Hollywood is in a panic. Box office receipts are down. People are staying home in droves. “Cinderella Man” can’t punch its way out of a popcorn bag. What’s a movie mogul to do?
How about say a brachah and get in line at the 25th anniversary San Francisco Jewish Film Festival? If the past is any guide, the films on this year’s lineup will be entertaining and provocative, the crowds noisy, enthusiastic and oh-so opinionated.
As usual, the festival not only presents a variety of films from around the world (49 flicks this year, carefully selected from a record 420 submitted), but also bundles some of them in timely themes, served up with hot-button panel discussions on the side.
Festival fans won’t have to wait long for the most anticipated film on the lineup. The opening night screening belongs to “Go For Zucker!” a German comedy making its American premiere at the festival.
“This is a politically incorrect, irreverent Jewish comedy made by a Jewish director,” says Peter Stein, the festival’s executive director. “It dares to poke fun at the foibles of Jews in a recognizable way to Americans. People like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen have been doing this for decades, but it was unthinkable in Germany because it’s a very tender topic. It’s been greeted in Germany with a sigh of relief and became a box-office smash.”
“Zucker” tells the story of two brothers who must contend with their late mother’s last request: Get along together or forfeit a sizeable inheritance. One brother, Jaeckie, is a hard-drinking ne’er-do-well from West Germany; the other, Samuel from East Germany, is devoutly Orthodox.
“Jaeckie and his wife try to pass as Jewish,” notes Nancy Fishman, the festival’s program director. “They have to bone up. The brothers were separated because of the split in Germany, and in a way it’s about not only Germany’s ability to deal with Jewish issues, but also about reunification of Germany.”
One of the focuses this year is on Israeli cinema. No surprise, as the world has taken notice of the quality of films coming out of Israel in recent years.
Citing recent pictures such as “Walk on Water,” “Lost Embrace” and “Broken Wings,” Stein says: “The doors are being opened because the product is good. There was a time when Israeli films couldn’t help but wave the blue-and-white flag. Now they tell stories of universal interest. It is now one of the most interesting national cinemas in the world.”
On the schedule this year are several Israeli features and documentaries, among them “Campfire” (winner of five Israeli Oscars), “On the Objection Front,” which explores the refusenik movement within the Israel Defense Forces, and Simone Bitton’s “Wall,” a documentary about the West Bank separation barrier, which won a special award at Sundance.
Another Israeli film on the schedule, “Keep Not Silent,” is an intimate portrait of three Orthodox women in Jerusalem reconciling their homosexuality with their deep religious faith.
“It’s a lesbian version of ‘Trembling Before G-d,'” says Fishman.
Culminating the emphasis on Israeli cinema will be a panel Saturday, July 23, moderated by KQED’s Michael Krasny, which will include Canadian Jewish filmmaker Elle Flanders. (Her film “Zero Degrees of Separation,” about gay and lesbian Israeli/Palestinian couples, will have two screenings.)
Also topping the marquee this year will be the festival’s exploration of Jews and the blacklist.
“Issues around the blacklist are still very present,” says Stein. “The increasing difficulty filmmakers find in bringing alternative or non-mainstream points of view to the public is always going to be a key concern, particularly for us as a film festival, which is a platform for encountering explorations of Jewish culture that are not necessarily going to be encountered in mainstream media.”
Both Stein and Fishman are also happy about including several films from the former Soviet Union on the program. Among them are “Maidan, Nave of the World,” which offers glimpses of a vanished Jewish life in Tbilisi, Georgia, and “Arye,” a story about an ailing Russian doctor who travels to Israel to reconnect with his lost love.
Closing night features “Rashevski’s Tango,” a Belgian film that peers into the lives of three generations of French Jews.
In between, screenings will run daily at the four festival locations in San Francisco, Berkeley, Mountain View and San Rafael. And as is always the case, the festival offers all kinds of additional programming, such as an afternoon of short films and animation geared to kids, and a film installation on continuous loop in the lobbies of the Castro and Roda theaters: “A Victim’s Perspective” is a real-time 11-hour prisoner’s-eye-view retracing of the 40-mile 1945 death march from Auschwitz to a Nazi evacuation center.
“Director Erik van Loon strapped a camera to his body and walked the entire route through the Polish countryside,” says Stein. “It’s a silent film, a haunting commentary on the passage of time.”
A milestone like the 25th anniversary wouldn’t be complete without honoring the two women who elevated the festival to global prominence: founder Deborah Kaufman and longtime director Janis Plotkin. Both will appear at a celebration Tuesday, July 19 in their honor.
As the Jewish Film Festival moves on to its next quarter-century, Fishman says, “After 25 years, the festival is considered one of the best in the world. That’s because of our willingness to take risks programmatically. We were willing to show films some thought the community wasn’t quite ready for.”
Summing up the notion of what constitutes a Jewish film, Stein says: “A Jewish film is one which creates an experience of the complexity of the Jewish world, that incites your sense of social justice, or makes you laugh uproariously at the human condition. It doesn’t mean there has to be a rabbi character. It means the audience leaves having a better understanding of themselves through a Jewish lens.”