Film Clips & Trailers
SFJFF Festival Trailer
Directed by Bay Area filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards and director of The Tribe (SFJFF 2006). How many of the images can you identify? There are more than 40, and (nearly) all of them come from films that have appeared in past editions of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
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A Hebrew Lesson
The process of learning a language is always fraught with humor, frustration—and pantomime. A Hebrew Lesson opens with a scene that might seem familiar, as Yoela, the teacher at a Hebrew immersion class (or ulpan) in Tel Aviv, introduces herself in Hebrew relying on simple body language.
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A Trip to Prague
Does everyone need to meet a nice Jewish girl? With striking illustrations and deadpan narration, this film relates a funny anecdote about the Jewish instinct to make a shiddach (fix-up).
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Anvil! The Story of Anvil
This wonderful and often hilarious documentary follows a once famous Canadian heavy metal band, founded in the 1970s by two nice Jewish boys, and still rocking on.
Arab Labor
Whether it leaves you in stitches or up in arms, this irreverent Israeli Arab sitcom will bring you the Middle East conflict as you’ve never seen it before.
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At Home in Utopia
“The Coops,” cooperative Bronx apartments, symbolized an experiment in justice and equality. Tthis documentary portrays the workers who embraced communist, socialist and union movements.
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Bilin My Love
An important documentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen through one village’s struggle, using stunning guerilla aesthetics that capture unique moments of desperation, courage and fear.
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Black Over White
Black Over White chronicles the Ethiopian concert tour by Israeli-Ethiopian-Yemenite world-beat band The Idan Raichel Project.
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Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
Roberta Grossman’s first-rate documentary Blessed Is the Match, narrated by three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, is a paean to Hungarian resistance fighter and poet Hannah Senesh.
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Description of a Memory
Nearly 50 years after Chris Marker’s landmark 1961 documentary about Israel, Description of a Struggle, Dan Geva’s film engages with and pays tribute to its progenitor. Clearly Marker’s film left a lasting impression on the Israeli-born Geva, who uses images from the original film as a springboard to uncovering the many changes that have taken place in the physical and political landscapes of Israel and in its inhabitants.
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Emotional Arithmetic
A surprise visitor (Gabriel Byrne) triggers turbulent childhood memories of love and loss among war survivors (Susan Sarandon, Max von Sydow) in this achingly beautiful story set in modern Quebec. Co-starring Christopher Plummer.
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Eyes Wide Open
What does Israel mean to American Jews today? Veteran filmmaker Paula Weiman-Kelman goes behind the scenes of the ubiquitous bus tours that clog Israel’s ancient landmarks to explore the complex relationship between the American Jewish community and the 60-year-old Jewish state.
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Facing Windows
Two love stories: one from the 1940s between two Italian Jews and one contemporary story of neighbors who watch each other furtively from facing windows across a street.
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The Film Class
The Film Class explores the black Bedouins’ legacy of slavery through the astonished eyes of the current generation of women.
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In the Family
In this gripping documentary, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick turns the camera on herself as she struggles with an impossible choice—–remove her healthy breasts and ovaries or risk a staggeringly high likelihood of developing aggressive cancer. Followed by filmmaker Q&A.
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In Treatment
Imagine you are in therapy and your shrink is a thoughtful, badly dressed bear of a man who resembles Israeli actor Assi Dayan. Then imagine that when the transference and countertransference are flying so fast you can see trails, your shrink goes to talk to his shrink—who happens to be the all-knowing Israeli grande dame of cinema, Gila Almagor.
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Jerusalem Is Proud to Present
In 2006, Jerusalem hosted the World Pride events, which were planned to culminate in a gay pride parade. Nitzan Gilady’s award-winning documentary weaves together the passions of gay rights activists and religious Jews, Muslims and Christians who oppose them.
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Love Comes Lately
Three intertwined stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. At the center is the elderly writer Max (Otto Tausig), whose vivid imagination merges life with fiction. Co-starring Rhea Perlman & Tovah Feldshuh.
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Max Minsky and Me
A fun, family-oriented comedy about a bookish 12-year-old girl in modern Berlin who neglects her bat mitzvah studies in order to become a basketball player.
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Miss Universe 1929—Lisl Goldarbeiter, A Queen in Wien
The dramatic life of a Jewish Viennese beauty queen as recorded in home movies by the man who loved her from a distance—her cousin.
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My Father's Palestinian Slave
This intimate documentary portrays the unlikely friendship between an undocumented Palestinian worker and his Israeli employer, veteran peace activist Moshe Amirav.
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The Old Stores
A wistful portrait of Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s quirky small shops—a button store, an (analog) watch repair shop, an old-fashioned barber—as they wrestle with their fast-paced surroundings and contemplate change in the face of modernization.
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Operation Mural Casablanca 1961
Operation Mural is the incredible but true story of the smuggling of 530 Jewish Moroccan children to Israel, under the guise of a holiday trip to Switzerland, in the spring of 1961.
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Out of Focus
Out of Focus captures the creativity of Ohad Naharin, Israel’s “rock star” choreographer and director of Batsheva Dance Company.
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Perlasca, An Italian Hero
What makes a man risk his life for people he doesn’t know? Perlasca is a taut drama about one Italian man’s remarkable courage in saving 5,200 Hungarian Jews.
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Praying In Her Own Voice
An excellent documentary about the contentious struggle of Women of the Wall for the right to wear prayer shawls and read Torah scrolls aloud at the Western Wall.
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The Quest for the Missing Piece
The Quest for the Missing Piece is a hilarious romp through the debate over circumcision.
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Roads
Thirteen-year-old Ismayil searches for a new life for himself and his younger brother outside the Arab drug slums of the Israeli city of Lod.
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Saved By Deportation: An Unknown Odyssey of Polish Jews
With wit and charm, this documentary follows two lively eighty-somethings back to the scene where, by a fluke of history, they survived the Holocaust: in Stalin’s Siberian gulag.
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The Secrets
Naomi and Michelle come to Safed to study in an orthodox women’s seminary. While seeking spiritual knowledge, they embark upon a secret journey of rituals and forbidden love.
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Sixty Six
A London boy’s bar mitzvah party is threatened by a coinciding soccer match in this charming nostalgic comedy. Helena Bonham Carter and Stephen Rea co-star.
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Stalags–Holocaust and Pornography in Israel
During the early 1960s, a new pulp lit emerged in Israel. “Stalags” pocketbooks featured camp prisoners sexually assaulted by buxom SS officers. Controversial and popular, Stalags were condemned as porn. This documentary asks, what did they really mean?
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Strangers
Handsome Eyal and knockout Rana meet by chance on a subway in Berlin. But he’s Israeli and she’s Palestinian—setting in motion a passionate story exploring the boundaries of nationality, culture and the heart.
To See if I'm Smiling
To See If I’m Smiling tells the powerful stories of six Israeli women soldiers who did their army service in combat units in the occupied territories.
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Two Lives Plus One
In this comedic drama, a Parisian schoolteacher’s newfound independence puts a strain on her conventional family when an attractive publisher takes an interest in her writing.
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Volevo Solo Vivere (I Only Wanted to Live)
A unique window into the Italian Jewish Holocaust experience, this documentary features testimonies of nine Italians who survived Auschwitz, including Liliana Segre, who will be present for an onstage interview after the screening.