Given Names

This film is part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival screenings in JCCSF’s Kanbar Hall.

A name may be freighted with generations of family and cultural history. A name may serve as the catalyst for one’s own quiet but revolutionary reinvention of selfhood. What’s in a name? In Prénoms (Given Names), Nurith Aviv turns her attentive lens to the stories embedded in first names, tracing how identity is shaped, translated, and sometimes transformed across languages and borders.

Structured as thirteen distinct chapters, each organized alphabetically from A (Agnès) to Z (Zeynep), Aviv invites friends and colleagues to tell their stories using their given names as points of departure. Through these personal accounts, participants reflect on the origins, meanings, and shifts of names across Hebrew, Arabic, and European contexts, revealing individual negotiations between heritage and self-definition.

Allowing each subject the space for recollection and reflection, the testimonies accumulate, raising broader questions of belonging, assimilation, and cultural memory. Unfolding with clarity and restraint, the language becomes both subject and method. A gentle but rigorous meditation on how a single name can hold the weight of history. —Lori Donnelly

Nurith Aviv, France, 82 min, United States Premiere

All seating is first come, first served.

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