11 Audience-Wowing Films - The Donald M. Ephraim Sun & Stars International Film Festival

Among the exciting, curated selection of films from all over the world are 11 cinematic offerings directed by women:

Wednesday, January 28th, 2026 – Frontier

Thursday, January 29th, 2026 – Speak

Friday, January 30th, 2026 – Sultana’s Dream

Friday, January 30th, 2026 – Calle Malaga

Saturday, January 31st, 2026 – Steve Schapiro: Being There

Sunday, February 1st, 2026 – Jimpa

Sunday, February 1st, 2026 – Natchez

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 – The Little Sister

Wednesday, February 4th, 2026 – The Ties That Bind Us

Wednesday, February 4th, 2026 – Late Shift

Friday, February 6th, 2026 – A Man With Sole: The Impact Of Kenneth Cole

“We're proud that more than one-third of our festival films are directed or co-directed by women, reflecting the increasing power of women in the production sphere and the film marketplace,” promises Barbara Scharres, SASIFF Artistic Director.

The 11 films with women directors slated for the upcoming Sun & Stars International Film Festival Include:

A Man With Sole: The Impact Of Kenneth Cole

(Documentary / 2024, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Dori Berinstein. USA, 104-minutes)

The Closing Night Screening of The Donald M. Ephraim Sun & Stars International Film Festival©, presented by MorseLife.

Fashion Designer, Philanthropist and Footwear Purveyor Kenneth Cole knows his shoes. He also appears to know the Native American directive to walk a mile in the moccasins of others, as proven through his 40 years of attention-grabbing strategies for merging commerce and compassion to raise awareness for causes including AIDS, homelessness and LGBTQIA+ rights. From the glitter of the star-studded AIDS benefits he has mounted at the Cannes Film Festival to the humorous billboards in Times Square, Cole’s unique entrepreneurship sells a humanitarian message. Emmy-winning director Berinstein delves into Cole’s history, his passion for social justice, and the brilliantly engaging promo that makes caring as cool as buying hot designer shoes.

Note: Kenneth Cole and Director Dori Berinstein will be present for audience discussion

Glazer Hall in Palm Beach

Friday, February 6th, 2026 - Cocktail Reception 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.; premiere screening at 7:30 p.m.

Calle Malaga

(Romance, 2025, Florida Premiere. Directed by Maryam Touzani. France/Spain/Morocco, 116-minutes—In Spanish and Arabic with English subtitles)

Winner of the Audience Award at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, this colorful romantic crowd pleaser is a triumph for luminous 80-year-old Spanish star Carmen Maura, who is playing Maria, a widow enjoying life to the fullest in her home in Tangier, the vibrant city of her birth. When her unhappy divorced daughter arrives from Madrid with a plan to sell the cherished apartment and consign her mother to a nursing home, Maria’s rebellion launches on day one when the adventure of reinventing her independence begins with a speedy exit from the institution. Friendship, ingenuity and creative cookery are at the heart of a delightful plan that incidentally brings her a new love and, quite unexpectedly, hot sex.

The Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center on Friday, January 30th, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

Frontier

(Frontera)

(WWII Thriller, 2025, North Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Judith Colell. Spain/Belgium, 100-minutes—In Catalan, Spanish, French and German with English subtitles)

A small community’s psychic wounds from the Spanish Civil War are opened anew when a Pyrenees mountain village is challenged and divided over their proximity to Nazi-occupied France. Based on true events and starring Miki Esparbe and Bruna Cosi, this film is set in Spain in 1943, in a remote border hamlet where in direct defiance of Franco’s official rejection of Jewish refugees, customs agent Manuel Grau, has surreptitiously teamed up with a smuggler to aid and hide Jews crossing over the mountain trails. Effectively evoking the period and the peril with escalating tension between neighbor and neighbor and husband and wife, director Colell creates a shadowy rural milieu dangerously ruffled by the unfamiliar need to make life-or-death moral choices.

The Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center on Wednesday, January 28th, 2026 at 4:00 p.m.

Jimpa

(Family Drama, 2025, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Sophie Hyde. Australia/Netherlands/Finland, 123-minutes)

Two-time Oscar-winner Olivia Colman and Golden Globe-winner John Lithgow bring tender joy and heart-rending pathos to this remarkable drama of inter-generational adjustment when trans non-binary teen Frances decides to move to Amsterdam to live for a year with her flamboyant gay grandfather Jimpa (Lithgow) to explore her still-crystallizing sexual identity. Her indulgent mother Hannah (Colman) struggles with misgivings based on her own unresolved history with Jimpa, the dad who long ago abandoned his family when he came out as gay. Amsterdam’s liberated and very vibrant pan-sexual Queer culture is a fitting background to a story that centers on the power and imperfection of love and the need for forgiveness. According to Deadline, “Colman simply excels [and] Lithgow gets one of his best outings in recent years.”

Hooky Entertainment Delray Marketplace on Sunday, February 1st, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

Late Shift

(Heldin)

(Drama, 2025, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Petra Volpe. Switzerland, 92-minutes—In German, Turkish and French with English subtitles)

Switzerland’s Oscar contender for Best Foreign Film follows a powerful emotional trajectory over the course of one harried nurse’s night on the understaffed surgical floor of a high-tech Swiss hospital. Nurse Flora (Leonie Benesch) maintains her mental equilibrium by leaning into routine through a demanding all-night shift that brings her briefly into the lives of unsettled patients for unexpected moments of beauty and profound human connection. Benesch, award-winning star of the 2024 Oscar-nominated The Teacher’s Lounge, conveys an intuitive understanding of the loneliness and life-and-death fears of her charges as the story evolves with wonderful grace against a backdrop of large and small crises.

Hooky Entertainment Delray Marketplace on Wednesday, February 4th, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

The Little Sister

(La Petite Derniere)

(Drama, 2025, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Hafsia Herzi. France/Germany, 106-minutes—In French and Arabic with English subtitles)

Winner of the Queer Palme at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where actress Nadia Melliti was awarded Best Actress, this drama centers on emerging self-acceptance for a daughter who realizes that neither her family nor her faith will recognize her for who she is. The adored youngest of a large and lively Algerian family, Fatima hides a guilty secret—she is unable to deny or quell her growing sexual attraction to women. With one foot in a world ruled by patriarchal tradition and the other in the challenging multicultural milieu of a Parisian college student, she hooks up with a woman on a lesbian dating site and discovers that the way to love and acceptance is blocked by her own doubts and fears. The Hollywood Reporter hails the film as “vibrantly felt yet impressively controlled—and blessed with a stone-cold stunner of a central performance.”

Hooky Entertainment Delray Marketplace on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

Natchez

(Documentary, 2025, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Suzannah Herbert. USA, 86-minutes)

Billowing hoop-skirts sway, Southern drawls charm, and opulent antebellum decor draws wows—all trademarks of plantation tourism through which the canny owners of once-crumbling historic properties have revived the economy of Natchez, Mississippi. Under the folksy facade of perfect racial harmony and entrepreneurial community spirit there lurks the remnants of an unsettled history. Director Herbert conducts one of the most fascinating and revealing documentary explorations of the year, venturing into the restored mansions where portraits of Confederate ancestors hang in honor and heirloom silver graces the table, observing way behind the scenes where the thoughts often left unsaid are inadvertently revealed. Hailed by Stephen Saito in The Moveable Fest as “one of the great documentaries of the 21st century,” Natchez has won seven festival awards, including Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Hooky Entertainment Delray Marketplace on Sunday, February 1st, 2026 at 1:00 p.m.

Speak

(Documentary, 2025, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman. USA, 104-minutes)

Acclaimed as the opening night film of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Speak is a dynamic high-stakes journey through the lives, challenges and ambitions of five precocious high school students as they prepare for the world’s largest oratory competition. Florida’s own Esther Oyetunji vies for a rare third national win in this veritable Olympics of the spoken word in which past winners have included Oprah, Brad Pitt, Josh Gad, and Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson. Powerful and persuasive personal essays seem ripped from the soul as the five give reasoned unabashed voice to views on subjects including disability rights, LGBTQ+ identity, school shootings and family suicide, exhibiting a passion and maturity clearly rooted in deep emotion and personal experience.

The Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center on Thursday, January 29th, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere

(Documentary, 2025, North Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Maura Smith. USA, 90-minutes)

The Centerpiece Screening of The Donald M. Ephraim Sun & Stars International Film Festival©, presented by MorseLife.

This fascinating film documents the firsthand stories of photographer Steve Schapiro along with his vast archive of iconic images. Over six decades, he bore witness to some of the most significant social and cultural moments in modern American history and his pictures were published in The New York Times, Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and more. His notable subjects have included Andy Warhol, Mohammad Ali, James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Rosa, Parks, Ray Charles, etc., and he produced publicity stills and posters for mega-hit films like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, Chinatown, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Note: Director Maura Smith will be present for audience discussion.

The Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center on Saturday, January 31st, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

Sultana’s Dream

(Animation, 2023, Florida Premiere. Directed by Isabel Herguera. Spain/Germany, 70-minutes)

The colors and cultures of India are entrancingly on display in this animated neo-folk fable that fantasizes Ladyland, a safe place for women where gender roles are reversed, men are segregated and women are equal and free to order the world in peace and harmony. This was the feminist vision of Bengali activist writer Rokeya Hussain in 1905, brought to life by Spanish filmmaker Herguera utilizing media and techniques including paper cutouts, puppet animation, sumptuous layered watercolor painting, and drawn geometric patterns reminiscent of mehndi henna tattoos. Adventurous heroine Ines travels to India in search of her roots, where she flees an overbearing suitor and sees the world with new eyes through her encounters with other women. Filmuforia hailed the “ravishing animation that packs a potent punch… (a) visually captivating gem.”

The Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis Center on Friday, January 30th, 2026 at 1:00 p.m.

The Ties That Bind Us

(L’Attachement)

(Romance, 2024, Palm Beach County Premiere. Directed by Carine Tardieu. France/Belgium, 106-minutes—In French with English subtitles)

A revealing comment on the complexities of the modern family, this aptly titled film ricochets between drama and comedy when Sandra (a marvelous turn by Italian star Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the determinedly single proprietor of a Parisian feminist bookstore, is unexpectedly plunged into family matters through the death of a neighbor. Elliot, a rascally but irresistible child is the catalyst in a melee that has Sandra the bewildered key player in a web of adult relationships that includes the kid’s dad and his new girlfriend, an ex, a sister-in-law, and the kid’s birth father, all seemingly on the make in varying combinations.

Hooky Entertainment Delray Marketplace on Wednesday, February 4th, 2026 at 4:00 p.m.

For more information about SASIFF including a complete list of scheduled screenings or to purchase tickets, please visit: www.sasiff.org.

About The Donald M. Ephraim Sun & Stars International Film Festival:

The Donald M. Ephraim Sun & Stars International Film Festival©, presented by MorseLife, aims to bring highly anticipated, critically acclaimed, and thought-provoking films to Palm Beach County. As a world-class film festival, it represents a major contribution to the cultural life of Palm Beach County and returns next month for its fourth season with screenings at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse from Sunday, January 25th, 2026 - Saturday, January 31st, 2026 at Hooky Entertainment Delray from Sunday, February 1st, 2026 - Thursday, February 5th, 2026 with the closing night screening at glamorous new Glazer Hall in Palm Beach on Friday, February 6th, 2026. SASIFF was co-founded by film buffs and cultural philanthropists Donald M. Ephraim and Terri Sriberg.

For more information about purchasing tickets or becoming a sponsor, please visit: www.sasiff.org - On Facebook at: www.facebook.com/DME.SASIFF - On Twitter at: www.twitter.com/dmesasiff - On Instagram at: www.instagram.com/dme_sasiff. Email: info@sasiff.org. Or call: (561) 220-6735.

About MorseLife:

MorseLife serves more than 3,600 seniors every day on its campus in West Palm Beach and through its community outreach programs. Founded in 1983, MorseLife is a provider of health care and residential services for seniors in Palm Beach County. A charitable, not-for-profit organization, its programs also include short-term rehabilitation, long-term care, independent and assisted living, memory care assisted living, hospice, home health care, care management, meals-on-wheels, and PACE. Since its beginnings, MorseLife has built a reputation and tradition of caring for seniors with excellence, dignity, and compassion. For more information, visit: https://morselife.org - On Facebook at: www.facebook.com/MorseLife - On Twitter at: www.twitter.com/MorseLifeHealth - On Instagram at: www.instagram.com/morselifehealth - On LinkedIn at: www.linkedin.com/company/morselife-inc-/ - Or contact: info@morselife.org.

(Photo Credit: Sun & Stars International Film Festival)