The 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (July 19 - August 5, 2018) presents over 150 films, events, parties, panels and performances over three weeks in San Francisco, Albany, Oakland, Palo Alto and San Rafael. SFJFF is dedicated to celebrating excellence in independent cinema that showcases the diversity of global Jewish life.
SF Bay Times readers can use the code BAYTIMES38 for a discount on all tickets, passes and packages to the Festival!
To use the code, click on the 'Buy Tickets' button for the film or item you'd like to purchase, and then enter your code where it asks "Know a Promotion Code?". Reselect the 'Guest' ticket and check out as normal.
Need Assistance? Contact the Festival Box Office at boxoffice@sfjff.org or (415) 621-0523.
Gilda Radner was an instant sensation when she burst onto the scene with her brilliant, fearless and uproarious SNL performances, and when she died after an epic battle with ovarian cancer, a piece of us left with her. SFJFF38 is thrilled to open the Festival with this endearing, exuberant and intimate tribute that uses rare personal recordings, clear-eyed journal entries and interviews with SNL cast members to bring Radner back into our lives.
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It’s hard to imagine a more talented and groundbreaking performer who led a more complicated and contradictory life than Sammy Davis Jr. Featuring excerpts from his exhilarating performances and star-studded interviews, director Sam Pollard’s riveting documentary presents a very full and very human portrait of this complex, courageous and conflicted man.
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In his heartfelt documentary, co-director and subject Elad Cohen explores the meaning and experience of family. Growing up deaf and gay in a family of hearing people, Cohen always felt alone. He creates a sense of family with friends, including Yaeli, a deaf woman with whom he decides to have a child. Their journey reveals the challenges of parenting, the bias against deaf individuals and the intricacies of human relationships.
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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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In East Jerusalem, Benny is an outsider. She has red hair and she chooses to indulge in poetry and pot. When beautiful newcomer Yael arrives in their small community, Benny smolders with a strange new fire and her life becomes undone. While remaining specific to its location and community, Red Cow highlights the universal desire of first lust and the feeling of being alive for the first time.
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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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Carrie Goldberg, an internet privacy attorney; Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and activist; and Tina Reine, a financial trader whose career was derailed by a vicious campaign of cyber harassment, are the three extraordinary subjects profiled. Coinciding with the #MeToo movement, as the internet becomes the next frontier for civil rights, the arc of the online moral universe may also be long, but here too, Netizens shows it bending towards justice.
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Deftly subverting coming-of-age genre expectations, Scaffolding provides a surprisingly nuanced meditation on the voids the people we love leave in our lives. Asher, a sensitive teen, is easily distracted and spoiling for a fight as he struggles to graduate high school. His domineering father and sympathetic literature teacher attempt to leave him with different approaches to masculinity, but each fails in his own way in this impressive debut feature.
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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.
Read More$110 JFI Members / $130 General Public
The 10-Flix Voucher Package can be redeemed for 10 regular priced tickets to any 10 programs of your choice (not good for Special Programs except Centerpiece Films, and the Freedom of Expression Award Presentation. Share with family and friends, fully transferable. Great for gifts! 10-Flix Vouchers cannot guarantee tickets to sold-out shows, so redeem early to ensure availability.
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