potrero view

July 2009

Jewish Film Festival Opens this Month

By Jim Van Buskirk

 This month the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), the first and largest of its kind, will celebrate its 29th year of offering films, festivities, and discussion programs highlighting 5,769 years of Jewish culture.  Attracting more than 33,000 filmgoers, the SFJFF is world-renowned for the diversity and breadth of its audiences and films. This year’s festival takes place from July 23 to August 10 at five Bay Area venues: the Castro Theatre, San Francisco Jewish Community Center, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, CineArts@Palo Alto Square, and Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

The festival opens with Australian director Cathy Randall’s debut feature, Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger.  Newcomer Danielle Cantanzariti stars as Esther Blueberger, whose odyssey begins when she escapes her Bat Mitzvah party and is befriended by Sunni (Keisha Castle-Hughes), the effortlessly cool girl who is everything Esther thinks she wants to be, plus has a far hipper single mom (Toni Collette).  Closing night is The Wedding Song, a new film by Karin Albou set in Tunis in 1942.  With Allied bombs dropping and the Nazis marching in, Albou examines the intersection of Arab and Jewish cultures and female sexuality as it plays out between two teenage girlfriends – one Muslim, one Jewish – and the bond they’ve shared since childhood.

In between is a variety of features, documentaries, animated films, and shorts sure to interest gentiles and Jews alike.   In A Matter of Size, the Festival’s centerpiece offering, Herzl is a 340-pound chef still living with his mother and gaining pounds in his weight loss class, until he and his friends find salvation in an ancient and unlikely sport that celebrates size:  Sumo wrestling.  Examples of world cinema include the latest from Argentine director Daniel Burman, Empty Nest, in which a couple is forced to re-examine their staid relationship when their youngest leaves home.  Broken Lines is Sallie Aprahamian’s story set in London about the conflicts of keeping marital vows.  And in Shmuel Beru’s Zrubavel, a young boy dreams of becoming Israel ’s Spike Lee, seeking to rise above the traps of his troubled neighborhood while his grandfather holds his extended family together.

“Reel Change: Social Justice Films” offers a special series of films, including The Yes Men Fix the World by Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, who expose the crimes happening behind the scenes in Bhopal, New Orleans, and other locales.  This year’s documentaries include the return of Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, a look at anti-Semitism and the identity issues it fosters; and Chronicle of a Kidnap, in which Nurit Kedar follows Karnit Goldwasser, the wife of Ehud Goldwasser, one of two Israeli soldiers captured in 2006 by Hezbollah.

The animated feature Mary and Max, directed by Adam Elliot, is a bittersweet tale of a friendship between oddballs at their wit’s end with the world but at peace with each other, featuring the voices of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Jewtoons offers a program of animated short films from Israel and around the world.  SFJFF will present the American debut of the Puppet Folk Revival Band, a cult sensation in Israel, at a special event at CELLspace.

Local filmmaker Jenni Olson is represented with her elegiac short film, 575 Castro Street, featuring Harvey Milk’s camera store as recreated for the Gus Van Sant feature, Milk, with Milk’s own voice excerpted from the audiocassette he recorded “in the event of my death by assassination.”   SFJFF’s Freedom of Expression Award will be bestowed on film director Aviva Kempner, the founder of the Washington Jewish Film Festival, who has reviewed films for the past quarter century.  Premiering at the Festival is her new documentary, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, the humorous and eye-opening story of television pioneer Gertrude Berg, the creator, principal writer, and star of The Goldbergs, a popular radio show for 17 years, which became television’s first character-driven domestic situation comedy n 1949.

For ticket information:  866.55.TICKETS or www.sfjff.org.

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