WinterFest raises hot-button issues
Opening with a Bay Area-made double feature and closing with an Israeli feature that deals with questions of faith and trust, the 10th annual Jewish Film Festival WinterFest is full of hot-button issues during its two-day run at the Vogue Theatre.
It opens with a heartbreaking 15-minute animated film, “Brother,” in which Bay Area filmmaker Joanna Rudnick delves into her brother’s tragic struggle with addiction, followed by San Francisco director Kate Schermerhorn’s documentary about American consumerism, “Do I Need This?” Attempting to answer that question are a hoarder, a Buddhist monk and several people who are somewhere between those two extremes.
Other topics include life in Ukraine with “A House Made of Splinters,” a documentary about a group home for foster children; World War II Ukraine with “SHTTL,” the story of how Operation Barbarossa — when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 — affected the inhabitants of a Yiddish Ukrainian village at the border of Poland; women’s issues in France’s “Other People’s Children,” about a 40-something schoolteacher who wonders if she’s missing out on this thing called motherhood; and antisemitism with “The Levys of Monticello,” a documentary about the Jewish family who saved Thomas Jefferson’s home from ruin.
One film with fresh buzz off its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival is “The Forger,” the story of Cioma Schönhaus (Louis Hofmann), a Jewish man living in plain sight in World War II Berlin who becomes an expert forger to help save other Jews.