“The Darkest Light,” the new documentary about the life and legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, has won the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s inaugural Best First Feature Award for a directorial debut.
As winner, it will get a second screening on the last day of the festival, Aug. 2, at 3 p.m. at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland.
The film, which premiered at the festival on July 19, tells the story of Carlebach, the global Jewish music sensation who died in 1994 and years later became the subject of numerous credible allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, including against teenage girls. “The Darkest Light” grapples with the effects of his actions on survivors, whether his music is still kosher to use in synagogues, and the efforts of his daughter Neshama Carelbach to reconcile the allegations with her adoring image of him.
Director Simon Mendes was on hand for the premiere and participated in a post-screening Q&A with two of Carlebach’s survivors, S.J. Schwaidelson and Donna Zerner, and a representative of Shalom Bayit, the Bay Area-based Jewish domestic violence prevention organization. The Q&A was followed by a processing session, at which about 70 attendees discussed their reactions to the film and how to address sexual assault in the Jewish community.
“We were extraordinarily moved and transformed by this documentary, which asks meaningful questions about the legacy of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and provides riveting, complex answers,” the SFJFF awards jury said in a July 22 statement. “Its judicious and eye-opening use of archival footage captures a significant strain of late-20th-century American Jewish life, while the wide range of interviews — with Carlebach’s family, acolytes, and victims — provides a complex reckoning with his legacy of sexual exploitation.”
When Mendes began working on the film, he was part of the 2022 filmmaker in residence program at the Jewish Film Institute, which runs the annual festival.
“We could not have asked for a better premiere than SFJFF. JFI was the first supporter of the film … that would become ‘The Darkest Light,’” Mendes said in a statement. “The film covers very difficult and sensitive terrain, and we’re grateful to the Festival for not only taking it on, but providing us with the resources to have the most successful and powerful premiere we could dream of.”