San Francisco Jewish Film Festival To Screen Movies In Oakland

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, now in its 37th year, returns to the Bay Area on Thursday, presenting a broad, challenging and eclectic mix of narratives, documentaries and shorts.

The films will be screened in San Francisco from Thursday through July 30, Albany from July 27-Aug. 6, Oakland on Aug. 6, San Rafael from Aug. 4-6 and Palo Alto from Saturday through July 27, with opening nights at each venue.

The festival opens at the Castro Theatre on Thursday with "Keep the Change," the story of a community of adults living on the autism spectrum.

Winner of the best narrative feature and best new narrative director prizes at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, the Tribeca jury described Rachel Israel's film as a "unique yet universal love story told in a way we've never seen."

The festival closes its San Francisco run on July 30 with "Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story." Lamarr, an Austrian Jewish emigre, was known in 1940s Hollywood for her extraordinary beauty and screen presence.

But director Alexandra Dean's documentary reveals a lesser-known side to the actress -- her role an engineer and inventor who created a "secret communication system" to help the Allies during World War II.

All told, 64 films from 14 countries will be screened, including "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power," a sequel directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk to "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's cinematic exploration of
the climate crisis. The former vice president will appear at the screening Monday.

The annual Freedom of Expression Award this year goes to Joe Berlinger, a seminal figure in documentary filmmaking whose "Paradise Lost" trilogy traced the wrongful conviction of three Arkansas teenagers for murder and led to their exoneration.

Berlinger's latest, "Intent to Destroy," an examination of the 1915 Armenian genocide, will be shown on July 27 at the Castro.

Eight films this year deal with the Holocaust, including "1945," the story of the effect on a Hungarian town of the post-World War II return of two Jews.

"Paradise," the Russian entry into the 2017 Academy Awards, involves the confluence of three lives in World War II Paris: a Russian aristocrat emigre, an SS officer and a French collaborator.

A number of films are directed by women. Among them are "Big Sonia," the documentary portrait of a vibrant, Holocaust survivor nongenarian, directed by Leah Warshawski and Toddy Soliday; "The Boy Downstairs," director Sophie Brooks' New York romantic comedy starring Zosia Mamet and Matthew Shear; and "Personal Affairs," director Maha Haj's narrative following an extended Palestinian family.

On the music front, Oakland-based filmmaker Robert Philipson's "Body and Soul: An American Bridge" uses that jazz standard to examine the relationship between African Americans and Jews. The Castro showing is
followed by a performance by the San Francisco-based Marcus Shelby Quartet.

— Bay City News; Image via Pixabay

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