Layla, a teenager in a Bedouin village in South Israel has a cell phone, drives a car, and has a secret boyfriend at the college she is attending. She watches from a distance as her mother accepts her father’s second wife into their family, prompting questions about her own future. This stunning first feature by Israeli director Elite Zexer sympathetically captures the struggle between tradition and modernity in the beautifully stark Negev desert landscape. - Lexi Leban Winner, World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival 2016

Are your kids scrolling through life, missing out on a childhood filled with imagination and outdoor adventure? Are you multitasking on your device, half listening to your child talk about his or her day? You are not alone. In Screenagers, filmmaker Delaney Ruston examines the impact of digital devices on our lives and the fraught household negotiations taking place around them. Screenagers will be followed by bagels and a post-film discussion. —Lexi Leban

In a comprehensive and compelling retelling, award-winning Israeli filmmaker, Shimon Dotan (Smile of the Lamb, SJFFF 1986) traces with remarkable access the history of Israeli settlements in the West Bank since Israel’s decisive victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Using archival footage of the religious zealots and interviews with a diverse range of modern-day settlers, Dotan weaves together the story that entangles the destinies of Israel and the Palestinian people. —Janis Plotkin Screened at Sundance Film Festival 2016

Shtisel is a family melodrama that looks like Modern Family put on a kippah and went to Jerusalem. This melodrama returns to SFJFF for its second season. The critical and commercial success combines Haredi traditions and popular television tropes. Season 2 again follows the Shtisel clan as they navigate adolescence, engagement, sibling ties and death. Whether for romantic, religious or family reasons, Shtisel appeals to fans of love across all ages. —Maya Lekach

Ukraine, 1905. Ten-year-old Shimek tells his darling Buzya fairy tales of the faraway, imprisoned Tsarevna, as their dreams of inhabiting a larger world beyond the shtetl blend with the first stirrings of young love. An inspired adaptation of the iconic stories from Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (which also served as the source material for Fiddler on the Roof), a sense of wonder vibrates through the artfully composed Tarkovsky-like images of Hasidic village life. —Tien-Tien L. Jong

Anny, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, loves dressing up for the Jewish holiday Purim. She is the champion of her Israeli retirement home’s costume contest since she moved in three years ago. Anny survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and lost her parents in Auschwitz. This year, she decides to dress up as a chicken.

Just as its iconic pink box has graced Passover seder tables for generations of American Jews, so, too, Streit’s matzo factory has stood for some 80 years on the Lower East Side. For many Jews, a family business has been a way to make a living and a way to ensure that the next generation could do better. This is all challenged by the need for modernity, the pressures of foreign competition and enticing real estate offers. —Sara L. Rubin