The Solidarity Human Rights Film Festival will return to the Tel Aviv Cinematheque from December 4 to 13 for its 13th edition, offering 10 days of screenings, discussions, and special events that look at social and political struggles in Israel and around the world.
The festival, run by founder and director Danny Wilensky and artistic director Gidi Avivi, has become a fixture on the cultural calendar for viewers who seek films that raise difficult questions about democracy, freedom of expression, inequality, and justice.
This year’s program includes 25 Israeli premieres of international dramas and documentaries, many of them award winners from major festivals.
It will also present new Israeli films and tributes to influential filmmakers whose work dealt with human rights.
Films and conference
The opening film will be Kontinental ’25, by Romanian director Radu Jude, which won the Best Screenplay award at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. The drama follows an eviction officer who faces a moral crisis after being ordered to remove a homeless man from a basement slated to become a luxury hotel.
Alongside dozens of screenings, the festival will host, for the first time, the Solidarity Conference on Cinema and Human Rights on December 11. The conference will focus on the role of filmmakers, journalists, and cultural figures during wartime, particularly now, after two years of conflict and in the shadow of October 7.
Participants will include former Supreme Court justice Hanan Melcer, former deputy attorney-general Dina Zilber, MK Ayman Odeh, former Meretz leader Zehava Galon, journalists Yaron London, Nir Hasson, and Rina Mazliah, filmmakers Uri Barbash, Zohar Wagner, and Tom Shoval, and many others.
Wilensky and Avivi say holding the festival now feels especially urgent, and they describe the festival as a way to keep public attention on issues such as equality, peace, and social justice through powerful films from Israel and abroad.
International participants
The international narrative competition will feature prize-winning films that include The Fourth Wall by David Oelhoffen, about a director trying to mount a Greek tragedy in Beirut in 1982; The Message by Iván Fund, the story of a nine-year-old Argentine girl who can supposedly communicate with animals; and Vena by Chiara Fleischhacker, a German drama about a young mother fighting addiction.
The Panorama section will present three international films and three Israeli premieres. The foreign titles include documentaries about asylum seekers in Austria, intergenerational memory in Switzerland, and teenage girls in a Dutch boarding school.
Israeli films
The Israeli films examine social tensions close to home and include They Came to Take Me by Yaniv Berman, which looks at the detention of three women who placed flyers for the hostages in a synagogue, and Leviathan (Whale) by Elia Schwartz, which follows a girl and her father as they join environmental activists protesting offshore gas rigs.
Outside the competitions, the festival will present a wide selection of international films, including Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity by Larry Weinstein about the symphony’s global impact and Blame by Christian Frei, a documentary about scientists caught up in COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
A special tribute will mark 20 years of the protests in Bil’in with screenings of Bilin, My Love and the feature film The Sea by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, as well as the Oscar-nominated 5 Broken Cameras by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi.
For more information, go to the festival website at https://www.solidaritytlveng.org/