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Filtered By: SFJFF 2012 Clear All

A.K.A. Doc Pomus

A.K.A. Doc Pomus

This musically rich biography pays homage to Doc Pomus, the legendary Brill Building songwriter who authored such enduring rock-and-roll hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas” and dozens of others for talents as diverse as Dion, Elvis Presley, Dr. John and B.B. King. Like so many of his R&B songwriting colleagues, Doc Pomus was a city-bred Jew. Born Jerome Felder, he spent a lifetime overcoming both visible and private pain through his extraordinary songs. In this spirited documentary, he is revealed as an American original. [MINIGUIDE 94/100]

Ben Lee: Catch My Disease

Ben Lee: Catch My Disease

At the age of 14 a nice Jewish boy from Sydney, Australia, became a rock star, and at 16, an international pop star. His name is Ben Lee and like his music, he's still evolving. Featuring interviews with his former girlfriend Claire Danes and friends Winona Ryder, Jason Schwartzman and Michelle Williams, Ben Lee: Catch My Disease is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist’s evolution. [MINIGUIDE 67/70]

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

This modern-day Romeo-and-Juliet tale is set in Israel and Gaza. After witnessing a suicide bombing, a girl writes a letter to Gaza seeking understanding and sends it into the Gaza Sea in a bottle. It’s found by a young Gaza man who emails back. Though they live less than 100 kilometers apart, they communicate only through emails and letters. While they often disagree, their relationship deepens as the political situation worsens. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

Dorfman in Love

Dorfman in Love

By all appearances, single 28-year-old accountant Deb Dorfman had embraced a life of suburban mediocrity. When a promise to house-sit for her long-time crush—a hunky war correspondent—uproots her from her sheltered San Fernando Valley home and thrusts her into the hub of a newly revitalized downtown LA, Deb’s world is poised to crack open. Transformation is inevitable, but is love? Elliot Gould co-stars in this delightfully quirky indie romantic comedy. [MINIGUIDE 70/70]

Already the winner of Israel’s top film prizes, this superb documentary thriller begins just after the death of the filmmaker’s 95-year-old grandmother. Sifting through a lifetime of accumulated possessions in her Tel Aviv apartment, Goldfinger makes an astonishing discovery: the deep friendship between his grandparents and Leopold von Mildenstein, the Nazi predecessor of Adolf Eichmann. The Flat is a complex, penetrating look at a different kind of Holocaust denial altogether. [MINIGUIDE 68/70]

Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story

Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story

Take a riveting journey into the intrepid exploits of the leader of Operation Entebbe. On July 4, 1976, 30-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan (Yoni) Netanyahu led the daring operation to rescue the 103 Israelis who were held hostage in Uganda. Filmmakers Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot delicately weave the epic with the intimate in this personal story of a young man who dedicated his life to the service of his people. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

Marty Glickman was an inspiration to millions. Featuring interviews with Bob Costas, Bill Bradley and Marv Albert, this documentary brilliantly captures Glickman’s life as an athlete, a pioneering sports broadcaster (he coined the term “swish”), and as a passionate advocate of sports as a means of transcending divisions created by race, class and religion. If you loved The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, this movie is for you. [MINIGUIDE 69/70]

Flamenco, the Gypsy-, Jewish-, Arab- and Andalusian-inspired art form, is loved around the world. But what happens when a white boy with Alabama roots falls in love with flamenco and becomes a renowned flamenco guitarist? Gypsy Davy tells the story of David Jones aka David Serva from the perspective of the five women in his life and his children—one of them, the filmmaker, who was abandoned by the musician when she was a year old. With searing honesty and wry humor, Serva’s daughter Rachel unravels a series of tangled lives and forges new possibilities. [MINIGUIDE 94/100]

Harbour of Hope

Harbour of Hope

In the spring of 1945 Irene, Ewa and Joe were among the nearly 30,000 survivors liberated from German concentration camps by the Red Cross and sent to the peaceful harbor town of Malmö, Sweden. Here they started life again. The survivors heartbreaking, yet life-affirming personal life journeys culminate in an emotionally powerful film about dealing with repressed wartime memories, the importance of a helping hand and finding a “harbor of hope.” [MINIGUIDE 72/70]

Hello I Must be Going

Hello I Must be Going

Celebrated character actress Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures, television’s Two and Half Men) gives a breakout performance as Amy Minsky, a thirtysomething divorcee, back under the suburban Connecticut roof of her parents (a wonderful Blythe Danner and John Rubenstein). Spending her days in sweatpants watching old Marx Brothers movies, Amy has put her life on hold, waiting for something or someone to ignite the spark lacking in her life.Sundance 2012, Opening Night Film[MINIGUIDE 68/70]

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

Preceded by Woody Before AllenAfter discovering the journals of his mysterious grandmother Maroussia, amiable English director Daniel Edelstyn sets off to Ukraine where he makes a startling discovery. In his family’s impoverished Russian village, he comes upon his great-grandfather’s vodka factory. Edelstyn returns to the UK with the wide-eyed ambition of importing his own brand of spirits and finds his life forever altered by the woman he never met.[MINIGUIDE 65/70]

Lily and Nira share a terrible bond: They were both victims of a serial rapist in the 1970s. A chance encounter brings them together 20 years after they identified their attacker in a police lineup. Based on real-life events, Invisible builds slowly, like a crackling bonfire. Veteran documentary filmmaker Michal Aviad makes innovative use of historical footage in her first narrative film and explores the aftershocks of sexual violence with surprising restraint. [MINIGUIDE 72/70]

Just 45 Minutes from Broadway

Just 45 Minutes from Broadway

This highly dramatic comedy is legendary independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom’s tribute to actors and the families who endure them. One daughter, the only member of the family to reject a life in show business, brings home her “civilian” fiancé (Judd Nelson) after a year of estrangement. What follows is a day and night fraught with drama as family members, self-consciously and with great gusto, play out the drama of their own lives. [MINIGUIDE 72/70]

The Kingdom of Survival

The Kingdom of Survival

M.A. Littler’s film is one part travelogue and one part paean to eight radical thinkers—including Noam Chomsky, Joe Bageant and Bob Meisenbach—who have tried to make the world a better place. If you are uncomfortable with questioning capitalism, then stay home and check your investments online. If you are interested in questioning authority as a form of tikkun olam, then this beautifully filmed exploration of ideas is for you. [MINIGUIDE 70/70]

The Law in These Parts

The Law in These Parts

Inventive Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (Inner Tour, SFJFF 2001; James’ Journey to Jerusalem) conducts an award-winning investigation into the legal system that has governed Palestinians in the West Bank since the 1967 war. Interviewing the judges and lawyers entrusted with interpreting the law, the filmmaker raises the core issue: Can a modern democracy impose a prolonged military occupation on another people while retaining its core democratic values? [MINIGUIDE 67/70]

My Dad is Baryshnikov

My Dad is Baryshnikov

Preceded by Catherine the GreatIn 1986 Moscow, Boris Fishkin is a scrawny and struggling 14-year-old student at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy with a sideline selling Soviet kitsch on the black market, when a bootleg video convinces him he is actually the gifted child of the great Mikhail Baryshnikov—a dose of patrimonial chutzpah that does wonders. But is Fishkin really the Soviet Billy Elliot? Time will tell in this charming comedy of underdogs and new beginnings. [MINIGUIDE 71/70)

Tight, edgy Israeli film noir sets off a ring of betrayal and deception after a radiant young Haifa artist has an affair behind the back of her much older science professor husband. An homage to the thrillers of Hitchcock past, the story features a heaping dose of repressed Jewish guilt and builds to an unexpected twist with the professor and his mother forming an unlikely alliance. [MINIGUIDE 66/70]

Preceded by B-BoyThough set during the Second Lebanon War of 2006, this coming-of-age story from Israeli director Maya Kenig evokes the offbeat charms of Juno. Libby, a shy 13-year-old California resident, is sent to live with her father in Israel, only to discover that he’s a well-intentioned sham. Launched on a modern-day quixotic adventure, they discover a shared talent for telling “off-white lies.” Kenig’s laconic storytelling highlights her actors’ considerable gifts. [MINIGUIDE 69/70]

One Day After Peace

One Day After Peace

Ten years ago Robi Damelin’s son, a soldier in the Israeli army, was killed by a Palestinian sniper. Instead of seeking revenge, Robi sets off on a journey to find forgiveness in herself. Originally from South Africa, she travels home to investigate the methods used for ending apartheid, hoping that she can bring the same peacekeeping tactics to Israel to begin the healing process and end the cycle of violence. [MINIGUIDE 70/70]

How would one go about approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that transcends the history and politics and delves deeper into our shared humanity? Not an easy task, but one that writer-director Lorraine Levy has achieved in the remarkable new film, The Other Son. The high concept premise is ingenious: an Israeli teen discovers that he is not the biological son of his parents and was switched at birth with the child of a Palestinian family. The lives of both families are shattered by this revelation and they are forced to reconsider their identities, values and beliefs. A must-see. [MINIGUIDE 100/100)

Yakov Fidelman struggles to hold on to the antique restoration workshop that has been his life’s work. After his longtime business partner dies, Fidelman rejects his estranged son Noah’s idea to close the business and build an apartment complex on the site. Anchored by Sasson Gabay’s (The Band’s Visit) mesmerizing performance, Yossi Madmony’s first feature yields a complex set of frayed character relations for which restoration proves an apt metaphor. [MINIGUIDE 70/70]

Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir

Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir

Preceded by Seven Minutes in the Warsaw GhettoRoman Polanski is as famous for his private life as he is for his extraordinary film career, notes friend Andrew Braunsberg in this intimate conversation shot while Polanski was in Switzerland fighting extradition to the US. A wide-ranging discussion of his life and career ensues, including formative childhood experiences as a Polish Jew in World War II, in an enthralling narrative tracing a life utterly distinctive and deeply resonant with its turbulent age. [MINIGUIDE 73/70]

Six Million and One

Six Million and One

Israeli filmmaker David Fisher initiates a road trip that becomes an extraordinary family psychodrama for his siblings at the site of the World War II concentration camp where their father Joseph was interned as a young boy. Traveling in a van they laugh at themselves and question their own willingness to go deeper into their family legacy. Stunningly beautiful forests and meadows silently conceal the reality of their father’s untold story. [MINIGUIDE 71/70]

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