The selected films offer a broad cinematic perspective on a century of European creativity, spanning historical rupture, a sober gaze at reality, and a search for new horizons of hope. Like the works in the exhibitions, these films do not offer direct testimony; rather, they open spaces in which new ways of understanding the human condition, society, and possible futures can take shape. From the modern city as a site of social and aesthetic experimentation, through Germany between and after the World Wars, to works shaped by extreme experiences of displacement and survival, the films engage with questions of identity and memory.

Some of the films employ a piercing realism, while others draw on music, montage, formal experimentation, or altered states of consciousness to convey complex experiences. At times, they observe reality with a cool precision; at others, they turn to poetic language and timeless imagery.

This program invites viewers to approach the films not as isolated works, but as a sequence of artistic responses to a world that repeatedly slips from the stable frameworks of certainty. It is a cinema that moves between documentation and vision, lucidity and hallucination, and, above all, between history as it unfolded and the ways it continues to resonate in human consciousness.

The screenings will be accompanied by introductions from the Museum’s curators and guest lecturers (in Hebrew). Some screenings will take place in the galleries.

In light of recent security events and their impact on the Museum’s activities, the exhibition The Day is Gone: 100 Years of the New Objectivity is not currently on view in the galleries. Nevertheless, its spirit continues to resonate throughout the film program. The films included in the program continue, each in its own way, to engage with this legacy. We invite you to visit the Museum’s website to learn more about the exhibition and to view selected works that were presented in it.

Director: Ralf Kirsten
With: Jutta Wachowiak, Fred Düren, Matthias Freihof | DDR (German Democratic Republic), 1986 | 93 min. | German; Hebrew subtitles

A hybrid film combining documentary and fiction, unfolding across both past and present. It traces the life of the artist Käthe Kollwitz from 1914 to 1945, interwoven with the research process of actress Jutta Wachowiak as she prepares to portray her.

By the age of 47, at the outbreak of World War I, Kollwitz was already a widely recognized and respected artist. The death of her younger son Peter—who volunteered for military service and was killed just two weeks later—became the deepest rupture in her life, transforming her into a pacifist and later an opponent of the Nazi regime. From that point on, themes such as “mother and child,” “war and peace,” and “life and death” became central to her work, inseparable from her personal experience.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Goethe-Institut.

Director: Larry Weinstein
With: Lou Reed, Nick Cave, P.J. Harvey, Elvis Costello, William S. Burroughs | Canada, Germany, Portugal, 1995 | 91 min. | English and German; Hebrew subtitles

September Songs, a musical film dedicated to the work of the renowned German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill, is an exceptional documentary both thematically and stylistically. Filmed in an abandoned industrial hangar designed in the spirit of Weill’s theatrical world, it blends cinema, cabaret, and concert performance into a total aesthetic experience. An ensemble of artists—including Lou Reed, Nick Cave, P.J. Harvey, Elvis Costello, and William S. Burroughs, alongside independent theater groups, soul musicians, and other performers—offer personal interpretations of Weill’s well-known and lesser-known songs, transforming his melodies and sharp social critique into a contemporary reflection on art, exile, and the human condition.

This special screening marks 21 years since the film’s release and presents the international premiere of a newly restored 4K version.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Embassy of Germany in Israel.

Director: Mascha Schilinski
With: Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Lea Drinda | Germany, 2025 | 149 min. | German; Hebrew and English subtitles

In Mascha Schilinski’s intimate and unsettling film, the coming-of-age of four girls across different periods on a farm in northern Germany becomes a mesmerizing cinematic poem. The film captivated the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Jury Prize.

Spanning from the early 20th century to the present, the lives of Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka unfold against shifting historical tides—from the horrors of World War II to the abundance of the modern era. The film’s lyrical, visually striking cinematic language both connects and separates eras shaped by desire, fear, love, and surrender.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Embassy of Germany in Israel.

Director: Roberto Rossellini
With: Edmund Moeschke, Ernst Pittschau, Ingetraud Hinze | Italy, 1948 | 78 min. | German; Hebrew subtitles

The third part of Rossellini’s neorealist war trilogy (preceded by Rome, Open City and Paisà) is its most radical and distressing chapter. It presents a portrait of war-ravaged Berlin seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Edmund lives among the ruins with his sick father and older brother and sister, wandering unsupervised through the devastated city. As the family’s sole provider, he is drawn into black-market dealings and falls under the sinister influence of a former teacher—a pedophile sympathetic to the Nazi ideology.

Germany, Year Zero is a piercing and heartbreaking examination of the consequences of fascism, both on society and on the individual.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Italian Cultural Institute of Tel Aviv.

Director: François Ozon
With: Pierre Niney, Paula Beer | France, Germany, 2016 | 113 min. | French, German; Hebrew and English subtitles

In a small German town, Anna mourns her fiancé Frantz, who was killed in France during World War I. She meets Adrien, a young Frenchman who arrives to lay flowers on his grave. His presence—so soon after Germany’s defeat—awakens complex and unexpected emotions. The film offers a compelling reflection on personal and political issues, raising the question of whether illusion or fiction may, at times, be preferable to painful truth.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim, it earned Paula Beer the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actress, as well as a César Award for cinematographer Pascal Marti.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Embassy of Germany in Israel.

Cabaret, 1972
Friday, 12/6/26, 19:00

For more information and tickets >

Director: Bob Fosse
With: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey | United States, 1972 | 124 min. | English, German, French; Hebrew subtitles

A musical drama set in 1931 Berlin, against the backdrop of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialists. Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), an American cabaret singer at the decadent Kit Kat Club, becomes romantically involved with British student Brian Roberts (Michael York). Their relationship grows increasingly complicated with the arrival of the wealthy playboy Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem), while outside the club the Nazi Party gains strength and reality begins to fracture. Director Bob Fosse masterfully weaves social, sexual, and political tensions into the framework of the musical—a genre previously associated primarily with lighter themes.

The film won eight Academy Awards (1973) and is regarded as a groundbreaking work and a landmark in cinema history.

Director: René Laloux
Design: Roland Topor | Animation: Jiří Trnka Studio | France, Czechoslovakia, 1972 | 72 min. | French; Hebrew subtitles

René Laloux’s psychedelic masterpiece was produced in the wake of the violent upheavals that shaped Europe in the second half of the 20th century. The story unfolds on the distant planet Ygam, where humans—known as Oms—are enslaved and regarded as animals by the planet’s giant blue inhabitants, the Draags. Terr, an Om boy raised in captivity from infancy, escapes his Draag caretaker and joins a group of rebellious Oms struggling against oppression and violence in a bid to reclaim their freedom and future. Set in a fantastical future world, the film ultimately conveys a message of hope, peace, and fraternity. It was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.

Director: G. W. Pabst
Cast: Rudolf Forster, Lotte Lenya, Carola Neher | Germany, 1931 | 111 min. | German; Hebrew subtitles

The Threepenny Opera is a satirical theatrical work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill that critiques the moral corruption of the Weimar Republic. The 1931 film adaptation, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, extends this critique through the visual language of cinema. Set in the impoverished underworld of Victorian London, the story follows the antihero Macheath (“Mack the Knife”) as he pursues Polly Peachum while eluding both the law and the criminals that surround him. The film’s oppressive atmosphere of corruption and unease, combined with Weill’s distinctive score, secures its place as a landmark of early sound film.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Goethe-Institut.

Please Note: due to the nature of the screening taking place in the gallery space, the film will be viewed in alternative seating arrangements on cushions, bean bags, and mats.

La Jetée
Director: Chris Marker
With: Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux | France, 1962 | 29 min. | French; Hebrew subtitles

Chris Marker’s only fiction film is one of the most influential and radical works in the history of science fiction. This love story, set in a post-apocalyptic future—exploring time travel and memory—is told almost entirely through still images, with the exception of one brief, pivotal moment.

After the destruction of civilization in World War III, a member of an underground community of survivors is sent by scientists into the past and the future in search of a key to humanity’s salvation. A recurring image of a jetty, first appearing as a childhood memory, gradually emerges as a site where past, present, and future converge in trauma and remembrance. This is a film about how personal memory becomes a force of history, and the emotional cost it exacts. It is a lyrical work that represents the weight and pain of modern history through the language and power of images.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of the Embassy of France in Israel.

Je t’aime, Je t’aime
Director: Alain Resnais
With: Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac | France, 1968 | 91 min. | French; Hebrew subtitles

A suicidal man is recruited by a team of scientists for a time-travel experiment previously tested only on mice. A malfunction traps him in his past, forcing him to relive fragmented moments of memory. From these disjointed images, a story gradually emerges about his lover, whose death may or may not have been caused by him. The past becomes an inescapable space in which love and catastrophe are inseparably intertwined.

In Resnais’s only science fiction film, time travel is non-linear, breaking into shards that challenge the possibility of stable memory or a single truth. He continues his poetic exploration of fate, memory, and time, delving into the human impulse to cling to the past even as it dissolves

The pioneering animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) — a mesmerizing silent film created using shadow-puppetry techniques — will be screened on a continuous loop in an open gallery space. Visitors are invited to wander in, pause and encounter the film at different moments throughout the screening.

Alongside the screening, an open creative space will offer hands-on activities inspired by the film and its characters, including the creation of shadow puppets using paper cutouts. Participants will be invited to animate their creations and present a personal shadow-puppetry performance in a dedicated area within the gallery.

The screening is made possible through the generous support of Goethe-Institut Israel.