Meet Babs Daitch, a sassy, houseboat-dwelling octogenarian with seemingly boundless energy.
Daitch, who lives in Marin County, has led a colorful life. She served as personal assistant to Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s, she dabbled in San Francisco real estate, and she led tourists around Las Vegas, where she also performed on stage with a comedy troupe.
“I try a lot of things, I hardly ever say no,” she says in “Thanks, Babs!” a short biographical documentary screening at the upcoming 45th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. “First of all, I’m curious as hell, but I can’t sit still.”
That much is clear from the film, one of more than 12 festival offerings whose subjects, directors, producers, writers and editors have Bay Area ties. The lineup ranges from serious to comedic, touching on everything from childhood trauma, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Holocaust to summer camp shenanigans and the work of visionary composer and performer Meredith Monk.
The festival kicks off July 17 and runs through Aug. 3.
“Thanks, Babs!” is an endearing introduction to a beloved fixture in the local queer women’s community. The film’s Oakland-based co-director, Jen Rainin, met Daitch years ago while both were working on a lesbian cruise.
“I adored her immediately and was struck by her singular energy,” Rainin told J. She and her co-director, fellow Oakland resident Rivkah Beth Medow, founded Frankly Speaking Films to tell stories of LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary people.
The documentary, screening Aug. 3, captures its central figure in constant motion, often while nestling her fluffy terrier Buckette in her arms. Daitch scrubs the deck of her boat on the San Rafael waterfront and makes a splash at aquatic exercise classes at the Marin JCC. She throws herself a party for the “41st anniversary of her 39th birthday” where she lap dances and threatens to confiscate drinks from anyone who dares to mention “80.”
In a more somber scene, she visits the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to pay tribute to the many friends she lost to the disease.
“The bones are old, Michael, the bones are old, but the love is just like it used to be,” she says to her late buddy as she kneels down to run her fingers over his name engraved in the memorial’s flagstone floor.
Along the way, Daitch gives glimpses of her personal life, even joking about her fondness for vibrators. “I’m a DIY girl,” she says with a grin, speaking in a New York accent that her 42 years in the Bay Area haven’t fully erased.
Sophie Rose, writer, director and producer of the highly personal documentary “The Feeling Remains,” followed the opposite geographic path, growing up in Marin and now living in New York, where she makes documentaries, short films and commercials for brands such as Nike, Ralph Lauren and Vogue.
“The Feeling Remains” weaves atmospheric, present-day footage shot on 16mm film with 1990s VHS home movies — taken in the family’s Tiburon home, on Stinson Beach and in other Bay Area locales. Together, these images piece together an intimate portrait of a Jewish family fractured by mental illness, violence and divorce.
Rose, 30, remains close with her immediate family, and her parents, older brother and sister all appear in the film, sharing their perspectives with striking candor.
“The main point of the film was trying to discover this elusive truth of what happened in the hopes that it was going to release me from the trauma,” said Rose, who will introduce “The Feeling Remains” at festival screenings in San Francisco and Oakland. “Going through the whole process of interviewing everyone, I came to realize that there is no one truth that was going to set me free. I had this perspective shift that everyone has their own truth, and really what I needed to be doing was accepting the past as what it was.”
The film underscores the fragility of family systems, where individual distress can ripple outward, leading to communal unraveling. Making “The Feeling Remains” has brought healing to the filmmaker, and to her family, she said, adding that the experience “really has been life-changing for everybody.”
Other former local residents with stories featured on screen include Michael and Barbara Silverstein, Bay Area activists in the ’60s and ’70s who appear prominently in “Sons of Detroit.” In it, their filmmaker son Jeremy Xido returns after 20 years to his childhood home in Detroit to discover how much the city has changed. The film raises powerful questions: What does home mean? How are our personal identities shaped by collective history?
Collective history also emerges as a theme of “The Stamp Thief,” a fascinating story about a real-life quest to locate a box of stamps pilfered from Jews during World War II by an SS officer and believed to be hidden in a Polish basement. Bill Guttentag, a double Oscar-winning filmmaker who lives in the South Bay and teaches at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, served as executive producer.
We watch as the team doggedly pursues its goal of returning the valuable artifacts to their rightful owners, despite steep odds. But as weighty as their mission is, there are moments of levity in the movie. The filmmakers “were able to create a film that had humor and a certain amount of craziness,” Guttentag said. “It’s a bit of a detective story.”
“The First Lady,” another LGBTQ-themed film showing at the festival, also has a Bay Area tie: Berkeley documentary filmmaker Tamir Elterman served as executive producer.
Making its international premiere at the festival, the movie follows Efrat Tilma, one of Israel’s first openly transgender women. Tilma knew at age 14 that she wanted to live life as a woman, but faced familial rejection, sexual violence, police threats and heartwrenching social isolation on her path to becoming a celebrated trans activisit and the first trans woman to volunteer in Israel’s civilian police force.
The moving tragedy-to-triumph story airs at the festival at a time of fear and uncertainty for many transgender people.
Rainin said she and her filmmaking partner see “Thanks, Babs!” as a timely entry, too.
“We felt the need for a project that would lighten the world for us, and in the process, lighten it for everyone else,” Rainin said. “We thought, if everyone could spend a little time with Babs, maybe things would feel just a little bit better.”