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Browse through the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival's current and archival films and media here. Use the search tools at left to search by director, title, country, year or tag, or to explore films from the festival's archive, 1981 - present.
Showing: Upcoming Films & Archive Films, Searching in Title. Search tag "Jewish Community"
- Anya (in and out of focus)
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Would you like an unrelenting documentary filmmaker for a parent? Emmy-award winner Marian Marzynski, Anya’s doting father, doesn’t put down the camera for 30 years. A dream until adolescent Anya realizes there’s a life beyond camera range. Through it all, the film is a test and a testament to love and honesty. But please--don’t try this at home.
- Arna's Children
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Arna Mer Khamis, an Israeli Jew, founded a children’s theatre workshop in the West Bank town of Jenin. Under her watchful and encouraging eyes, Palestinian kids discovered their inner playwrights and actors despite the escalating tension in Jenin. Shot over a 13-year period, this film--much like Michael Apted’s 7 Up documentaries--captures the lives of Arna’s children over time while drawing the viewer into their emotional, physical and political development.
- Ashkenaz
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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.
- Bilin My Love (Bil'in Habibti)
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By presenting a unique joint effort of Palestinian and Israeli left-wing activists, this documentary (Wolgin Award for Documentary Film, Jerusalem International Film Festival 2006) captures the struggle for the Palestinian West Bank village of Bilin, threatened by the building of the Wall. Bilin My Love sheds light on little-known aspects of the Middle East conflict; using stunning guerilla aesthetics, the director brings to the screen unique moments of desperation, courage and fear.
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By presenting a unique joint effort of Palestinian and Israeli left-wing activists, this documentary (Wolgin Award for Documentary Film, Jerusalem International Film Festival 2006) captures the struggle for the Palestinian West Bank village of Bilin, threatened by the building of the Wall. Bilin My Love sheds light on little-known aspects of the Middle East conflict; using stunning guerilla aesthetics, the director brings to the screen unique moments of desperation, courage and fear.
- Black Over White
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Black Over White is part road trip, part examination of multiculturalism in Israel, through a close-up look at an Ethiopian concert tour by Israeli-Ethiopian-Yemenite world-beat band The Idan Raichel Project.
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Black Over White is part road trip, part examination of multiculturalism in Israel, through a close-up look at an Ethiopian concert tour by Israeli-Ethiopian-Yemenite world-beat band The Idan Raichel Project.
- Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
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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.
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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.
- Campfire
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Best Picture, 2004 Israeli Academy Awards. Rachel, a recently widowed mother of two rebellious teenage girls, hopes to start a new life by joining a religious settlement in the West Bank. But she must first win over the community’s leader, who is threatened by her independence. A nuanced, moving drama.
- Cantor's Tale, A
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A loving tribute to a Golden Age in American Jewish life when chazzanut--the celebrated cantorial art--reached its zenith. Renowned cantors made best-selling recordings and attracted followers who would travel miles to hear them. The film follows the journey of Jack Mendelson, a Brooklyn-born son of a deli owner, who today trains future cantors in the nearly lost traditions of Eastern European sacred music.
- Four Short Films about Love
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These documentary vignettes provide a rare window on coming of age. As we prepare to make our own way in the world, what draws us closer to the people we love? What pulls us apart?
- Front, The
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A classic better appreciated decades after its release, The Front is a comedy about a deadly serious subject. Woody Allen portrays a somewhat naпve front for a trio of blacklisted television writers; Zero Mostel, in a role based partly on his own story, plays a Blacklist victim who cannot betray his Jewishness. Walter Bernstein got a much-deserved Oscar® nomination for Best Screenplay.
- Spotlight Series Half-Remembered Stories
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A Zombie Day of Atonement. A great-grandmother’s infidelities. An escape from czech nationalists on the road to manchuria. On the way to creating a new future, young Jewish storytellers are rediscovering their past.
Video-surprises on the theme Half-Remembered Stories are being presented in all SFJFF theater venues.
For the full, digital experience, visit www.njfp.org
Can a half-remembered story become a whole truth? See for yourself!
This program of the SFJFF is produced by Citizen Film.
- Holidaze
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This triptych of stories from SFJFF’s New Jewish Filmmaking Project, produced by Citizen Film, delivers candid, funny observations of do-it-yourself holiday rituals. Teenage co-directors consider the mysterious relevance of ritual in secular, multicultural lives.
- If Streets Could Talk
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A young filmmaker takes three generations of relatives back to their former neighborhoods in San Francisco. She asks: how does where you lived shape who you are?
- Keep Not Silent
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Keep Not Silent reveals the clandestine lives of three women, all of them pious, Orthodox Jews, and all of them lesbians. A stunning, compassionate documentary.
- Klaira's Story
- Lalo's Jerusalem
- Maidan, Nave of the World
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Maidan, Nave of the World is a painterly portrait of the careworn streets and alleys of Tbilisi, Georgia, city of multiple faiths.
- Meet Michael Oppenheim
- Metallic Blues
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Two bumbling used-car dealers in Israel hatch a scheme to sell a shiny blue limousine in Germany and make a profit. A comic, touching road movie starring the brilliant Mutt-and-Jeff duo Avi Kushner and Moshe Ivgy as buddies with big dreams but even bigger problems.
- My Father's Palestinian Slave
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This intimate and gripping documentary portrays the unlikely friendship between an undocumented Palestinian worker and his Israeli employer, veteran peace activist Moshe Amirav. Their relationship unfolds before the camera of Moshe’s 19-year-old Swedish son.
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This intimate and gripping documentary portrays the unlikely friendship between an undocumented Palestinian worker and his Israeli employer, veteran peace activist Moshe Amirav. Their relationship unfolds before the camera of Moshe’s 19-year-old Swedish son.
- Not Another Jewish Movie
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A quirky chorus of teenagers grapple with ambivalent feelings about being Jewish and a sense of uneasiness about participating in mainstream American life.
- Odessa...Odessa!
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Odessa...Odessa! is a poetic journey to find the Jewish soul of Odessa, Ukraine, moving poignantly from Odessa today to Brighton Beach and to Ashdod, Israel.
- Old Stores, The
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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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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.
- On the Objection Front
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After years of loyal active duty, six Israeli combat soldiers find they can no longer countenance serving in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They become "refusniks"--putting them at odds with deeply held national values and having devastating consequences in their own lives.
- Peace One Day
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An individual genuinely can make a difference! Jeremy Gilley set out to persuade the United Nations to create an annual global ceasefire day. This excerpt focuses on the Israeli and Palestinian responses to his request.
- Quest for the Missing Piece,The
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This hilarious but serious romp through the debate over circumcision takes us on a bris tour and asks, Why is this ritual so different from all other rituals?
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This hilarious but serious romp through the debate over circumcision takes us on a bris tour and asks, Why is this ritual so different from all other rituals?
- Saved By Deportation: An Unknown Odyssey of Polish Jews
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Most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust did so because of being deported to Stalin’s gulags and then living out the war in the southern Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. A blessing, if a mixed one, as Saved by Deportation recounts with wit and charm, following two lively eighty-somethings back to the scene where they came of age.
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Most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust did so because of being deported to Stalin’s gulags and then living out the war in the southern Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. A blessing, if a mixed one, as Saved by Deportation recounts with wit and charm, following two lively eighty-somethings back to the scene where they came of age.
- The Secrets
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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.
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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.
- Strangers [2007]
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When handsome Eyal (Liron Levo) and knockout Rana (Lubna Azabel) are seated across from each other on the subway in Berlin, their backpacks are mixed up, leading to a chance meeting. He’s Israeli and she’s Palestinian, but they both came to Berlin for the World Cup and are immediately swept up in the dual frenzies of soccer mania and desire. After the tealights have burned out in their rented Berlin love nest, they realize that the fact that she is from Ramallah and he is from the north of Israel means they have different views of the world. Strangers is a crisply written, top- notch love story that crosses international borders and explores the boundaries of nationality, culture and the heart.
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When handsome Eyal (Liron Levo) and knockout Rana (Lubna Azabel) are seated across from each other on the subway in Berlin, their backpacks are mixed up, leading to a chance meeting. He’s Israeli and she’s Palestinian, but they both came to Berlin for the World Cup and are immediately swept up in the dual frenzies of soccer mania and desire. After the tealights have burned out in their rented Berlin love nest, they realize that the fact that she is from Ramallah and he is from the north of Israel means they have different views of the world. Strangers is a crisply written, top- notch love story that crosses international borders and explores the boundaries of nationality, culture and the heart.
- Tehilim
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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.
- We were Exodus
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The journey of the Exodus was the boldest clandestine immigration event following World War II: in July 1947, 4,551 Holocaust survivors boarded the ship in Sиte, France, and left secretly for Palestine. The men who volunteered to crew the Exodus were a ragtag team of Jewish World War II veterans and mariners with a conscience from all over the world. Their recollections form the structure of this impeccably researched documentary about the Exodus ’47.
