From the opening scenes of “Bad Shabbos,” the centerpiece film of the upcoming Sacramento Jewish Film Festival, you know you’re in for a wild comedic ride.
Nice Jewish boy betrothed to a nice Catholic girl? Check.
Midwestern parents of the bride-to-be coming for dinner? Check.
Seriously disturbed or possibly neurodivergent kid brother who can’t keep his mouth shut? We’re off and running.
The 2024 comedy, shot on the upper West Side of New York City, rolls all the stereotypes of New York Jews into one fast-paced, well-acted entertainment that still manages to say something about family and about growth — the concepts that put the “warm” in “heartwarming.”
“Our main goal was to take everything we love about the comedies of old and — like the characters in this film — try to adapt to modern times,” director Daniel Robbins said in his press materials.
Festival director Teven Laxer told J. that “some of the scenes remind me of ‘Annie Hall,’” Woody Allen’s angsty 1977 comedy about interfaith relations. Indeed, Robbins lists Allen among his influences, along with Jewish film directors Ernst Lubitch, Billy Wilder, Nora Ephron and Mike Nichols for his Robin Williams showcase “The Birdcage.”
The fact that the Robbins’ previous credits include horror films is not surprising, given how events that unfold during this film’s particularly “bad” Shabbat veer between the goofball and the horrific (though mostly the former).
“What I really love is having a theater full of people laughing,” Laxer said. When he saw the film at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last summer, “I laughed so hard I missed some of the lines I had started laughing at.”
The film, winner of the Audience Award at the 2024 Tribeca film festival, will be shown at Sacramento’s Crest Theatre at 7:45 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22. Sacramento Bee reporter Sharon Bernstein, formerly of Berkeleyside and the Los Angeles Times, will moderate an onstage conversation with the director following the film.
The Sacramento Jewish Film Festival, a program of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region, has presented films related to Jews and Judaism since 1997. This year, 11 films will be screened live at the Crest Theatre from Feb. 20 to 23, followed by 14 films that will stream online from Feb. 24 to March 9. About half of the films are foreign, from Israel or other countries.
The program includes three regional premieres. “Welcome to Yiddishland,” a documentary about a global movement of artists reviving Yiddish language and Jewish identity through their art, is billed as a Western U.S. premiere. The timely Israeli documentary “Checkpoint Women: Memories,” about Machsom Watch, an organization of Israeli women who act as human rights observers at checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank, is a Northern California premiere, as is the nostalgic feature “The Blond Boy From the Casbah.”
In contrast to the neurotic New York Jewish family of “Bad Shabbos,” “The Blond Boy From the Casbah” paints a nostalgic portrait of a poor but loving Jewish family living in Algeria on the brink of its war of independence from France in 1954. Couched in a somewhat flimsy meta-story about a famous French film director who returns to his birthplace of Algiers to screen his autobiographical film, it is the tapestry of reenacted memories that anchors director Andrew Arcady’s poetic tale.
Beautifully shot in Tunisia, the docudrama evokes a time and place where working Jewish and Arab families could coexist in a crowded “casbah,” supporting one another’s efforts to raise children and lead normal human lives. For the Algerian Jewish community, however, the idyll is destroyed when the anti-colonialist uprising changes the longtime climate of social tolerance. It screens at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20.
If you’re able to handle a flick that starts at 9 p.m., the touching new Israeli feature film “Bliss (Hemda),” screens the same night. A tender domestic drama that withholds the meaning of its title until the very last scene, the film explores the lives of both a 73-year-old Israeli man who is dealing with impotence, and his vibrant second wife, alongside the web of family relationships they navigate. Despite these mundane details, director Shemi Zarhin brings forth a believable sense of the depth and complexity of everyday Israeli life.
Written and filmed before the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and the Israel-Hamas war, with dialogue in Hebrew and Arabic, “Bliss” touches lightly on the interface between Jewish and Arab Israelis living in the Galilee. It also parses the tensions between recent immigrants to Israel and the native born, as well as between religious and secular interpretations of human purpose.
“It’s just a sweet intersection of real life in Israel,” said Laxer, describing the film as “poignant and relevant.”
His selection of this drama for the festival seems to have been on point: “Bliss” won the Best Israeli Film award at the Miami Jewish Film Festival in January.
At 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21, the festival will screen “Love in Suspenders,” an Israeli rom-com about a mismatched widow and a widower who fall in love. Previously shown in the 2019 festival, it was a favorite of the late Anne Eisenberg. The film will be presented in her memory along with a special video tribute to her. A longtime festival volunteer, Eisenberg was also a leader with the Sacramento Federation and the National Council of Jewish Women’s Sacramento chapter, among other Jewish community roles.
The theatrical portion of the festival finishes up with four films on Sunday, Feb. 23, including “Sabbath Queen” at 5:10 p.m. The 2024 American documentary follows the unconventional Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie across his 20-year journey to reinvent Jewish religion and ritual. Following the screening, a panel of local rabbis — one Orthodox, one Conservative and one Reform — will discuss the film and their perspectives about what Lau-Lavie calls a “God-optional synagogue,” Laxer said.
More views about Israel and Judaism are found in the diverse program of streaming films, which in Laxer’s words, touch on “practically the whole range of the post-war Jewish experience in the 20th and 21st centuries.” Be sure to check when purchasing tickets whether your chosen streaming films have any geographical restrictions.