Along with an abundance of international films, the 19th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival zooms in on the Jews of America.
The festival, which runs Thursday through Aug. 2, takes a panoramic look at the last century of Jewish American experience.
The 14 films on American Jews show a broad diversity — from Southern Jews in the Mississippi Delta to huddled immigrants on Ellis Island, from corn huskers in small-town Iowa to a home-run king in the major leagues.
“It’s unusual. We are always starving for films about the American experience,” festival director Janis Plotkin said. “There is so much about our history in Europe and Israel but few films look at the flourishing of identity and how we evolved as a people here.”
This year’s festival, which opens at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre and spreads to Berkeley, Menlo Park and San Rafael, has culled 37 films from 13 countries.
To Plotkin, the films on American Judaism represent inward reflection and a coming of age.
“We have had over a century of life here,” she said. “We’ve all had very different experiences as Jews in America, and these films support the multiplicity of choices we have.”
Like a road trip across the country in search of the nexus of Americana and Judaism, the 14 films cut across cities and countryside and focus on people as varied as famed writer Philip Roth and backwoods farmers.
“Delta Jews” takes viewers to Mississippi to examine how Jews have managed in the South for more than a century. Narrated by Alfred Uhry, the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright of “Driving Miss Daisy,” the film chronicles the history of Southern Jews in the Christian-dominated region infamous for its history of racial inequality.
Skipping up to the Big Apple, the documentary film “Ellis Island Tales” examines how the Old World was funneled into the New World.
“It’s a beautiful meditation on inner diaspora and immigration as a metaphor for the Jewish experience,” Plotkin said.
A program called “An Evening with Ben Katchor” also focuses on New York via two short films about the comic-strip artist as well as through Katchor’s own slide show, “Carfare City.” One of the two short films, “Pleasures of Urban Decay,” is directed by Sam Ball, who by day is the film festival’s assistant director.
Moving westward to Detroit, “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” tells the story of the first Jew to make it huge in baseball by whacking homers and religious stereotypes in the 1930s and ’40s. “It’s amazing how much he was a symbol of having arrived for American Jews,” Plotkin said of the Tigers’ slugger.
Planted in the heartland, “Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa” delves into filmmaker Marlene Booth’s personal experiences. She uses home movies, conversations with friends and footage of her 30th high-school reunion to paint a complex picture of her identity.
And crossing the Rockies, the melodrama “I Stare at You and Dream” follows a Jewish woman living in a Latino neighborhood in the Los Angeles melting pot.
The festival — the first and the largest Jewish film forum in the world — continues to rack up widespread attendance in the Bay Area. Last year, some 32,000 came to the movies.
According to the film fest’s own stats, nearly half of those attendees describe themselves as unaffiliated Jews.
In that respect, Ball explains, the Jewish community in America has come full circle at least in one way.
“The Jewish Film Festival has taken a similar role at the end of the century as Yiddish theater did in the beginning of the century,” Ball said. “Many Jews who stopped going to synagogues still flocked to the theater. We have that same phenomenon. People who aren’t religious still come to the films in tremendous numbers.”
As part of the film fest’s interest in courting multicultural and international audiences, organizers have also included a strong selection of films from Europe and Russia.
Opening night on Thursday features the U.S. debut of “After the End of the World,” a timely piece on life in the Balkans. The romantic tale flashes back to pre-World War II Bulgaria among a bustle of Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Gypsies and ethnic Bulgarians.
“It’s the perfect film to open on given the political wars in the Balkans,” Plotkin said. “When I saw the film, I didn’t realize how relevant it was going to be.”
Several Russian films will grace the festival, including “Khroustaliov, My Car!” — an avant-garde film about the hardships of a Jewish general in Moscow in 1953. Also look for a rare account of the mix of Jews, Japanese, Russian and Kazakh cultures in Stalin-era Kazakhstan in the film “Biography of a Young Accordion Player.”
In the blockbuster French film “Man is Woman,” which Ball describes as “a steamy romantic comedy that is part Yiddish musical,” a young Jewish Parisian woman falls in love with a gay clarinet player. She marries him but the relationship turns into disastrous folly.
As in years past, the festival again showcases a slice of the best contemporary Israeli entertainment. Fans of last year’s “Florentene,” a popular Israeli TV drama, can catch the next round of installments about the young and hip in Tel Aviv with “Florentene (Part II).”
Tangling with the tensions between Jews and Arabs, “Yom Yom” features renowned Israeli actor Moshe Ivgi in a comedic role as a half-Arab, half-Jewish resident of Haifa.
Taken altogether, the films in the festival look back on a century of rapid and epic changes in Jewish identity.
“We are using film as a means to draw people together, allowing them to look at Judaism in a different way. It’s refreshing,” Plotkin said. “There’s more Jewish film now in the world than ever before. And I think the Jewish community here has caught on.”