Auctioneer : Where are you from?
Josephus : Ethiopia.
Auctioneer : What part?
Josephus : 125th Street.
In Mel Brooks’ 1981 “History of the World, Part I” Josephus (Gregory Hines), a self-professed Ethiopian Jew, pours wine on Emperor Nero, lights up a crowd with his “Ethiopian Shim-Sham Sand Dance” and, of course, also lights up a joint the size of a rolled area rug, intoxicating a band of pursuing centurions.
That was 25 years ago, and since then cinematic representations of Ethiopian Jews have not been coming soon to theaters near you.
Until now — and this time the Ethiopian Israelis are real, as are their gripping and emotional tales. No shim-sham here.
The Ethiopian Jewish children who landed in Israel as confused and uprooted toddlers during the airlifts of the ’70s and ’80s are now fully grown young men and women — and, lucky for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, more than a few of them have access to cameras and stories to tell.
The festival, now in its 26th year, runs from Thursday, July 20 to Monday, Aug. 7 in four venues.
And there may be no storyline more compelling than “Sisai,” a documentary about a young man’s journey from his adopted home and family in Israel to locate his long-lost father in their native Ethiopia.
The film, winner of top documentary honors at last year’s Jerusalem International Film Festival, was created by young Ethiopian Israeli David Gavro, who followed his adopted brother — Sisai — through Israel and back into Ethiopia.
“The generation of children from Operation Moses is now coming of age and beginning to tell their own stories about what it means to be an Ethiopian Jew, a Jew of color and battle a certain amount of natural confusion and prejudice,” explains Peter Stein, the film fest’s executive director.
In other words, with more than 100,000 Ethiopian Israelis, many of whom are young
and restless, Stein sees a body of potential filmmakers whose time has come. No wonder three Ethiopian Israeli-related films made the cut for this year’s festival.
“Live and Become” tells a fictional Moses-like story about an Operation Moses beneficiary. A starving non-Jewish woman in a Sudanese refugee camp figures the best thing she can do in life is provide her young son with a chance to “live and become,” so she passes him off as Jewish and gets him on the plane.
Once in Israel, young Schlomo is adopted by a kindly Mizrahi family, works on a kibbutz, serves in the army and falls for an Israeli girl — but all the while his life is defined by his two great secrets: He is not a Jew and not an orphan. And his mother is still out there, somewhere. Among the many questions provoked by Romanian Israeli director Radu Mihaileanu’s film is one of the most basic — and most contentious — in the Jewish world: Who is a Jew?
“By the end of the movie, in my opinion, [Schlomo] is a Jew. He grew up in the Jewish culture, grew up a Jew in Israel and had been adopted by the Jewish family,” opines Nancy Fishman, Jewish film fest program director.
But Fishman concedes her opinion is far from universal, and audiences will have that and many other points to debate as they file out of theaters.
“It really is an epic quest and the process may be more important than the ultimate answer. But you really can have debates.”
The final offering of the fest’s Ethiopian triumvirate is a short titled “Motherless Haya.” The film is one of a handful documenting the lives of Israeli teenagers in the town of Ramla, and was made by protagonist Haya Zelka herself.
Transitioning from Jews of color to the whitest white people in the world, the SFJFF marks another milestone with its first placement of a Scandinavian film on opening night. The Swedish film “Four Weeks in June,” slated for the fest’s lead-off spot on Thursday, July 20, documents the relationship between a tempestuous younger woman and an elderly Jewish neighbor with a mysterious past.
Of this year’s 51 festival offerings, Stein and Fishman are particularly fond of more than a few:
• The film fest marks the U.S. premier of “Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,” a far-reaching documentary of the 12 Yiddish stages serving New York City during the days when a man venturing out of doors minus a hat could be prosecuted for a crime. The film also traces the living relics of the heyday of Yiddish theater, including the feisty Zypora Spaisman (who died in 2002). Appropriately, the fest will also show the American-made, 1939 release “The Living Orphan,” a Yiddish-language feature film preceded by the 1931 Yiddish short “A Cantor on Trial.”
• When Israeli director Amos Gitai’s helicopter was shot down during the Yom Kippur war, that was the impetus to push him out of a career in architecture (he earned a Ph.D at U.C. Berkeley) into a life in film. Yet perhaps fittingly enough for a man steeped in architecture, one of Gitai’s most seminal projects is titled “House.” The film documents the myriad owners of a stone home in West Jerusalem, which changed hands many times over the years depending upon who was fleeing from whom. Originally commissioned by Israeli television in 1980, the film was deemed too controversial and kept off the air. The experience gave Gitai a trove of material to work with, as he completed a trilogy documenting the home and its inhabitants, including this year’s “News from Home/News from House.” Three of Gitai’s films are included in the fest, and the prolific director will receive the 2006 SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award.
• Think “The Karate Kid” — except set it in Israel, throw in the ever-present Jewish-Arab divide and ditch the “Wax on, wax off” and you’ve got “Shadya,” another fascinating Israeli documentary. Shadya Zoabi is a 17-year-old Israeli Arab on the nation’s international karate team fighting not only martial arts opponents but the ill will of her Palestinian karate brethren and members of her community who feel beating opponents into submission is hardly appropriate womanly behavior.
Stein and Fishman also say the festival features a number of “ripped from the headlines” films in a year when there were plenty of Israeli- and Jewish-themed headlines to rip.
Perhaps most notable are a pair of documentaries highlighting the Gaza disengagement. Stein compares following the disengagement via the nightly news versus watching a feature-length film to “the difference between reading a three-inch story on page three of a newspaper or a John McPhee essay in the New Yorker.
“To weave long-arc stories, you meet the characters, you have the opportunity to take a pause and reflect on the political background of the story and the long history of particular settlements that, otherwise, you’ve only known in a crisis moment,” he says.
The Gaza documentaries “5 Days” and “Troubled Water” take such markedly opposite approaches to covering the disengagement that it’s hardly accurate to identically label them “disengagement documentaries.”
Yoav Shamir, director of “5 Days,” compresses what must be the second-most-chaotic yet organized weeklong period in Israeli history into one tight, compelling, disturbing film.
Fishman points out that one of the most unsettling aspects of the disengagement process was the notion of Jews pitted against Jews, and viewers of Shamir’s work will not be spared the experience.
“In ‘5 Days’ [we see] soldiers who clearly don’t agree with what they’re doing, pull settlers out of their houses, and then sit down on the curb and cry. There are interviews granting incredible access to the general in charge, Dan Harel. There are also interviews with those in right-wing movements supporting the settlers who attempt to get by roadblocks and interviews with left-wingers. It’s an incredibly balanced film,” she says.
“It focuses more on the impact disengagement had on Jews than on Palestinians. There are some Palestinians in this film, but the disengagement is largely internal.”
While Shamir’s film is a snapshot of a brief and tumultuous week, Gil Karni’s “Troubled Water” follows the interrelations of secular Israeli Gaza fisherman and their Palestinian neighbors over the course of more than 15 years.
The Jews and Arabs brokered an uneasy truce, agreeing that at least one Israeli should be present on every Palestinian fishing vessel. And while this film is intellectually engaging, it is not a simple, “feel good” feature. When the second intifada breaks out, the divisions between the fisherman open quickly and much good will slips into the fissure. Like “5 Days,” this story concludes with the disengagement.
“Documentary filmmakers always say they’re writing the first draft of history,” Stein says. “These films about the Gaza disengagement show how.”
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is putting on its biggest and costliest show ever this year, which is pretty much the same claim it can make every year. The fest, which operates on a year-round basis, runs on a $1.3 million budget, only a quarter of which is recouped via ticket sales.
That’s a lot of money, but Stein and Fishman note that theirs is one of the few film festivals to insist on compensating the creators of the films it shows, and that renting theaters isn’t cheap (and neither is flying in directors, actors, professors or other panelists from all four corners of the globe).
And the panels aren’t just a novelty. You can rent any number of Gitai’s films and watch them in your living room. But you likely can’t get Gitai himself in your living room to ask him just what he was thinking.
Also, in an effort to bring more of the fest’s best qualities to more people, Stein and Fishman have scheduled more panels and showings in all of the four venues — San Francisco, Mountain View, Berkeley and San Rafael.
“That reflects how widespread the Jewish community is, and how the Jewish Film Festival is trying as much as we can to bring a full-service festival to all the venues,” Stein says.
And while the fest has grown in its 26-year lifespan into the nation’s largest celebration of Jewish film, its raison d’etre remains unchanged.
“Despite the fact there are a fair amount of Jews involved in the mainstream film industry, that has not necessarily translated into stereotype-free images of real Jewish people on the screen. That’s one of the reasons the fest was founded and one of the goals we still strive for,” notes Fishman.
Besides, “What is life without art?”
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