SFJFF38 is pleased to showcase award-winning and critically acclaimed films from around the world each year in the Bay Area. These Festival titles have already garnered national and international acclaim at premier film festivals.
CENTERPIECE NARRATIVE. A Hasidic cantor (Géza Röhrig) and an under-equipped biology professor (Matthew Broderick) become blasphemously obsessed with the process of a human body’s decay. What follows are illicit dives into anatomy textbooks, outlandish homemade experiments, a road trip to a body farm, and the ever-lurking prospect of dybbuk possession. Röhrig and Broderick are an unholy match made in deadpan heaven as they embark on this increasingly literal journey into the underground.
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CENTERPIECE DOCUMENTARY. In 1986 former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim launched an election bid to become Austria’s president. But revelations suddenly surfaced that Waldheim had been a German army officer suspiciously close to Nazi wartime atrocities in the Balkans. A stunning chronicle of the heated race and its foreshadow of populist, right-wing demagogues from Donald Trump to Austria’s Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache.
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Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi refugee and reluctant activist who was appointed a UN Goodwill Ambassador, is the subject of this piercing, powerful and critically acclaimed documentary. Alexandria Bombach, winner of the directing prize at Sundance this year, deftly captures the complexity of being a survivor and an outcast in search of a homeland, an all-too-common experience that must be told in order for genocide to truly happen “never again”.
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He is credited with igniting the Golden Age of Yiddish cinema and yet was reviled for converting to Catholicism. He married an Italian countess and yet was openly homosexual. Like a real-life version of Zelig, Michał Waszyński, director of the 1937 classic The Dybbuk, tried on many identities and led a life filled with turbulent contradictions. This mesmerizing biography brings us closer to a fascinating, unknowable chameleon.
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Science Fair deftly weaves together the stories of nine high schoolers as they strive to earn the right to join 1,700 other students from around the world at the 2017 edition of Intel’s International Science Engineering Fair (ISEF). While not all of them are winners in the eyes of the judges, viewers cannot help but be impressed with the students as they tirelessly pursue their dreams.
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This emotionally powerful documentary about one family’s misfortune is also a compelling indictment of the injustice of mandatory minimum prison laws. Cindy Shank was a wife and mother of three young daughters when she was arrested on drug conspiracy charges, a result of her involvement with a drug-dealing former boyfriend. Director Rudy Valdez (Cindy’s brother) documents the devastating impact her 15-year sentence in a federal prison has on her and her family.
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Shadi, an architect who lives in Italy, returns to Nazareth for the wedding of his sister. He helps his father, Abu Shadi (renowned actor Mohammed Bakri), deliver 340 wedding invitations by hand, according to Palestinian custom. When Abu Shadi wants to invite a Jewish friend who Shadi believes is part of Israeli military intelligence, we see the conflict through the eyes of two different generations of Palestinians in this superbly acted film.
Read More$250 Members / $275 General Public
You asked, we listened. The new for 2018 East Bay Pass gives you priority access to all SFJFF38 programs (including East Bay Big Nights), at its East Bay venues, in Albany and Oakland (some exceptions may apply).