Honoring Excellence: AJFF’s 2026 Jury Award Winners

As the 26th Annual Atlanta Jewish Film Festival (AJFF) comes to a close, we take time to honor the filmmakers, storytellers, and visionaries who have left an indelible mark on this year’s festival. The AJFF Jury Awards celebrate the films that challenge perspectives, spark dialogue, and offer a profound exploration of the human experience. Each year, an esteemed panel of filmmakers, critics, industry experts, and students deliberate on the festival’s most compelling films, awarding prizes across six distinct categories: Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best Short Film, Emerging Filmmaker Award, Building Bridges Award, and Human Rights Award. 

These awards reflect AJFF’s core mission—to inspire, educate, and foster understanding through the power of film. This year’s winners are testaments to the resilience, artistry, and storytelling that define cinema at its most impactful.

Best Narrative Feature: Once Upon My Mother

A sweeping laughter-through-tears family saga spanning 1960s Paris to the present, Once Upon My Mother captures the fierce love and relentless determination of a Moroccan-Jewish immigrant mother fighting for her son’s future.

Jury Statement: Writer-director Ken Scott's Once Upon My Mother is a profoundly human film filled with universal truth. Portraying a mother's love for her struggling son, it immerses the viewer through its cinematic power. Rooted in family, identity, and personal transformation this film celebrates human connection and healing in a way that reaches everyone's hearts.

Best Documentary Feature: Proud Jewish Boy

Director Isri Halpern’s methodically researched documentary revisits the little-known story of 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, whose 1938 shooting of a Nazi diplomat became the pretext for Kristallnacht.

Jury Statement: Throughout the film, the filmmakers’ artistic choice to incorporate compelling illustration, audio, and limited reenactment brought to life a teenage refugee from 1938 of whom there was no video footage and very few photographs. Rigorous research and tenacious investigation unearthed a case of insidious propaganda, its efficacy, and the consequences for its target, Herschel. The filmmakers allow the audience to empathize with his plight and admire his determination to highlight Nazi tactics, lessons that resonate today. The filmmakers took a complicated subject that touches on multiple dimensions of diversity and made a broadly accessible film that leaves the audience wanting to know more.

Best Short Film: Butterfly

Nominated for the 2026 Academy Award for Animated Short Film, Florence Miailhe’s Butterfly follows the life of a French Jewish Olympian.

Jury Statement: A unique rendering of a Holocaust survivor story that uses a distinct style of animation to beautifully convey the motion of swimming through the eddies and tides of a turbulent life. Through Florence Miailhe’s striking short, we are drawn into the struggles and perseverance of Algerian-born Jew Alfred Nakache. It is a reminder of what hatred deprives, not only individuals, but the world at large.

Emerging Filmmaker Award: Shai Carmeli-Pollack for The Sea

Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, Israel’s Oscar submission and winner of multiple Israeli Academy Awards, offers a deeply human father–son odyssey that navigates borders — both physical and emotional — with tenderness and restraint.

Jury Statement: The Sea is a deeply humanistic and deceptively simple story about a challenging subject laced with subtle symbolism and handled with deft care by writer / director Shai Carmeli-Pollack. His vérité approach engrosses audiences through the eyes of a willful child and his devoted father who are brought together as human aspiration collides with political circumstance.

Building Bridges Award: Malachi

This intimate documentary follows a young Israeli boy born with Treacher Collins Syndrome as he seeks belonging and reconciliation with his origins.

Jury Statement: Malachi explores the impact of an Israeli boy’s abandonment at birth due to a rare genetic disorder. The film’s use of animation and its inclusive storytelling paints a powerful portrait of two families brought together by a devastating choice. Malachi’s story demonstrated how bridges can be built not just between communities, but within families. This documentary is a profoundly moving exploration of how we embrace individuals with disabilities.

Human Rights Award: Surviving Malka Leifer

Adam Kamien’s Surviving Malka Leifer chronicles three sisters from Melbourne, Australia, who pursued justice across continents in a 15-year legal battle.

Jury Statement: One of the core beliefs of independent film is that it allows us to start important conversations both within our communities and ourselves. The Human Rights Award is given to the film that best captures the perseverance and strength of those whose sense of justice guides them in the face of bigotry, inequality, and persecution. No film better exemplifies this than Surviving Malka Leifer, directed by Adam Kamien. The heroines of this film showed strength and commitment to themselves and each other in the face of gender-based violence, a community that abandoned them, and a justice system that betrayed them. A timely reminder of the importance to give voice to survivors, everywhere.