Even more fun than a bar mitzvah!

L’chaim! This month, the Northwest Film Center and the Institute of Judaic Studies celebrate 20 years of exhibiting and advancing Jewish history and culture with the Portland Jewish Film Festival.

The festival will take place over two weeks—from April 15 through April 29—and will include 14 feature-length films that embody the diverse spectrum of the Jewish identity and community. The movies will be shown in NWFC’s Whitsell Auditorium.

“Over the last few years the festival has grown both in the number of attendees and in the number of films,” said Hal Nevis, festival chairman at the IJS. “We hope to make this growth continue.”

The IJS was founded by Rabbi Joshua Stampher and put into action in 1984 with the support of several local colleges and universities including Reed, Lewis and Clark and Portland State. Its main mission is to “encourage people throughout the community to join together to learn about Jewish history, culture and life.”

Despite that the festival will show exclusively Jewish films, Nevis believes there will be something for filmgoers of all stripes.

“I don’t think that any of these films are ‘strictly’ Jewish. Obviously, at a Jewish Film Festival one expects movies that touch on Jewish life in some form, but the frame is very large,” Nevis clarified. “The themes are all different, as is the style of filmmaking. We even have an animated film.”

NWFC was founded in 1971 and incorporated into the Portland Art Museum in 1978. With an attendance of about 80,000 at various media arts offerings per year, the film center reaches one of the most diverse audiences in the community, offers nearly 20 classes covering the fundamentals of film production and studies and hosts a number of film festivals annually.

“[Basically,] the film center provides general publicity for the event and outreach to film audiences, and the IJS works to reach Jewish community audiences, secure sponsors and arrange hospitality in connection with the screenings,” NWFC Director Bill Foster said. “Given the range of interesting Jewish films from throughout the world and the limited opportunity to see them in Portland, the center decided that this would be a great community partnership.”

As the film center’s director, Foster chose the movies to be shown and organized the screenings.

“I looked for outstanding films that, while Jewish, tell stories that resonate beyond their setting and speak to experiences and issues that confront our common humanity,” Foster said. “All the films are accessible to general audiences.”

Although he has the utmost respect for each film, Foster certainly has his favorites.

“I tend to gravitate to documentaries,” Foster explained. “There are several excellent ones this year: Nicky’s Family (2011), Five Broken Cameras (2011) and My Architect (2003) in particular. You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate their compelling stories.”

Nicky’s Family, directed by Matej Minac, details an Englishman who organized the rescue of 669 Jewish Czech and Slovak children during the outbreak of World War II.

Five Broken Cameras is composed of Emad Burnat’s peaceful archiving of an escalating environmental and political struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.

And My Architect follows the life of Louis I. Kahn, a giant among modernist 20th-century architects.

Along with inspirational documentaries, the festival will also include feature films like the 1933 film Counsellor at Law, starring John Barrymore, and the animated The Rabbi’s Cat (2011), about a feline who receives the miraculous gift of speech after swallowing his arch rival the family parrot.

Along with the enthusiasm surrounding the 20th anniversary come a few important changes.

“For the first time we are bringing filmmakers to Portland,” Nevis said. “The director of Nicky’s Family and the producer and brother of the director of The Queen Has No Crown (2011) will be in attendance at the screenings.”