Davis, Radner top film fest marquee
Show business documentaries about Sammy Davis Jr. and Gilda Radner will headline the 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the longest-running Jewish film fest in the world.
The festival’s lineup was announced on Tuesday, and as always, it’s a big deal. The Jewish Film Festival is long — not quite like a season, but like a time of the year and a mood, not unlike the holidays. Like two whole Hanukkahs in one, it stretches well over two weeks and takes place in all parts of the Bay Area, so basically you have no excuse: They make it very easy for you to see these movies.
“Love, Gilda,” Lisa D’Apolito’s film about comedian Gilda Radner, takes the opening night spot. “It’s thoroughly entertaining,” says Jay Rosenblatt, the festival’s director of programming. “It has a lot of poignancy, amazing clips — and you realize what a loss it was, to have her die so young.” D’Apolito will be there at the Castro on opening night, and so will Laraine Newman, from the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.”
“Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me,” a documentary by Sam Pollard, will close the festival, a choice that brings up an obvious question: Really? Sammy Davis? Isn’t he a showbiz cliche? “Going into the film, most people might have that bias,” says Rosenblatt. “But what the film does is break through those preconceptions to show a complicated and complex man who was on the forefront of civil rights.”
Davis, who converted to Judaism following a crisis in his life, also lost one eye in a car accident.
Documentarian Liz Garbus (“The Execution of Wanda Jean”) will be honored with the festival’s Freedom of Expression Award, in a ceremony that will include an onstage conversation with Garbus and Bonni Cohen (“An Inconvenient Sequel”). The conversation will be preceded by a screening of Garbus’ pilot for the TV series “The Fourth Estate,” an inside look at the New York Times as it covered the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
There are two centerpiece films. The dramatic centerpiece is “To Dust,” a dark comedy by Shawn Snyder about a grieving cantor (Geza Rohrig), obsessed with his newly dead wife’s decomposition, who takes a biology class from a science teacher (Matthew Broderick). That sounds — can we be honest here? — pretty horrible, but it won the audience award at Tribeca, so it must have something going for it. “It’s very original, very unexpected, one of the most unusual buddy films I’ve ever seen,” says Rosenblatt. “You know how some films grow on you? I don’t know if it’s for everyone, but most people will appreciate it.”
The centerpiece documentary is “The Waldheim Waltz,” about Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general whom everyone considered a great guy until he ran for president of Austria in 1986. That’s when it came out that, in 1942, he was a senior officer in the SS and was involved in the expulsion of Jews from Greece.
The Waldheim documentary is one of a trio of films in the “Bless My Homeland, Forever” series, all dealing with Austria’s troubled past. The others are “Murer: Anatomy of a Trial,” a dramatic film about the 1963 trial of Franz Murer, known as the “Butcher of Vilnius,” and a 1924 silent film, “The City Without Jews,” about a town that deports all its Jews and then wants them back. Lost and forgotten, this prescient film, dating to almost 10 years before Hitler’s rise to power, was found in a Paris flea market in 2015. This will be its international premiere.
In addition to the bookend films and centerpieces, there are a number of interesting programs, including “Hands On/Hands Off: Anatomy of a Feminist Film Movement.” It will consist of two modern documentaries and a screening of the 1933 classic “Baby Face,” starring Barbara Stanwyck. “We wanted something archival, a little older to ground it,” says Rosenblatt. “It’s an interesting film, because it’s also about female empowerment — she’s an abuse survivor who
takes power into her own hands.”
Among the many other films worthy of mention, here’s one : Roberta Grossman’s “Who Will Write Our History.” A combination drama and documentary, it’s the story of people in the Warsaw Ghetto who, during World War II, banded together to collect evidence of their experience and bury it, so that history would know the truth about what happened there.
All told, the festival will be showing 67 films from 23 countries. These include three programs of shorts — the Jewish Film is now an Academy Awards qualifying festival. That means that the shorts that win at the festival will automatically be looked at by the motion picture academy for Oscar consideration.
The Jewish Film Festival takes place from July 19 through Aug. 5, in a variety of venues throughout the Bay Area. Not every film plays everywhere, so check the festival’s website to see what plays where and when.