Here’s a juicy nugget for you trivia buffs: The first San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opened not in San Francisco but in Los Angeles. That minor design flaw aside, festival founder Deborah Kaufman has nothing but fond memories of her 1981 maiden effort.
Before then, no one had held a communitywide Jewish film festival anywhere, ever. But Kaufman’s endeavor enjoyed instant success. And with the upcoming 25th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival running from July 21 to Aug. 8, organizers and fans have been surfing waves of nostalgia as they look back on a quarter-century of reel appeal.
Today, the S.F. Jewish Film Festival is the biggest event of its kind in the world. In addition to the summer festival, organizers screen films and run programs year-round. That’s a far cry from the first opening-night party, held during Passover week, when caterers mistakenly served pita bread rather than matzah, causing a rabbi in attendance to scold Kaufman.
“It was just one of those moments,” laughs Kaufman, who is now a Berkeley-based independent filmmaker. “It was an exploration of my own Jewish identity.”
That sort of chametz malfunction is one way to explore Jewish identity. Those closest to the festival believe the films screened over the years have addressed Jewish identity in a thousand and one ways.
Janis Plotkin, who ran the festival with Kaufman before replacing her as director, recalls one of her most memorable moments from the early days of the festival.
“I saw [Josh Waletsky’s] ‘Image Before My Eyes,’ one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” she says. “It’s about Polish Jews between the wars and before the decimation of Jewish culture. Part of my family heritage is Polish Jewish, and my only association had been as victims and emaciated bodies. This was an opportunity to find pride in who I was. It was an ‘aha’ moment.”
Peter Stein, the current festival executive director, adds, “What started out as an alternative way of experiencing Jewish culture was the catalyst for what is now a movement. There are today about 100 Jewish film festivals around the world. That says to me these festivals create a necessary space to experience and argue about contemporary Jewish identity and to celebrate the way film can mirror and enlarge our view of ourselves.”
Before Stein joined the festival staff, he was an enthusiastic attendee. “I have a memory of being in the line outside the Castro Theater in the mid-1990s,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Who are all these people?’ It looked like San Francisco: multi-ethnic, diverse in age, and I realized as I went down the line it was my crowd.”
Nancy Fishman, the festival’s program director, fondly recalls the panel discussions that follow screenings. “I remember watching Janis Plotkin and Deborah Kaufman introducing panels. [I was] thinking how smart they were. It was exciting to be in a room on the cutting edge of culture.”
That’s an apt description of Kaufman’s original intention with the S.F. Jewish Film Festival.
A Bay Area native, Kaufman grew up the daughter of secular Zionists (her mother, poet Shirley Kaufman, made aliyah to Israel years ago). Steeped in Jewish and Israeli culture herself, Kaufman says, “There were a few ways to identify as a Jew: through synagogue, through Israel or Holocaust remembrance. But there was nothing in the Jewish community that turned me on, that I could relate to.”
So the young law school graduate, almost as a lark, fixed on the “idea of using film — the medium of my generation — to create community and explore Jewish identity.”
That first event, called simply the Jewish Film Festival, was actually a touring event co-sponsored by Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum, the American Film Institute and the UCLA Film Archives. The tour made several stops, starting at UCLA and including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and New York’s 92nd Street Y.
“After the first festival, it was so clear there was a huge audience,” recalls Kaufman. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it another year.'”
That’s when Kaufman brought in Plotkin, then an activist with the American Jewish Committee. “[Kaufman] came to me trying to build a database,” remembers Plotkin. “As she told me about the project, it sounded really interesting. I was a community organizer, and I thought in many ways film was one of the best ways to organize community.”
Together, the two did “some crazy things,” as Kaufman recalls, one being a midnight screening of the silent German classic “The Golem,” complete with an all-new rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.
The festival quickly earned a reputation for controversial programming, booking films that were critical of Israel or open to unconventional views of Jewish life. Often they brought in Palestinian filmmakers, which never failed to spark intense discussion.
“I was always comfortable programming controversial films,” says Kaufman “I wasn’t worried about criticisms of Israel because I grew up a Zionist and I’m strongly attached to the country. I wanted a different tilt.”
That tilt almost tilted over when the festival screened “Inner Tour,” a 2001 Israeli film about Palestinians from the West Bank touring Israel for the first time.
“We had on stage the Palestinian co-producer,” recalls Plotkin. “You could hear a pin drop. The Palestinian had never been in front of an audience of Jews. His voice was quivering, talking about having guns and tanks pointed at his apartment in Ramallah.”
In the early years, Kaufman, Plotkin and their team chose from among only a few dozens films, but by
the time Kaufman departed in 1993, they were
pre-screening hundreds.
“The difference was we started before the age of video,” says Kaufman. “We were looking at 35 mm films. [With the advent of video], we were deluged by films.”
Some of those were by independent filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt of San Francisco. Over the years, he has become a familiar player at the festival thanks to such films as “Human Remains” (1998) and “King of the Jews” (2000). He, too, started off his association with the festival as a moviegoer rather than moviemaker.
“It was amazing to be in this huge auditorium mostly full of Jews,” says Rosenblatt. “There was a certain level of camaraderie. I remember an amazing sense of celebration when we saw ‘The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.’ That was an incredible screening.”
Remembers Plotkin, “We were always happy and excited. Every year we were breaking new ground and doing it outside the normal realm of Jewish life. It was a real sense of discovery of a community.”
Both Kaufman and Plotkin agree the festival’s road trip to Moscow in 1990 was a major coup. It turned into the biggest Jewish event ever held in the Russian capital, with more than 50,000 attendees.
“The Moscow festival was a highlight of my life,” says Plotkin. “The funny thing is, the mayor tried to stop it because the new regime had given away his summer dacha to a rabbinical scholar. But the mayor showed up on opening night anyway, drank champagne and ate our cake.”
As a filmmaker, Rosenblatt always felt welcome at the festival. “It’s one of the friendliest and most hospitable festivals,” he says. “They have this Friday-night dinner I’ve been going to for the past eight years. It’s given me a real sense of connection to the Jewish community, a sense of history and culture heritage. And because I don’t do the religious holidays, it’s my own kind of holiday.”
Rosenblatt is not alone. Plotkin, Kaufman and Stein all say the Jewish Film Festival has been de facto “high holidays” for many secular Jews who would otherwise have little Jewish content in their lives.
After 13 years with the festival, Kaufman partnered with the festival board chair, Alan Smitow (her life partner), to make films. Her first, “Blacks and Jews,” earned a spot on the festival calendar in 1997. “That was amazingly gratifying,” she says, “to be on that other end. There’s nothing like having your film shown at a sold-out audience at the Castro.”
Plotkin, too, has since moved on, working with the Mill Valley Film Festival for six months each year and teaching film at Stanford University.
But every year at this time Plotkin, like Kaufman, can be spotted in line at the Castro waiting for another cinematic thrill ride at the Jewish Film Festival.
As she says, “That’s where I see my friends.”