44th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Wraps 18 Days of Spirited Films, Events, and Conversations
SFJFF44 Welcomes Dozens of Local, National, and International Filmmakers to the Festival; Festival Award Winners and Completion Grantees Announced
The Jewish Film Institute’s (JFI) 44th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), the longest-running event of its kind, wrapped 18 days of exhilarating live cinema in the San Francisco Bay Area on Sunday, August 4, with a final day of screenings at Landmark’s Piedmont Theatre in Oakland, following successful, dynamic runs at multiple theaters in San Francisco. Audiences of all backgrounds delighted in SFJFF’s curated program of screenings and special events, which celebrated Jewish diversity and creativity on screen, and connected filmmakers and audiences through the power of independent Jewish cinema.
SFJFF44 presented a total of 67 feature-length and short films from 16 countries that explored Jewish history, creative contributions, and life around the world, including 2 World Premieres, 1 International Premiere, 2 North American Premieres, 6 United States Premieres, 10 West Coast Premieres, 6 California Premieres, and 7 Bay Area Premieres. SFJFF44 offered ten days of screenings in San Francisco, with events held at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, Vogue Theater, Roxie Theater, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, and Delancey Street Screening Room. Taking place in the midst of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and seismic changes in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, SFJFF44 used its platform to affirm its commitment to artistic freedom of expression, and to highlight the vibrancy and complexity of contemporary and historical Jewish identity.
“Every year, SFJFF is marking new firsts, and the 44th addition was no exception. The Festival took over new parts of San Francisco, with Big Nights at the Palace of Fine Arts, provocative Next Wave programming at the Roxie Theater, and community conversations at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco,” said Lexi Leban, Executive Director of the Jewish Film Institute. “Anchored by an expansive slate of JFI-supported films, SFJFF44 was a celebration of community: the success belongs to the filmmakers, storytellers, and audiences who came together in live spaces to celebrate the power of cinema and shape the cultural narrative.”
The Festival continued its work of curating programs that deepen collective understandings of what it means to be Jewish through a lens of inclusivity, engagement, and entertainment. Programs like Peripheral Visions: A Jews of Color Shorts Program, Torah Tropical, and Jews by Choice addressed examples of Jewish identity far outside the mainstream, while other presentations reflected Jewish cultural contributions to American life like Shari & Lamb Chop, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, Teaches of Peaches, and Diane Warren: Relentless. True to its commitment to presenting thought-provoking films that catalyze dialogue, SFJFF44 featured nuanced, pre-October 7th films by Israelis, Palestinians, and international collaborative teams that offered unique perspectives to help contextualize the current crisis in Israel and Gaza like Lyd, The Other, and Three Promises, as well as Vantage Points: Perspectives from Sapir College. Questions of spirituality and belonging were replete in highlights like Sabbath Queen, All About the Levkoviches, and Between the Temples. These seemingly divergent threads came together to form a robust live event that saw audiences returning enthusiastically to theaters, with multiple standing ovations, sold-out screenings, and active participation from an increasingly diverse community of film-lovers.
“We were proud to provide a San Francisco welcome to local and international filmmakers, and connect audiences with familiar and unexpected stories that entertained, engaged, and moved them” added Ash Hoyle, Guest Festival Director. “This year’s Festival in particular celebrated our universal right to freedom of expression and both filmmakers and attendees rose to the occasion tremendously to discuss and explore these programs with openness and enthusiasm.”
SFJFF44 Award Winners
The fifth cycle of JFI Completion Grant recipients was announced during SFJFF44 Closing Night at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre. 2024 Completion Grantees include All God’s Children (an SFJFF44 selection), Bulletproof Stockings, Coexistence, My Ass!, Monk in Pieces, Oxygen, and Wednesdays in Mississippi, which received a JFI Discretionary Grant. The Grants, which provide finishing funds to emerging and established filmmakers for original stories that promote thoughtful consideration of Jewish history, life, culture, memory, and identity, awarded $80,000 to six projects in 2024. JFI’s Completion Grants program has distributed $415,000 to 33 projects since 2020. A Call for Entries for the Grants’ sixth funding round will open in early 2025. For more information on the 2024 Completion Grantees, click here.
The SFJFF44 Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Running on Sand, Adar Shafran’s Israeli drama about a young Eritrean refugee at risk of deportation from Israel. When he is mistaken for the new foreign player of a struggling soccer team, he’s thrown into a complex situation, with his survival depending on the team’s success. The SFJFF44 Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature went to Porcelain War, the striking documentary by Slava Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo that profiles the practices of Ukrainian artists Slava, Anya, and Andrey as they find and create beauty amid the destruction of war. Bellomo was in attendance for a post-film Q&A in Piedmont.
SFJFF, which is an Academy Award®-qualifying film festival in the Best Documentary Short Subject category, announced Center of Life, directed by Jacob Arenber, as the Festival’s Best Documentary Short Award winner. The 2024 jury was comprised of Sam Feder, a Peabody Award-nominated film director and writer; Alana Hauser, a documentary executive and producer who has worked in various capacities at The New York Times and Sundance Institute; and Nishtha Jain, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker from Mumbai, India best known for her multi-awarded films The Golden Thread (2022), Gulabi Gang (2012), Lakshmi and Me (2007) and City of Photos (2004). The jury released the following statement:
“We have selected Jacob Arenber’s Center of Life to receive the Best Documentary Short Award at this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Arenber’s spare, moving film follows one Palestinian family’s efforts to obtain Israeli citizenship. Scenes of family routine accompany audio of court records scrutinizing the minute details of their home, casting suspicion on every aspect of their life from the mundane — the many cleaning products to the nametags on their toothbrushes — to the nature of their spending, to question their right to continue living in Israel. We bear witness to the toll this takes on a family and a people burdened with proving their humanity.”
The SFJFF44 Award for Best Narrative Short went to Maurice’s Bar by Tom Prezman and Tzor Edery. The 2024 jury was comprised of Sarah Winshall, a creative producer and founder of the independent production company, Smudge Films; Harris Doran, a filmmaker and producer who won the NEXT Jury and Audience Awards at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the Audience Award at the Berlinale for Kokomo City; and Emil (Em) Weinstein, an award-winning writer/director. The jury noted:
“The jury found this film to be resonant, extremely well made, and introduced us to a world and characters we cared about immediately through exquisite storytelling. This film transports us to another time in which the intersections of Jewish identity and queer identity were as relevant as they are today and as politically fragile. The film is as moving as it is entertaining.”
The SFJFF44 San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award went to the Israeli narrative The Vanishing Soldier, directed by Dani Rosenberg. Honorable mentions went to Mediterranean Fever by Maha Haj and The Monkey House by Avi Nesher. The SFBAFCC released the following statement: “Dani Rosenberg’s electrifying The Vanishing Soldier impressed jurors in a multitude of ways. Not only because of its energetic direction and all-in lead performance from Ido Tako as an 18-year-old Israeli soldier who abandons his post in Gaza so he can hang out with his girlfriend — an act that accidentally triggers a media and military frenzy — but because of its effectiveness at being both a nervy thriller and a powerful indictment on the absurdities of war.”
Julie Cohen, the Academy Award®-nominated documentarian, received the SFJFF44 Freedom of Expression Award which included an in-depth conversation about her work and career with Nicole Newnham, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp. Cohen, renowned for films like RBG, My Name is Pauli Murray, and Every Body, has spent her illustrious career recontextualizing important, oft-overlooked elements of history and exploring thought leaders and activists from marginalized communities. The Freedom of Expression Award — presented annually at SFJFF since 2005 — honors the unfettered imagination, which is the cornerstone of a just, free, and open society. Previous winners include Judith Helfand, Liz Garbus, Joe Berlinger, Norman Lear, Lee Grant, Theodore Bikel, Alan Berliner, Elliott Gould, and Sayed Kashua, among others.
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Opening & Closing Nights
SFJFF44 opened and closed with two profound documentaries about Jewish cultural icons. The Opening Night film Shari & Lamb Chop by Lisa D’Apolito (Love, Gilda, SFJFF 2018) celebrated the life and legacy of the Jewish television personality whose ventriloquism enabled her to voice groundbreaking societal truths in the mid-twentieth century. D’Apolito, Lewis’ daughter Mallory, and Lamb Chop themselves regaled audiences with anecdotes and insights about the performer in a post-film Q&A. A party followed at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, where guests mingled and enjoyed delicacies from SFJFF44’s Bay Area culinary partners.
SFJFF44 closed out its San Francisco run with the West Coast Premiere of Sabbath Queen by Sandi DuBowski (Trembling Before G-d, SFJFF 2001). Recipient of a 2023 JFI Completion Grant, the 21-years-in-the-making documentary chronicles the life of Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie and his founding of the God optional, spiritual community Lab/Shul in New York City. The film, which explores central questions of belonging and community in Judaism today, received standing ovations in both San Francisco and Oakland, with DuBowski and Lau-Lavie providing insightful post-film commentary.
Festival Highlights
The Centerpiece Narrative, Sundance hit Between the Temples by Nathan Silver, showcased transcendent performances by Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane as a cantor in a crisis of faith who finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. The film is set for a theatrical release in August by Sony Pictures Classics. A sneak preview of Janis Ian: Breaking Silence introduced audiences to the remarkable life and career of 1960s folk singer Janis Ian and her barrier-breaking activism in music. Ian, along with director and 2023 Filmmaker in Residence Varda Bar-Kar, attended the screening.
Other JFI Completion Grantees in the Festival included A Photographic Memory, Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s deeply personal documentary about the mother she never knew and her intersection with famous twentieth-century photographers; Ilana Trachtman’s Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round; Assaf Lapid’s The Return from the Other Planet; Justyna Gawełko and Tomer Slutzky’s Jews by Choice; and the short film Los Últimos Judíos de Guantánamo by Yael Bridge, a 2022 JFI Filmmaker in Residence. Seed, Slutzky, and Bridge all attended the Festival and enraptured audiences with their insights into the filmmaking process.
SFJFF audiences turned out in droves for Comedy Spotlight Bad Shabbos, Daniel Robbins’ fast-paced macabre comedy about a Shabbat dinner crumble that goes fatally awry. Another film by Robbins, the mockumentary Citizen Weiner, introduced him and writing partner Zack Weiner as up-and-coming Jewish comedic writers to watch. Local Spotlight film XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture, directed by SFJFF alumnus Ferne Pearlstein (The Last Laugh), made its California Premiere at the Festival, diving into the thorny topic of cancel culture through interviews with luminaries like Judy Gold and Marc Maron. The Take Action Spotlight Winner, the Sundance hit directed by Susanna Fogel about NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, opened a timely dialogue about election interference and civic responsibility. At the Vogue Theater, the sold-out California Premiere of the 1922 silent film Breaking Home Ties featured the new restoration made possible by the National Center for Jewish Film, with live musical accompaniment by Adam Dorn, Gretchen Gonzales, Scott Amendola, and Steve Berlin.
Co-presented with Urban Adamah and the Jews of Color Initiative, SFJFF44 presented Peripheral Visions, an eclectic shorts program at Urban Adamah’s mid-Berkeley farm that provided cinematic exploration of the unique cultural contributions of Jews of Color in expanding collective understandings of what it means to be Jewish. The evening was programmed by guest curators Noemie Hakim-Serfaty and Rebecca Pierce, JFI Marketing & Communications Manager.
The Festival’s Next Wave section, which curates films that showcase fresh artistic voices and perspectives for younger audiences, brought music docs, comedies, and internet culture to the Roxie Theater over two action-packed evenings. The Next Wave Spotlight double feature kicked off with Rachel Wolther’s The French Italian, followed by the sold out World Premiere of Peter Vack’s WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM, a hallucinatory, provocative, and singular narrative exploration of terminally online culture, with Vack and lead actress Betsey Brown in attendance. Following the film, the party continued late into the night at Dalva next door.
In a partnership with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, SFJFF44 presented a series of programs focused on community healing, dialogue, and reflection about timely societal and cultural topics in the United States, Israel, and Palestine. Attendees were treated to a spirited work-in-progress screening of All God’s Children, the latest film from two-time Sundance Grand Jury prize winning director Ondi Timoner, who was in attendance for a post-film feedback session with viewers to refine the film. Later, director Joy Sela moved audiences with The Other and its message of hope and coexistence among Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, while Vantage Points: Perspectives from Sapir College, a collection of student shorts from the only academic institution in the Gaza envelope, reflected a spirit of pluralism. The shorts program was months in the making with Sapir College faculty, following the October 7th attacks, and included the presentation of a $10,000 grant by JFI and the DARE Foundation to the college.
Beyond the Screen: Filmmaker Events
SFJFF44 featured a number of exclusive events for visiting filmmakers, distributors, curators, and industry professionals that were designed to help build the field of independent Jewish filmmaking. In tandem with the Festival, JFI hosted the 2024 Jewish Film Presenters Network Conference for a series of programs about film festival exhibition, independent arts programming, and more, with multiple JFI staff members participating as panelists and presenters. The Jewish Film Presenters’ Network develops industry standards and promotes the exchange of ideas to ensure the growth and sustainability of the more than 200 U.S. Jewish film festivals that together reach over 500,000 audience members each year.
The Festival also hosted JFI’s current cohort of Filmmakers in Residence, who traveled from around the world to experience the Festival and participate in workshops, training, and critiques of their projects in progress. The Filmmaker Residency provides creative, marketing, and production support for emerging and established filmmakers whose projects explore and expand thoughtful consideration of Jewish history, life, culture and identity. The Residents received industry mentorship and project development led by Marcia Jarmel, Director of Filmmaker Services, and included workshops with Dawn Valadez from the Bay Area Video Coalition and the leaders of LABA BAY, a lab for Jewish Arts and Culture, Elissa Strauss and Sam Shonkoff. The Residents also previewed excerpts from their films for JFI supporters, attending filmmakers, and community leaders at the Festival’s annual Shabbat Dinner, hosted at KQED.
“It was a joy to host our talented JFI Filmmakers in Residence for another year of creative workshops at the Festival,” said Marcia Jarmel, Director of Filmmaker Services. “These kinds of experiences build community and confidence while developing one’s project, and are vital to creating a vibrant community for independent filmmakers addressing Jewish themes in their work, a role JFI has been building on as we seek to nurture the next generation of Jewish-content film.”
Looking Ahead
SFJFF44 brought audiences together for thought-provoking films and community events that expanded and evolved the Jewish story. The 2024 Festival saw a flurry of screenings and premieres of JFI supported films, and new opportunities for established and emerging filmmakers to develop their networks in an industry mixer hosted in conjunction with the Jewish Film Presenters conference. Year-round, JFI continues to support and nurture bold Jewish filmmaking through its Filmmaker Services grants and residency programs. Applications for the Jewish Film Institute’s 2025 Filmmakers in Residence program open September 2024. The 45th anniversary San Francisco Jewish Film Festival returns in Summer 2025. The Call for Entries for SFJFF45 opens in October 2024. JFI’s next grant cycle begins in January 2025.
The Jewish Film Institute (JFI) champions bold films and filmmakers that expand and evolve the Jewish story for audiences everywhere. As the presenter of the annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the world’s first and most revered event for independent Jewish storytelling, JFI celebrates the spirit of film, inquiry, independence, collaboration, community, and inclusion to turn conversation into action, reframe understanding of Jewish cultures and identities, and nurture networks of filmmakers and artists. The Institute’s filmmaker services include the competitive, year-long Filmmaker Residency and the JFI Completion Grants, which provide finishing funds to jury-selected projects. www.jfi.org
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) is the largest and longest-running festival of its kind and a leader in the curation and presentation of new film and media exploring the complexity of Jewish life and identity around the world. Since its founding in 1980, SFJFF has cultivated and championed emerging and established filmmakers throughout their careers, helping to launch new artistic voices on a national and international scale. www.sfjff.org
