Size matters. At least as far as the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is concerned. Maybe that’s why the festival this year will feature far more films than ever before — 70 in all.
That’s way up from last year’s record total of 54.
How did executive director Peter L. Stein and program director Nancy K. Fishman fit them all in? They simply lengthened the festival and added theaters.
It’s no surprise the lineup expanded. With the explosion of top-quality Jewish-themed film and TV, especially in Israel, this year Stein and Fishman adopted a “shop ’til you drop” attitude.
Says Stein, “There is a lot of excellent film being made on Jewish subject matter throughout the world, and we want to share more of it with our audiences. This year we considered more than 600 films, shorts and television programs, and when Nancy showed how many terrific titles were going to be left out, we decided to add slots.”
As always, the festival reserved its most prized “gets” for opening and closing nights. This year, the festival opens July 24 at the Castro Theatre with “Strangers,” an Israeli film about a romance between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman who meet on a train in Berlin during the 2006 soccer World Cup.
“Strangers” is a full-length version of co-directors Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv’s 2004 short film of the same name, which won Best Short at Sundance. This time, the directors turned their actors loose, allowing them to improvise much of their dialogue.
Fast forward to closing night, Aug. 11 in San Rafael, and director Paolo Barzman’s “Emotional Arithmetic.” The Canadian feature boasts a Hollywood A-list cast, including Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Max von Sydow.
It tells the story of a Jewish Quebecois woman (Sarandon) about to reunite with an elderly man (von Sydow) with whom she spent the war years in a transit camp near Paris.
In between, 114 screenings at five locations will entice viewers across the Bay Area. Dramas, documentaries and shorts top the marquee, along with salutes to noted filmmakers and a few mini-festivals within the festival.
Most intriguing is a special program of films focusing on Italian Jews during the Mussolini years.
Included is “Volevo Solo Vivere” (“I Only Wanted to Live”), a Steven Spielberg-produced documentary about Italian Jews who survived deportment and the death camps. One of those survivors, Liliana Segre, will make the journey from Italy to San Francisco to attend the screening and participate in a Q&A afterward.
With this year marking the 60th anniversary of
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Israel’s founding, the festival will feature many Israeli films, with a spotlight on diversity in the country. Several films about Israeli queer identity made the lineup, including “Jerusalem is Proud to Present,” a documentary about the aborted 2006 LGBT gay pride parade.
As always, the SFJFF honors key filmmakers who made an impact on global cinema. This year’s Freedom of Expression Award goes to Israeli-Hungarian documentary filmmaker Peter Forgacs. His work often involves deft editing of home movies and other archival footage. His “Miss Universe 1929,” about a Jewish Viennese beauty queen, will screen this year.
Also on the honor roll, Tel Aviv filmmaking brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann, who will be in town for screenings of several of their films (six in all). Among the films is “Stalags,” a documentary about a spate of sexually explicit dime novels that sprung up in Israel in the wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial.
There’s plenty more on tap. Films cover everything from heavy metal Jews (“Anvil”) to neurotic Jews (the original “In Treatment,” which inspired the HBO series), celebrated heroes like Hannah Senesh (“Blessed is the Match”) to the unsung heroes (“Perlasca” — about the Italian Schindler — and “We Were Exodus”).
Despite the “S.F.” in the name, the festival has regional scope, with screenings taking place all over the Bay Area. In addition to the familiar Castro Theatre in San Francisco, festival screenings take place at the Roda Theatre (in the Berkeley Rep complex), the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael and new for the South Bay, Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and the CineArts@Palo Alto Square.
Now in its 28th year, the SFJFF is one of the highlights of the Bay Area’s Jewish calendar. Many secular Jewish cineastes have told director Stein that the festival is the most “Jewish” thing they do all year.
A complete schedule of screenings will be available online Tuesday, June 24 at www.sfjff.org, along with detailed ticket and location info. But longtime attendees know the drill: The summer’s here and the time is right for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.