In addition to screening 65 films this summer, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has unveiled its own short film of sorts — the annual festival trailer.
Each year, the festival produces a lighthearted promotional short. It’s used to build hype for the festival, but mostly it’s a tasty little amuse-bouche for festivalgoers before the meal of the feature presentation.
In this year’s trailer, a shorter, 30-second version of which premiered online today, a series of people lay on a shrink’s leather couch, complaining of oddly cinematic problems.
“There’s no way I’m original. So does that make me a remake? What if I’m a sequel?” one patient says in horror.
“Sometimes I feel like an extra, just another background player,” another patient bemoans.
“Best boy? Most days I don’t feel like an adequate boy,” a third one says.
Jon Korn, the trailer’s writer, has worked on SFJFF trailers before. He said each one has to hit on the trio of San Francisco, Jewishness and film.
“There’s no explicit Jewish content in this one, but I think it resonates with the ‘-ish’ part of Jewishness, the cultural part of it.… It’s just having fun with the sort of trope of a psychiatrist and her patients, which felt like a very Jewish thing to us.”
The trailer is produced by the San Francisco-based marketing agency Avocados and Coconuts, which has made several of the festival trailers in previous years. On the festival’s opening night, the full-length trailer will debut alongside a compilation of favorite trailers from previous years.
The 46th festival runs from July 16 to Aug. 2 in San Francisco and Oakland.