“This is about year-round growth, repositioning AJFF as a hub for Jewish storytelling beyond the festival,” said Blank, who adds that the festival’s new educational initiative is a critical part of that push.

Funds from the Kenny Blank Vision Initiative will underwrite a special student field trip screening of “Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire,” which screens at the AJFF this year. And for the first time this year, the AJFF’s Filmmaker Fund will support Jewish storytelling by giving direct support to a filmmaker.

“This is a major evolution for AJFF. We’re not just screening films — we’re now helping to create them,” said Blank.

In addition to the introduction of that initiative, the AJFF continues to innovate by debuting its mobile app at this year’s festival for audiences to track films and events.

As usual, this year’s AJFF offers a mix of penetrating political documentary — including a damning look at prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 17-year tenure in “The Bibi Files” — and pure entertainment, like the pratfall-heavy family dysfunction farce “Bad Shabbos.”

The “Bad Shabbos” cast, including Kyra Sedgwick and Method Man, will be in attendance for that opening night screening at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.

One of the more idiosyncratic options this year will surely be the 1960 Jerry Lewis comedy “The Bellboy,” part of the AJFF’s tribute to Jerry Lewis.

In addition, the AJFF which feature a documentary “From Darkness to Light,” about Lewis’ notorious unfinished film “The Day the Clown Cried,” where he plays a clown performing at Auschwitz, accompanied by a live Q&A with Lewis’ son, Christopher J. Lewis, author of the biography “Jerry Lewis on Being a Person.”

Whether you catch programming in person at venues across the city, or stream from home, this year’s AJFF offers a plenitude of options including these recommended picks.

Credit: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

Credit: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

“Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse”

A layered, fascinating portrait of the celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, this documentary from directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin looks at both the cultural impact of Spielgelman’s groundbreaking graphic novel “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” but also the artist’s fraught personal history. The son of Holocaust survivors, Spiegelman grew up shaped by the darkness of his parents’ painful histories and childhood tragedy. His parents’ experiences informed the perspective and stories in “Maus” and invested Spiegelman with a very early sense of life’s cruelty. This powerful documentary also charts Spiegelman’s involvement in the underground comics movement of the 1960s and his influential contributions to the comic genre in both subject matter and form.

1 p.m. Feb. 22 at Georgia Theatre Company Merchants Walk, 1301 Johnson Ferry Road, Marietta; 4 p.m. Feb. 22 at The Plaza Theatre, 1049 Ponce de Leon, Atlanta.

Credit: Polaris Images

Credit: Polaris Images

“The Bibi Files”

Israel’s controversial prime minister has a long history of graft and corruption, asserts this documentary about Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara. Their penchant for cigars, jewelry, Champagne and other perks encouraged a system of pay to play, allowing businesspeople to grease the wheels of his political machine. Directed by Alexis Bloom, the film is a damning portrait of an intensely problematic U.S. ally that features leaked interrogation footage gathered by Israeli police as part of the trial of Netanyahu for bribery and fraud. Billionaires like film producer Arnon Milchan, and Miriam Adelson, one of the largest donors to Donald Trump’s political campaign, offer additional testimony and a window into the Netanyahu’s unapologetic greed and utter disinterest in accountability and the power structure that has propped up Netanyahu’s 17-year rule.

4:50 p.m., Feb. 23 at The Springs Cinema & Taphouse, 5920 Roswell Road, Sandy Springs; 3 p.m. March 3 at Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road, Atlanta

Credit: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

Credit: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

“Blind at Heart”

Director Barbara Albert’s woman-centric drama isn’t perfect, with its soapy moments and a taste for visual hyperbole, but it is an often engrossing adaptation of Berlin novelist Julia Franck’s bestselling novel “The Blind Side of the Heart,” about a Jewish woman who marries a Nazi soldier for protection and becomes deeply conflicted about the son that troubled marriage produces. Though rooted in the experience of Jewish women during World War II, “Blind at Heart” is also a brutally honest look at the entrapment of marriage and motherhood and the toll it can take on women in wartime or anytime.

11 a.m. Feb. 21 at The Springs Cinema & Taphouse, 5920 Roswell Road, Sandy Springs; 7 p.m. March 5 at Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road, Atlanta; streaming March 7-16.

Credit: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

Credit: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

“Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief”

This documentary is a shocking look at Nazis looting priceless Jewish artworks during the Holocaust and then profited from selling them at war’s end. “Plunderer” focuses on elegant, knowledgeable art historian Bruno Lohse, Hermann Göring’s right-hand man who managed to evade prosecution from the “Monuments Men” who recovered looted art after the war. Historian Jonathan Petropoulos describes his long-standing relationship with Lohse in Hugo Macgregor’s exhaustive “Plunderer,” which reveals an insidious vein of greed, theft and unethical business at the heart of the international art market. That underground economy in stolen goods propped up by curators, dealers and collectors underpins the collections of many of today’s great art museums.

2:55 p.m. March 4 at Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road, Atlanta

“Eid”

Often difficult to watch, this first feature from an Israeli-Bedouin filmmaker Yousef Abo Madegem centers on an unhappy construction worker who is haunted by a violent attack in his childhood and dreams of escaping to Paris to reunite with a lover and write plays. Bullied at work and forced to marry, Eid (Shadi Mar’i) is trapped within the confines of family and a transactional culture defined by rigid gender and power dynamics. Though the cultural codes in Eid’s world are harsh, it’s hard not to relate to the ways all of us are stifled by the parameters set by family and culture.

2 p.m. March 2 at Tara Theatre, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road, Atlanta; streaming March 7-16

FESTIVAL PREVIEW

Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. Feb. 19-March 16. $15-$18. Special events vary in price. Multiple venues. ajff.org