potrero view

July 2010

Jewish Film Festival Turns Thirty

By Jim Van Buskirk

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), the first and largest of its kind, celebrates its 30th anniversary this month.  In addition to screenings at the Castro Theatre and the Jewish Community Center, festival venues will include Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Rhoda Theatre, The CineArts@Palo Alto Square, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin. More than fifty films will be offered, including documentaries, features and shorts from around the world, in addition to an outdoor screening of Dirty Dancing, a live music program and special guests, discussions, panels and parties.

Renowned independent filmmaker and educator Jay Rosenblatt is program director for this year’s festival.  Rosenblatt, who has been making independent films for three decades, has been a film and video production instructor at various Bay Area film schools. His fourteen films and two videos have screened throughout the world, including at the Sundance Film Festival and previous San Francisco Jewish Film Festivals, and have accumulated more than one hundred awards.

The many international features of this year’s festival include The Wolberg Family by debut director Acelle Ropert, in which the Jewish mayor of a French provincial town desperately tries to keep his family together against a 1960s soul music soundtrack.  Jaffa, a powerful drama from Israel about working class Jewish and Palestinian families whose lives are intertwined through an unlikely romance.  And Argentinean director Marcos Carnevale’s Anita, about Anita Feldman, a young woman with Down syndrome, who lives a happy, routine life being cared for by her mother, played by Spanish cinema veteran Norma Aleandro.

The SFJFF is known for its presentation of powerful, provocative documentaries. Among this year’s highlights are Amos Oz: the Nature of Dreams, a portrait by Yonathan and Masha Zur of the renowned Israeli author. Sayed Kashua: Forever Scared charts seven eventful years in the life of the scriptwriter of the hit Israel television series Arab Labor. War Against the Weak is based on award-winning journalist Edwin Black’s book about eugenics principles applied in Germany and the United States in the 1940s. Saviors in the Night and A Small Act both explore the legacy of ordinary people who have taken risks to help those in need. The shorts programs feature the world premiere of local director Theo Rigby’s six-minute gem, Perfect Mother, which uses home movies as a mother tries to understand what happened to the “perfect” image of her own departed mother.

A special series of screenings, funded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will use portrayals of Jewish gangsters and “ethnic” gangsters played by Jewish actors to explore issues of class, ethnicity immigration, masculinity and assimilation. “Tough Guys: Images of Jewish Gangsters in Film” was developed by former SFJFF Program Director Nancy K. Fishman, who became interested in Jewish gangsters when she learned that Brooklyn gangster Dopey Benny Fein had threatened her grandparents by sending them a funeral wreath, probably because they refused to pay him protection money. Well-known gangster films like Barry Levin’s Bugsy, classics and obscure examples will be screened, with a panel discussion including Oakland-based Ron Arons, author of The Jews of Sing Sing, which explores the scope of Jewish criminality in New York City from the late 1800s through the 1950s.

The New Jewish Filmmaking Project, produced by Citizen Film, will present Half Remembered Stories, an online exhibition of audio, video, and text-based stories examining “lost people, lost places, and the quest to reclaim lost memory.”

For more information on tickets at the various venues: www.sfjff.org.

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