Josh Safdie

Origins and early life

Joshua Safdie was born in New York City on 3 April 1984 and spent his boyhood between his father in Queens and his mother and stepfather in Manhattan. He and his younger brother Benny are Jewish: their father, Alberto, is a Sephardic Jew of Syrian Jewish descent who grew up in Italy and France, and their mother, Amy, is an Ashkenazi Jew of Russian Jewish descent. Alberto, who for a time carried jewellery from the diamond district on Forty-seventh Street to shops in the boroughs, made home movies of his sons, and the boys were making their own films long before Josh graduated from Boston University in 2007.

Work and career

His first feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, premiered at South by Southwest in 2008 and went to the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, where Daddy Longlegs, made with Benny from their years with their father, followed in 2009. The brothers next made Heaven Knows What, which opened at Venice in 2014, and Good Time, with Robert Pattinson, which competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2017. Uncut Gems, released in 2019, cast Adam Sandler as a Jewish jeweller in the Manhattan diamond district their father had known, with Martin Scorsese as executive producer.

After Benny said in January 2024 that they would no longer direct together, Josh wrote Marty Supreme with Ronald Bronstein and directed it alone, loosely basing it on the Jewish table tennis champion Marty Reisman and casting Timothée Chalamet. He has called it a Jewish experience story about the pride that blossomed after the Second World War, and its Holocaust flashback rests on the true story of the Jewish player Alojzy Ehrlich, which he found in his research.

Recognition

Uncut Gems had won the brothers the Independent Spirit Award for best director, and Marty Supreme, released by A24 on 25 December 2025, took some 192 million dollars worldwide and nine Oscar nominations, four of them his own, including best director.