September 2008San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is World’s LargestBy Jim Van BuskirkLast month, San Francisco hosted its 28th Jewish Film Festival, featuring 70 films from 19 countries shown at five Bay Area venues. The Festival’s opening trailer, by local filmmaker and former Potrero Hill resident Tiffany Shlain – who founded the Webby Awards and most recently directed The Tribe – included excerpts from more than 40 Jewish films. Executive Director Peter L. Stein and Program Director Nancy K. Fishman co-curated special programs on Italian-Jewish cinema and diversity in Israel, which celebrated the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, as well as a special selection of LGBT films. A festival highlight was Susan Sarandon’s remarkable portrayal as the emotionally fragile Melanie Winters in Emotional Arithmetic, Paolo Barzman’s film adaptation of Matt Cohen’s novel. Living with David, her former history professor, now curmudgeonly husband (Christopher Plummer), their son, Benjamin (Roy Dupuis), and grandson, Timmy (Dakota Goyo), Winters nervously anticipates the arrival of Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow), whom she has long idealized. Bronski brings an unanticipated guest: Christopher Lewis (Gabriel Byrne). The arrival of these two figures sends the household into turmoil. Over the course of the weekend it’s revealed that 35 years ago Bronski had sacrificed himself for the young Winters and Lewis at Drancy, a French detention center outside Paris, which was used by the Nazis as a way station to Auschwitz. “Over the course of a momentous weekend, all are forced to reassess the choices and compromises each has made to cope with their ruptured lives and the mysterious scars the past has left behind,” wrote Peter Stein of the 99 minute, English-language film. The screening of Emotional Arithmetic, the Castro Theater’s closing night film, was followed by a question and answer period with director Barzman. Drancy also makes an appearance in Being Jewish in France, a 2007, 185-minute documentary written and directed by Yves Jeuland. The transit camp was created in August 1941 by Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government to house more than 4,000 Parisian Jews. It was taken over by the Nazis in July 1943 for use as a deportation center. During the opening credits of each of Being Jewish in France’s two parts – part one is 73 minutes long; part two is 112 – the lilting refrain of Charles Trenet’s “Douce France” is sung in Yiddish. France’s relationship to its Jewish residents has been long and complicated; France was the first country to grant Jews citizenship after their revolutionary cries in Yiddish of “Vive la France” during the 18th century. The film chronicles the controversial Dreyfus Affair, which inflamed passions and anti-Semitic hatred at the end of the 19th century. In the aftermath Jews became more assimilated – especially after serving in the French military during World War I – seemingly solidifying their French identity. Yet during World War II the Vichy government’s deathly deportations were conducted even before they were ordered by France’s German occupiers. The film continues through the 1960s, depicting France’s absorption of Sephardic Jews from Arab countries in the 1960s, especially the Algerian “pieds-noirs.” Using rare archival footage, combined with contemporary interviews with leading French historians, politicians, and intellectuals, the film is a rich portrait of an ever-evolving landscape. The film’s French title, Comme un Juif en France (like a Jew in France) is taken from the French expression Hereux comme un dieu en France. The French narration, with English subtitles, is by Mathieu Almaric, star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The documentary is being distributed by the National Center for Jewish Film.
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