Platform

Eavesdropping: the year in quotes

Opening today: two weeks of reflection on the Year in Film and the Decade in Film by Bay Area critics, writers and filmmakers. Below are some of the pithier thoughts by Bay Area industry stalwarts (and a few select others) as quoted in a variety of publications, from the New York Times to Variety to SF360.org. We know this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the Bay Area’s impact on the national/international filmscape: Please offer your own quotables, or collected wit/wisdom, in the Comment Box at the article’s end.

topics: activism, actors, bay area, directors, diy, documentary, jewish cinema

Take Two

Shamir’s "Defamation" is a vintage documentary dust-up

Reminiscent of Marcel Ophuls’ fearless provocations in Hotel Terminus (1988), Yoav Shamir breaks every rule of polite documentary filmmaking in Defamation. The Israeli director audibly challenges his subjects’ statements (off-camera, but still palpably present) and keeps the camera running beyond a “natural” cut-off point until the audience becomes uncomfortable and the interviewees reveal their lunacy or idiocy. The irony is that Ophuls was chiseling away at the lies and complacency obscuring Klaus Barbie’s career as Gestapo chief in Lyon and postwar U.S. agent, while Shamir is questioning whether Jews today use the Holocaust to define themselves to an unhealthy degree. In both cases, the result is an endlessly entertaining and discomfiting film.

topics: activism, directors, documentary film, jewish cinema

Experience

S.F. Jewish Film Festival rules in favor of social justice

At first blush, this year looks a lot like last year in the extended Jewish community. Israel’s draining occupation of the West Bank and incursions into Gaza continue unabated, while Hamas ratchets its influence in the Palestinian street. The specter of an Iran with nuclear capabilities edges closer, providing ammo for Israel’s center-right supporters. Closer to home, the deep recession has American Jews as nervous as their neighbors. Meanwhile, a tentpole of 20th-century Jewish identity, the Holocaust, recedes another step into the fog of history.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, jewish cinema, political film

In Production

Kaufman and Snitow zoom in on debate over new Jewish identity

The American Jewish experience used to be defined by immigration, assimilation, the Holocaust, Israel, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. But Brooklyn has supplanted the Lower East Side, Sacha Baron Cohen (a Brit, but based in the U.S.) has replaced Brooks and Seth Rogen has overtaken the Woodman. As a new generation of young Jews negotiates the relationship between custom and modernity, Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow have jumped into the fray, camera in hand.

topics: bay area, documentary, independent film, jewish cinema

Experience

The 28th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

In a small elementary school in Kafr Kara, an Arab village in central Israel, two teachers stand at the front of a classroom to deliver the day’s lesson. The topic is independence—for half the class. For the other half, it’s catastrophe. At least, that’s how the teachers, one Jewish, one Arab, seem to see it, and a classroom of small human sponges waits to see who will get the last word.

It’s not exactly just another day at Bridge over the Wadi, a bilingual, bicultural Jewish-Arab school that is one of half a handful in existence. Rather, it’s the anniversary of the creation of the Israeli state, known as Independence Day to Israelis and to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe. But how to tell a coherent story to children when narrating from opposing points of view is a question that surfaces repeatedly in the documentary Bridge over the Wadi, which screens in this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Directed, written, and produced by the sibling filmmaking team of Barak and Tomer Heymann — a selection of whose films are highlighted this year in a festival tribute — Bridge follows the school, located in the Wadi Ara (wadi is Arabic for "valley"), through its first shaky year of existence in 2004 and 2005.

topics: jewish cinema

Platform

Kibitzing with S.F. Jewish Film Festival's Stein and Fishman

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has never, in its 28 years, taken the path of least resistance. To cite the most obvious example, a hallmark of the annual program is the inclusion of several films critical of Israel. (That these movies are almost always produced by Israeli filmmakers, and financed by government grants, is irrelevant to the fest’s critics.) This year’s contrarian act is increasing the number of films and screenings in the face of a spiraling economy. The expanded lineup includes spotlights on Italian Jews During Fascism and Diversity In Israel (a multicultural, gay-straight portrait of Israel on its 60h anniversary), along with salutes to doc-making brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann and home-movie excavator par excellence Péter Forgács. The SFJFF opens Thursday with Strangers, Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv’s lusty, improvised tale of an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman hooking up in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup, and continues through Aug. 11 at the Castro Theatre. The lineup, including the Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Rafael schedules, is at SFJFF’s website. Executive director Peter Stein and program director Nancy Fishman spilled the beans in their office in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center.

topics: directors, documentary, film festivals, filmmakers, independent film, jewish cinema

The List

Contemporary Jewish Museum's DAWN

Looking for something meaningful to do Sunday morning at 2 a.m.? SF360.org offers key notes of the all-night Dawn festival—art, film, ideas—at the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s new digs.

topics: art, dance, jewish cinema, music