Our History

The Wilmington Jewish Film Festival entered the Port City’s cultural scene in October 2013 with an entertaining film celebrating Jewish songwriters’ contributions to Broadway musicals. It featured a catered dinner with the filmmaker as the guest of honor. With the success of that film event, the first annual festival was presented in April 2014 and is still going strong.

The film screenings have attracted a wide variety of attendees, and the festival has become an important part of both Wilmington’s Jewish community and the community-at-large. Screenings include domestic and internationally acclaimed films about Jewish themes and issues, both historical and contemporary. The selections represent the best of Jewish film creativity in the US, Israel, France, and other nations. A summer film series was added in 2016 to screen excellent films to increase the number of quality films to our audience. Periodically we offer pop-up film events where we screen an important film along with bringing in the filmmaker.

The Festival, held in the spring, is hosted in historic Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts, in downtown Wilmington. Our Summer Series is hosted at The Pointe Cinemas. A signature feature of our festival is a reception that follows each of our films giving the audience an opportunity to discuss the film with fellow filmgoers and to build community.

Our Mission

The Wilmington Jewish Film Festival has as its primary mission the presentation of films with Jewish content to advance and share common interests within the Jewish community and at the same time to share our heritage with the general public. The festival seeks to offer quality entertainment that will create an ongoing vehicle for the Wilmington Jewish Community to strengthen its cultural foundation, promote diversity through higher visibility in the area and grow Wilmington’s reputation as a culturally vibrant Jewish community.