SF Jewish Film Festival 2018 Preview

You don’t have to be Jewish, as the saying goes. The 38^th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opens this week, screening a great variety of films, nearly seventy in all, from twenty-three countries. Roughly half are documentaries. Most are secular in nature. There are profiles of celebrities – like the opening and closing films, about Gilda Radner and Sammy Davis, Jr. respectively – and others about famous and not-so-famous artists, activists, heroes, high achievers, and interesting unknowns. There’s also a look back at the home of some of the greatest jazz ever recorded, Blue Note Records; an investigation into the storied Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, and an examination of what the world might be like without meat. Narrative pictures include a neo-noir murder mystery, a thriller, some historical fiction, and even the first couple episodes of a highly touted new Israeli comedy series. While the primary venue will be the Castro Theater in San Francisco, films will also be screened in Palo Alto, Oakland, Albany, and San Rafael. At a number of the screenings, as an extra treat, the filmmakers and/or stars of the movies will be present for some Q&A.

I’ve had the opportunity to see advance copies of a few of the festival offerings. I want to give you capsule reviews of some of these, and also highlight a few others that I’m interested in, and maybe you will be too. Even if you are nowhere near the Bay Area or simply can't get to this festival, you may want to take note  of the films that interest you - as many will be playing festivals elsewhere, some will be released commercially later this year and many will eventually be available on streaming services. A link to the SFJFF website is provided below.

Of the festival offerings that I’ve seen, my favorite has to be Wajib, a narrative (fictional) comedy/drama about a Palestinian Christian family in contemporary Nazareth, the predominately Arab city in Northern Israel believed to be the childhood home of Jesus. Shadi, an architect who now lives in Rome, has returned to Nazareth for his younger sister’s upcoming wedding. He is accompanying his father Abu around town to personally deliver several hundred wedding invitations (said to be a Nazarene custom). This means they have to spend all day together driving around, having tea with distant relatives, family friends and other invitees; but the generational conflict between the sophisticated son and his hidebound, irascible dad (likely one of the reasons that Shadi is living in Italy) keeps bubbling up, in ways that are revealing, often hilarious, and ultimately quite poignant. Mohammad Bakri, who plays the father, and Saleh Bakri as the son – the actors are actually father and son – are just terrific. Palestinian writer-director Annemarie Jacir does a nice job moving the story along, keeping us from getting claustrophobic with the two principals in their old Volvo, by taking us into the living rooms of several of the invitees, all of whom are quirky characters in their own right and provide a lot of local color. We also get an inkling of what it’s like to be an Arab (even a Christian one) living in Israel, with its opposing undercurrents of accommodation and rage.  Just a lovely movie.

Budapest Noir is a quite creditable neo-noir film from Hungary, co-sponsored by the Film Noir Foundation, presenter of the Noir City festivals in San Francisco and other cities. It features a hunky, raincoat-clad newspaper reporter named Szigmond Gordon as protagonist, investigating the murder of a young woman in a seedy neighborhood, with officials suspiciously trying to quash a proper investigation, a high-class brothel with good-looking dames, dumb but brutal thugs, and other familiar genre tropes - plus cool, noirish photography. It’s 1936, and an anti-Semitic, fascist fervor is rising in Hungary. Basically, this is solid, hard-boiled detective stuff transplanted from Chicago, LA, New York and even Vienna to an increasingly fetid prewar Budapest. Sure, the style and story are derivative, and Babylon Berlin may be better, but it’s interesting and engaging enough. Square jawed Krisztián Kolovratnik, plays the tough, hulking, stubble-cheeked Szigmond as an intrepid if humorless guy trying to get to bottom of it all and solve the murder. Something about the way he strode around bothered me, but my wife had no such problem.

I found the documentary Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes quite fascinating, but then while I’m no expert, I do like jazz. Blue Note was founded in 1939 by two Jewish emigres from Nazi Germany, Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, and within a decade it was the premier label for a new wave of jazz musicians that came to dominate the post-war scene. bebop, and especially hard-bop and post-bop innovators like Thelonius Monk, Art Blakey, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, to name a few, all recorded for Blue Note.  If these names and this topic sound boring or uninteresting to you, you’ll probably want to skip this movie. On the other hand, if you’re intrigued, I think you’ll love the film. It features clips of performances and other samples of the music, and commentary by the likes of producer Don Was (now president of the revitalized company) Shorter, Hancock, Lou Donaldson, Norah Jones (herself a recording artist for the new Blue Note), Robert Glasker, and more. Some of the music performed or heard on the soundtrack includes Round About Midnight (Thelonius Monk), Somethin Else (Miles Davis), Un Poco Loco (Bud Powell), Blue Train (John Coltraine), Sidewinder (Lee Morgan), Song For My Father (Horace Silver)and Don’t Know Why (Norah Jones). All told, it’s a lovely present to jazz fans.

The City Without Jews is film with a fascinating backstory. For one thing, this silent film was lost for ninety years until a copy was discovered in 2015.  It has now been beautifully restored. Further,  the film is now seen as prescient, anticipating by a decade the rise of State anti-Semitism, which soon led to the holocaust. Produced in Austria in 1924, the story was actually intended as a satiric account set in a far distant future (1976), during a devastating depression, with high unemployment, unrest, etc.  Soon, anti-Semitic fever infects the population, eventually resulting in the expulsion of all the Jews. This doesn’t turn out so well – in fact, things get so much worse that the Jews are invited back, with apologies. It was never considered great cinema, but it is an interesting artifact, particularly knowing what we now know. My advance screener had no musical accompaniment for some reason, which made it increasingly difficult to watch in its entirety (87 minutes).  However, the SFJFF presentation at the Castro Theater, the first screening of the restored movie outside of Austria, will be accompanied by an original score performed live by Sascha Jacobsen and the Musical Art Quintet. It should be quite the event.

Playing God is an apt title for this documentary about Kenneth Feinberg, the disaster czar, who has been called upon to oversee and administer victim compensation funds after events like the 9/11 suicide attacks, the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010, the Newtown-Sandy Hook shootings of December 2012, and several others. He also acted as Special Master, under appointment by the US Treasury, to determine the legality of a proposal, by the underfunded Central States Pension fund of the Teamsters Union, to drastically cut the pensions of retired teamsters – and a significant portion of Playing God follows Feinberg as he holds meetings with the rank and file to consider their concerns.  The magnitude of the tasks taken on by this guy is unbelievable. In the BP oil spill case, he was appointed administrator of a $20 Billion fund to compensate victims, eventually receiving and determining over a million claims! It was the job of Feinberg and his team to determine both the validity of the claims and the appropriate amount of relief to be paid to each legitimate claimant. After 9/11, it was Feinberg’s job to determine the appropriate level of compensation for survivors of the victims. How he did this was controversial, yet modeled after commonly used calculations in tort litigation cases - so compensation to families varied considerably based on things like income and age of the deceased. Feinberg comes across as very smart, very thoughtful, unflappable, pragmatic and fair-minded. Yet the documentary itself feels flatfooted, making an interesting topic seem dull at times. One reason is that much of the time the filmmaker fails to give the audience sufficient insight about the controversies Feinberg is dealing with – or provides that information too far along in the story. I’m a retired lawyer and was often uncertain myself about such things.

Who Will Write Our History is a documentary I hoped to review, but I could not get the screener-link that I received to work. It’s a  tale about Jewish life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto before its total destruction, as revealed by a trove of documents recovered between 1946 and 1951. The material had been collected by an activist group within that horror-filled death trap, which they then buried for posterity knowing that most everyone there was doomed, and as an answer to the question: “Will the Germans write our history, or will we?” Their story is told via the archival documents – photos, diaries, Nazi notices,  written narratives – and dramatic reenactments. Could be great.

To Dust is another film I was hoping to catch in advance. My interest was prompted in part by the presence of poet/actor Geza Rohrig as one of the two leads in the movie, the other being Mathew Broderick.  Rohrig gave an amazing and memorable performance in his previous movie Son of Saul, playing an Auschwitz inmate. Also, the story in this picture sounds wacky and interesting. Here’s part of the catalogue description: “Shmuel, a Hasidic cantor [Rohrig] walks into a community college bio class taught by Albert [Broderick] to learn about death. If you guessed this was the setup to a blasphemous joke, you’d be halfway there. What you might not expect is how assuredly this absurdist premise holds up as it shifts in tone from pitch-black comedy to odd couple zaniness to heartfelt poignancy. Struggling to process his wife’s death, Shmuel becomes fixated . . . ” and so on.

The SFJFF starts on Thursday evening July 19, 2018 and runs through Sunday August 5th. Information about screening locations, dates and times for these and all other festival offerings are available at the festival website. You can purchase tickets there, too.