The 16th annual New York Jewish Film Festival, which begins today and offers a moviegoer’s odyssey of 31 motion pictures, includes two world and nine American premieres. The films range in setting from pre-Soviet St. Petersburg to 1960s Paris to a New York saloon.

The festival is one of Gotham’s longest running collaborations of two arts institutions: the Jewish Museum, which brings the Jewish world to the film audience, and Lincoln Center, which brings the film audience to the Jewish world.

The festival began in 1992, when the director of the broadcast archive at the Jewish Museum, Wanda Bershen, with support from businessman and founding funder Martin Payson, approached the program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Richard Peña, whose institution agreed to become the co-sponsor. An immediate success, the festival was one of the first at the new Walter Reade Theater.

Ms. Bershen, who ran the festival for its first six years, had begun her work at the museum a month prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The following year, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which was the first and remains the world’s largest Jewish film festival, produced its annual event in Moscow, testing the boundaries of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost.

With the dissolution of the communist bloc, people hungered to see what was going to emerge from that part of the world. According to the director of the festival and associate curator of the Jewish Museum, Aviva Weintraub, “There was a boom in production on Jewish themes from these countries.” But the new Europe held some surprises for Ms. Bershen, who recalled seeing a film in Budapest in the early 1990s and inquiring if the director was Jewish, only to be told, “It’s unusual for someone to ask us that question.” She said the post-communist country was unaccustomed to speaking so openly about Jewish identity.

Not surprisingly, the issue of Jewish identity became a central theme of the emerging film festival. The director of public programs at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, Barbara Abrash, said the festival organizers were soon able to raise issues of exile and identity as universal experiences.

“The films, while specifically about Jewish people and subjects, spoke to much larger conditions,” she said.

While only a handful of Jewish film festivals existed when the New York event was founded, there are now more than 65 around the world. Ms. Weintraub said the explosion of Jewish film festivals is linked to the growing prevalence of film festivals in general and to an increased visibility of independent films. “One used to have to scour to find the films,” she said.

Claus Mueller, a sociology professor at Hunter College, added that the rise of inexpensive production technologies, more film schools, and an increased number of platforms for distribution also fueled this growth.

Mr. Peña and Ms. Weintraub are half of a small curatorial team that chooses the films. Preparation for the following year begins two or three weeks after the festival ends, when the pair heads to the Berlin International Film Festival. But summer is their most intensive viewing period, and any film that has not already had a theatrical release in New York is eligible. Each year they winnow a list of about 300 films to 31, balancing genres while seeking a blend of young energy and more established directors. They also try to include a silent film each year.

The festival mixes lighter subjects with darker films, such as Christian Delage’s powerful documentary, “Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing Their Crimes.” Interestingly, this film should be seen in conjunction with one not in the festival, Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner’s “Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963–1965,” which opens Friday. Drawn from 430 hours of audiotapes, the documentary offers a chilling look at the Frankfurt trial of members of the SS.

The editor of JewishFilm.com, Larry Mark, said the New York festival has a distinctive “intellectual” feel to it while the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival tends to take a more edgy and political approach.

Then there is the dedicated New York audience. “I remember attending the festival on a bitter cold night in January 2004,” Peter L. Stein, the SFJFF’s executive director, recalled. “I was going to see an experimental Russian documentary — and I was astounded to see a couple of hundred stalwart New Yorkers determined to make their way into the film.”

Some of the films featured at the festival have gone on to enjoy great postfestival afterlives, like the 2001 German film “Nowhere in Africa,” which won the 2003 foreign language Oscar. Other noted participants at the festival over the years have included Jeanne Moreau and Isabella Rossellini.

Mr. Stein said that because Jewish audiences tend not to be shy about their opinions and critiques, he believes that a good Jewish film is “any in which the audience leaves only slightly disappointed.”

That willingness to be challenged usually leads the crowd to a number of lesser-known festival films.

“What I find very gratifying is when people take a chance on a film that is about something unfamiliar,” Ms. Weintraub said.

Scholar Ilan Stavans, who wrote the story about a Mexican Jewish family in mourning on which “My Mexican Shivah” is based, perhaps said it best. He told an audience in Boston at a conference of Jewish film festivals that Jews have been called the “the People of the Book” for ages. Now they’re becoming “people of the books and images.”