions and ideologies threaten the band’s unity and future.
Nicole Teeny is a queer Slamdance award-winning filmmaker. Her debut feature documentary, Bible Quiz, was theatrically released and played on Netflix, Sundance Channel, 50+ festivals, and at US Embassies/Consulates. Nicole’s narrative short Period, from theIn Bloom anthology on Paramount+, led to her invitation to speak at the United Nations. Her upcoming podcast series is forthcoming on ESPN 30 for 30. Nicole’s work has been showcased at hundreds of museums, festivals, and galleries worldwide including the Venice International Film Festival, OutFest, and Berlin Film Festival, and supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, LEF Moving Image, Berlin Film Festival’s Berlinale talents, PGA Create Lab, Breaking Through the Lens, If/Then, InsideOut, and the United States Department’s Education & Cultural Affairs.
Coexistence, My Ass!
Amber Fares, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Amber Fares, Rachel Leah Jones
Winner, Envision Award for the film’s singular ability to envision a world free of prejudice and hate.
Coexistence, My Ass! follows Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi as she struggles to create a one-woman comedy show called “Coexistence, My Ass!” about racism, sexism, war, peace and… her ass. With hatred and violence in Israel/Palestine turbo-charged like never before, “co-existence” already a problematic term now sounds like a bad joke — so where does she go from here?
Amber Fares is an award-winning documentary filmmaker best known for her directing debut Speed Sisters (HotDocs, 2015), which aired internationally on Netflix, Al Jazeera, and RAI. Her subsequent credits include We Are Ayenda (WhatsApp/Amazon,) which won the Best Director at the Sundance Brand Storytelling conference. She also directed an episode of Gutsy (AppleTV, 2022), Reckoning with Laughter (AJ Witness), and was a co-director on Convergence: Courage Under Crisis (Netflix). She was a Supervising Producer on an episode of America Inside Out with Katie Couric (National Geographic), and a Co-Producer and Cinematographer on the Peabody-winning The Judge (PBS). Fares was a Sundance Momentum Fellow and Sundance Editing and Story Lab Fellow, and is based in New York.
Monk in Pieces
Billy Shebar, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Billy Shebar, Susan Margolin
Winner, Albert & Judith Goldberg Award for a film that celebrates Jewish arts and culture.
Meredith Monk—Jewish-American composer, performer, and director—is one of the unsung creative geniuses of our time. Featuring interviews with Bj?rk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces illuminates Monk’s wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery.
Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker known for Dark Matter (2007) starring Meryl Streep and Liu Ye, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance; and High Noon on the Waterfront (2022), featuring John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival and was broadcast on Turner Classic Movies and HBO. TV credits include the acclaimed docuseries DarkNet (Showtime, 2016); Doctor’s Orders (Discovery+, 2021); and the Webby-winning Trump Bites (The New York Times, 2018-21).
Oxygen
Netalie Braun, Israel, Narrative Feature
Produced by Adi Bar Yossef, Aviv Ben Shlush
With the outbreak of a new war in Israel, a soldier is about to enter Lebanon. His mother refuses to wait for bad news and decides to take matters into her own hands.
Netalie Braun is a poet and an acclaimed film director. Her last film received Israel’s Academy Award for Best Documentary. She was the Artistic Director of Israel’s Women Film Festival. Currently, Braun is a senior lecturer and the Head of the MFA program at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel-Aviv University.
Wednesdays in Mississippi
Marlene McCurtis, United States, Documentary Feature
Produced by Marlene McCurtis, Joy Silverman
Discretionary Grantee
Wednesdays in Mississippi is the little-known story of the first-ever all-women national civil rights program. The film traces the efforts of multifaith Northern Black and White women activists who flew into deadly Mississippi during the Freedom Summer in 1964, clandestinely supporting integration efforts and local Black women’s leadership to seed community economic and educational empowerment.
Marlene McCurtis is a current Lavine/Better Angels Fellow and Firelight Media Documentary Lab and Sundance Sustainability Humanities fellow alum whose short Here I’ll Stay was co-produced by Firelight Media and Field of Vision and premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival. She has produced and directed Emmy-nominated series for A&E, PBS, and NatGeo. Currently, she is in post-production on Wednesdays in Mississippi, her first independent, self-directed feature documentary, selected for the Cucalorus Film Festival Work-in-Progress Lab, the Athena Film Festival Work-in-Progress Lab, and the Oxford Film Festival Film Female Directors Retreat. Her latest short, The Circle, a collage of spoken word and movement, written and performed by system-impacted artists, has screened at the Social Justice Film Festival, the Global Peace Festival, the Monologue and Poetry International Film Festival, and the Justice on Trial Film Festival.
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