A scene from “The Father, The Son, and The Rav Kalmenson.” Photo: Chelsea Film Festival.

Four short films and one documentary directed by Israeli filmmakers will be featured in the 11th edition of the upcoming Chelsea Film Festival (CFF), an international event based in New York that highlights independent films and up-and-coming directors.

Making its world premiere at CFF is the short film The Monopol, which focuses on the atrocities Macedonian Jews faced during the Holocaust. Directed by Gal Genossar, the 19-minute historical drama is set in 1943 in Skopje, Macedonia, where the protagonist Anna and her family are taken to a concentration camp before being transported to the notorious Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Anna is forced to make a life-changing decision: immediately escape with her husband and daughter or risk everything by trying to save the rest of her family as well.

CFF’s screening of the film, whose screenplay was written by Israeli screenwriter and playwright Nati Brooks, will be followed by a Q&A with Genossar and the cast.

The 30-minute documentary Zoya Cherkassky Soviet Life from director Anat Schwartz, in addition to Libby and I, directed and written by Inbar Caspi, will both make their US premieres at CFF this year. The former profiles Ukrainian-born artist Zoya Cherkassky, whose artwork about immigration, survival, and alienation has sold for thousands of dollars. Audiences will “accompany her on an intimate journey from the studio in the immigrant Tel Aviv neighborhood where she has met her Nigerian husband, to her childhood in Kyiv, in search of her lost Ukrainian-Soviet childhood, hoping to find the one place in which she would feel at home,” according to a synopsis of the film provided by CFF.

In Libby and I, according to the synopsis, “a disoriented woman wakes up in an empty theater, separated from Libby, her heart. She tries to figure out why they parted. Outside of herself, a therapy session is taking place. Libby and I is a short film that explores the dissociation and displacement that occur when a rape victim copes.”

Also making its New York premiere at CFF is the short film and animated dark comedy Deadline from director and screenwriter Idan Gilboa. The film focuses on the friendship and solidarity between two elderly women who are “sickened by society’s disregard and disrespect.” Shahar Fux co-wrote the screenplay for the project.

Another short film debuting at CFF is The Father, The Son, and The Rav Kalmenson, which is written and directed by Dayan D. Oualid. The 15-minute comedy follows a 30-year-old Orthodox Jew named Yoel and his 6-year-old son. Yoel is praying one Shabbat morning in his neighborhood synagogue when the rabbi of his community, Rav Kalmenson, challenges Yoel by announcing to him that his son “is lighting up.”

The 2023 Chelsea Film Festival is scheduled to take place from Oct. 12–15 at Regal Theatres Union Square in New York City.