The Jewish Film Festival announced the program for its upcoming festival on Tuesday night, June 20, and the lineup looks appetizing, as usual. This is one of the great festivals in the Bay Area, impeccably curated, with a wide range of movies both foreign and domestic, and this year is no different.
But here’s a question, something you may have wondered over the years: How does the festival decide what constitutes a Jewish film? After all, if it were just a matter of someone Jewish having made it, then practically every American studio film made before 1950 — with the exception of the movies produced by Daryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox — could be called a Jewish film. As Neal Gabler wrote in his book “An Empire of Their Own,” the Jews — that is, studio heads such as Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle and the Warner brothers — “invented Hollywood.”
Turns out, having a Jewish filmmaker alone is not enough to qualify a movie for the Jewish Film Festival. “It has to have some kind of Jewish content,” says Jay Rosenblatt, the festival’s program director. “Perhaps one of the characters is Jewish, or there’s a Jewish theme. There’s something in the film that’s about Judaism.”
The one exception are films that get into the festival through “Tikkun Olam,” a small section of the festival devoted to films that are not necessarily Jewish in content but that express political or social ideals in harmony with Jewish values. And this year, the festival has a big coup for that category: “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Al Gore’s follow-up to his award-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The original film brought the issue of climate change to a wide audience. The sequel, which picks up the story, is a mix of good news and bad — technologies that give hope, but a political situation in Washington that makes progress difficult. The film follows Gore as he takes his crusade around the world, wheeling and dealing as a major force behind the Paris accord, and reacting with dread to the election of Donald Trump.
The festival starts on July 20 in San Francisco before spreading out to the East Bay, South Bay and Marin County. “Keep the Change” — a New York romantic comedy, but with a difference — will open the festival. Directed by Rachel Israel, the film features lead characters, and actors, who are all on the autism spectrum. Originally a short, it was expanded into a feature by its director. It won best narrative feature and best new narrative director at the Tribeca Film Festival.
“Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” will close the festival. It’s a documentary about the Austrian actress, who was a star in Europe and fled Austria when Hitler annexed her country into the Third Reich. “What people don’t know about her,” says Rosenblatt, “is that she was an incredible inventor and scientist, and she actually invented the technology called frequency hopping. It was used in World War II to avoid torpedoes, and is used today in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.” Lamarr’s son Anthony Loder will be in attendance.
Between opening and closing, there will be lots of good and interesting things. For example, there’s “The Young Karl Marx,” from director Raoul Peck; and “Dina,” the winner of the Sundance Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for documentary filmmaking. “It’s kind of a companion piece to our opening film, because its subjects are also on the spectrum,” says Rosenblatt.
Also definitely of interest: “Gilbert,” Nell Berkeley’s feature-length portrait of the comedian Gilbert Gottfried, whose version of “the aristocrats” joke is raunchier than anybody’s. The film shows the private Gottfried, who apparently doesn’t go around the house screaming and cursing about everything. This is good news.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.comTwitter: @MickLaSalle
The Jewish
Film Festival
The 37th installment of the annual event runs July 20-July 30 in San Francisco; July 22-27 in Palo Alto; July 27-Aug. 6 in Albany; and Aug. 4-6 in San Rafael.
The opening-night film, “Keep the Change,” screens at 6:30 p.m. July 20 at the Castro; at 6:40 p.m. July 23 at the Cinearts; 6:15 p.m. July 30 at the Albany Twin; and 6:45 p.m. Aug. 5 at the Smith Rafael.
The closing-night film, “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,” screens at 6:10 p.m. July 26 at the Cinearts; 8 p.m. July 30 at the Castro; 4:45 p.m. Aug. 5 at the Albany Twin; and 4:15 p.m. Aug. 6 at the Smith Rafael.
More information and complete schedule at (415) 621-0523, https://sfjff.org/