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For the most part, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival shows movies. But it also produces a short film — a very short film — every year: the festival trailer.
Though the annual trailer is primarily used to promote the festival ahead of time, its main audience is the filmgoers sitting down to watch a screening at the festival itself. The trailer plays before each screening and helps set the tone for the festival.
“In recent years, we’ve really been looking at inclusivity and making people feel welcome on opening night and when they come to their first screening,” Lexi Leban, executive director of the Jewish Film Institute, which runs the festival, told J.
This year’s 30-second trailer certainly captures that spirit. In the first of several short scenes, two women chat at Sinai Memorial Chapel. One says, “I saw a new movie last night.” Says the other, “Yeah? What kind of a movie?” It then cuts to a police officer describing a movie as “kind of action-adventure-ish.” In another scene, an elderly woman in Chinatown describes a movie as “documentary-ish.” A North Beach deli worker hands a salami to a customer while describing a movie as “German expressionist-ish.” And so forth.
At the end, a narrator says, “The 44th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival — this ‘ish’ is for everyone.”
SFJFF has been producing its own trailers since the mid-1980s. This year, for the first time, the new trailer is premiering exclusively right here in J. Check it out:
The message of this year’s trailer recalls its 2016 counterpart, the most viral past trailer, which had “upwards of 50,000 views on Facebook,” according to Nate Gellman, JFI’s director of development and communication.
In the 2016 trailer, a man boards a J Muni train, where he sees an older Asian woman in a tallit using a curling iron, a Black boy trying to open a jar of gefilte fish and a fully decked-out Sister of Perpetual Indulgence using the Jewish dating app JSwipe. Eventually, an Orthodox man sits down behind the man and offers him popcorn. The tagline at the end: “You don’t have to be Jewish to ride the J train.”
Amani King, creative director of Avocados & Coconuts, the San Francisco ad agency that produced this year’s trailer, explained the concept behind it: “What we wanted to do is get you into the spirit of what the festival brings to a city. We all love going to movies, or watching them, and part of the joy is watching them with friends, talking about them with friends — that’s the kind of banter we wanted to depict.”
Though much of the Jewish community is in a more somber mood this year due to the Israel-Hamas war, King said it was important to keep the trailer — which was written by Yvette Solis and directed by Gabrielle Occhipinti — light.
“The goal was really not to be political, to celebrate film, celebrate the festival, look beyond the prevailing politics right now,” he said. “Let’s just take a moment to exhale and watch a film and engage with the community at a real festival.”
In keeping with tradition, at SFJFF’s opening night celebration at the Palace of Fine Arts on July 18, the new trailer will be preceded by a series of favorites from years past. “I feel like it’s the signature experience of the festival to sit down on opening night and be taken through a history of our festival in these trailers,” Leban said.
Don’t be late!