Bena

By Emmy Scarlett and Erica Marcus

For all you bagel loving film fans, this year the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary with an amazing line-up of films from around the globe. Some of the best films from around the world are here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Films that will inspire, and provoke vivid memories of a bygone era (Nancy Fishman’s most fabulous Jewish gangsta retrospective) while also leading the audience into a world that is still questioning who the Jewish people are, as people, as artists and as citizens of an interconnected but also broken world. And then there is the eye-candy in the audience. What better place to take the man or woman of your dreams on a second date?

Some of the highlights of the festival are films about Jewish baseball players and of course those Jewish gangsters as well as series of films that explore the literary lives of Jewish writers. I am looking forward to catching the second season of Arab Labor and of a must see Budrus.

Amoz Oz:The Nature Of Dreams, captures the life and work of the Israeli writer with outmost grace and compassion. Oz is a writer but he also is a peace activist and he’ very much troubled by Israeli politics and the continued unequal plight of Palestinians. The film lovely looks at Oz’s relationship between the Palestinian scholar Sari Nusseibeh as they discuss the need for a two state solution during Oz’s book tour for his book A Tale Of Love And Darkness.

The narrative film A Room And A Half by the Russian filmmaker, Andrey Khrzhanovsky is a visually intoxicating film about the life of the Russian Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987. Themes wriiten throughout his books are magically woven filmicaly throughout the film. The use of animation with musical interludes gives the viewer insight into Brodsky’s love of cats and his fable like portrayal of his parents. At just over three hours, it never failed to delight.

The French film In My Father”S Footsteps, directed by Marcel Carmel is fun but poignant. The film looks at the relationships between men and women, children and parents. 1970’s, Paris, the story centers around a Tunisian family and the father who gets mixed up with a local gang, and subsequently gets put in jail for petty crime, meanwhile his children and wife suffer from his actions, and figure out how to survive on their own. The film reminds me of an early Truffaut with the two young sons at the helm of the story. Brilliantly acted.

Long Distance , the Israeli documentary by Amikam Goldman is a meditation on loss and longing, and the frustrations, and economic hardships felt by the plight of Foreign workers living in Isreal. Most of the films dialogue is heard through the telephone conversations of the callers and their loved one’s. The film can be alienating, and at times difficult to watch, but beautifully shot.

A Small Act, a documentary directed by Jennifer Arnold was a standout at Sundance 2010, a beautiful piece that looks at an “act of generosity” by one Swedish Jewish woman by anonymously sponsoring a Kenyan boy, and his path in becoming lawyer which then leeds to a chain of events into the creation of a fund that helps poor Kenyan school children continue their education. This film will inspire anyone in the act of helping others, and the selflessness of those who see the need of giving as empowering.