The Jewish Film Festival gears up for another ambitious, engaging run
By Bruce Bellingham

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the world’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, is proudly celebrating its 28th anniversary. It runs from July 24 through August 11 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco; the Roda Theatre (at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre) in Berkeley; the CinéArts @ Palo Alto Square in Palo Alto, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

The opening night features Strangers. It’s summarized this way: “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.” Mania and desire? That’s what we like to see.

The World Cup is a big theme this year. Two highlights from this year’s festival are Paul Weiland’s British entry, Sixty Six and Jan Schutte’s, Love Comes Lately from Germany. Sixty Six, starring the riveting Helena Bonham Carter, is set in 1966 England as the country is in the grasp of World Cup fever. Twelve-year-old Bernie is also on the brink of something: his bar mitzvah. As family crises come to a head, and his fellow Brits are consumed by the World Cup qualifying rounds, Bernie faces the ruination of his big event. 
In Love Comes Lately, septuagenarian Max Kohn (Otto Tausig) is going strong, perhaps too strong: a boisterous skirt-chaser whose amorous pursuits – both real and imagined – risk alienating a girlfriend he loves but neglects. As he pens his tales of amour, the line between fact and fiction begins to blur. Based on short stories by Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, Loves Comes Lately also features Rhea Perlman and Tovah Feldshuh. It sounds like a winner.

The festival always features documentaries.  Slavomir Grunberg and Robert Podgursky’s Saved by Deportation is included. In 1940, a year before the Nazis started deporting Jews to death camps, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of approximately 200,000 Polish Jews from Russian-occupied eastern Poland to forced labor settlements in the Soviet interior. As cruel as Stalin’s deportations were, ultimately they largely saved Jewish lives, for the deportees constituted the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust.

On a different note, the Odan Lotan’s Israeli doc, The Quest for the Missing Piece, is a humorous examination of circumcision. It’s bound to provide some cutting wit.
Filmmaker Mimmo Calopresti brings his Cannes-selected documentary, I Only Wanted to Live (Volevo Solo Vivere). A nominee for Italy’s top film award, it follows nine Italian detainees of the Auschwitz death camps. Using archival testimonies found in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, as well as footage and photographs taken from personal photo albums, the film traces the subjects’ deportation, internment and ultimate survival.

This film was screened last month at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, but it’s worth looking out for: Toots, a documentary about the famed New York saloon keeper raconteur, directed by his granddaughter, Kristi Jacobson. 

“Toots Shor is many things to many people,” said Edward R. Murrow in 1955. A friend to the famous, a crook to the feds, father, brother, gambler, hustler, but most of all Toots Shor was the owner of America’s greatest saloon. Politicians, gangsters, sports heroes, and movie stars – Sinatra, Gleason, DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Frank Costello, Eisenhower, Nixon, Earl Warren – for 30 years, all found their way to Toots, his eponymous saloon on New York’s West 51st Street for food and drink, served up with a heaping side of insults and put downs. Interviews include Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Frank Gifford, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Nick Pileggi, David Brown, Peter Duchin, Maury Allen, Dave Anderson, Bill Gallo, Joe Garagiola, Sidney Zion, Gay Talese, and Gianni Russo.

The festival will take place in San Francisco (July 24-31), Berkeley (August 2-9), Palo Alto (August 2-7), and San Rafael (August 9-11). The film lineup is complemented with discussion programs, international guests, awards and celebrations.

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: July 24-August 11. Tickets, all-festival passes and discounts available at the box office, 925-275-9490 or www.sfjff.org. For more information, visit the website or contact jewishfilm@sfjff.org.