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Filtered By: SFJFF 2008 Clear All

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

It plays like a mockumentary—think This Is Spinal Tap in the frozen North—but this wonderful and often hilarious documentary follows the antics, on- and offstage, of a once famous Canadian heavy metal band, Anvil, founded in the 1970s by two Toronto school friends (and nice Jewish boys). Anvil had a megahit album in 1982, influencing a generation of metal bands; then, missteps and struggles. But Anvil rocks on.

Ashkenaz, a pithy but panoramic view of Israel’s “white” Jews, undermines any preconceived notions of Jewish ethnicity. Director Rachel Leah Jones, a Berkeley native, flits from experts and scholars to just plain folks to reveal a nonhomogeneous Ashkenazi population seen through the eyes of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis. It’s a fascinating study in diversity within a single word.

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh was a Hungarian Jewish resistance fighter, an optimist in the face of dire circumstances and a poet. Roberta Grossman’s first-rate documentary Blessed Is the Match, narrated by three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, is a paean to Hannah Senesh’s courage and creativity. This inspirational film features gorgeous images of parachutes floating gracefully in the air, like Senesh’s poem “Blessed Is the Match,” written days before her capture by the Nazis.

Description of a Memory

Description of a Memory

Chris Marker’s landmark documentary about Israel, Description of a Struggle, thoroughly examined, critiqued and predicted the newly created state’s past, present and future. Nearly 50 years later, director Dan Geva looks to answer many of the questions originally raised by Marker as he attempts to track down the people featured in Marker’s film, with surprising and emotionally complex results, in Description of a Memory.

Facing Windows features dual 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. The erotic tension between a sexy but routine-weary woman (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and her hunky Italian Clark Kent look-alike neighbor (Raoul Bova) gives way to quiet communication and a profound experience when together they befriend Davide , an elderly Jewish man (Massimo Girotti).

Verité filmmaker Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, 5 Days) hangs out in India’s Himalayan foothills with some of the 30,000 young Israeli men and women who annually escape there, take drugs and often “flip out” after their military service. We also meet the growing band of Israeli social workers and barefoot rabbis who have followed the “lost generation” to their Shangri-La to keep them from going off the edge.

Four Questions For a Rabbi

Four Questions For a Rabbi

About This Film

Filmmaker Joanna Rudnick was 27 years old when she discovered she had BRCA—a genetic mutation that is particularly high among Ashkenazi Jewish women. We join Rudnick as she struggles with an impossible decision—whether to remove her healthy breasts and ovaries or risk a staggeringly high likelihood of developing a deadly cancer. The result is a powerful and gripping documentary that is as life-affirming as it is heartbreaking.

It Kinda Scares Me

It Kinda Scares Me

a drama teacher documents his at-risk youth project and everything gets personal.

Naomi, daughter of a revered rabbi, comes to Safed—where the mystical texts of the Kabala were received—to study in an orthodox women’s seminary. Eagerly diving into serious Torah study, she catches the eye of the flirtatious Michelle. Assigned to bring meals to the mysterious Anouk (Fanny Ardant), ill and seeking spiritual redemption, Michelle and Naomi embark upon a secret journey of purifying rituals and forbidden love.

A father’s mysterious disappearance throws his family into a spiritual crisis in this engrossing, beautifully acted drama set in modern Jerusalem. Uncertain if Eli is dead or alive, his family copes with their confusion in ways that test their faith and love. Wife Alma, a secular Jew, chafes when her observant in-laws insist on ritual prayers (tehilim), while her young sons embark on a religious scheme that precipitates a moral crisis.

Tulip Time--The Rise and Fall of the Trio Lescano

Tulip Time--The Rise and Fall of the Trio Lescano

Dutch Jewish sisters Sandra, Giuditta and Caterinetta Lescano, known as Trio Lescano, were the Italian equivalent of the Andrews Sisters. They were immensely popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s until the Italian fascist ideology forced them into silence. Tulip Time is a fascinating profile of the swinging Trio Lescano, who went from being circus performers to darlings of the Fascist elite to pariahs because they were Jews.

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