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Filtered By: English Clear All

10% - What Makes a Hero?

Checkpoint (SFJFF 2004) and Defamation (SFJFF 2009) established Israeli documentarian Yoav Shamir as an unapologetic provocateur. Michael Moore executive produced the filmmaker’s newest film, a globetrotting quest to identify the shared characteristics of heroic individuals. From a bonobo preserve in Congo to the suburban home of a Flemish woman whose family harbored Jews during WWII, Shamir takes viewers on a fascinating journey that is sure to spark thoughtful conversation and passionate debate.

306 Hollywood

Brother and sister filmmakers conduct an obsessive archeological dig through their deceased grandmother’s treasured mementos.

32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide

In this heartfelt documentary director Hope Litoff struggles with her own demons as she explores the life and death of her sister, Ruth Litoff. A gifted photographer, Ruth was as lovely as the artwork she created, but she struggled with mental illness throughout her life. The film charts Hope’s excavation of the belongings that Ruth left behind and Hope’s journey of exploration to learn more about her older sister.

5 Days

On August 15, 2005, Israeli defense forces were about to forcibly remove some 8,000 remaining Jewish settlers from their homes, schools, farms and synagogues in Gaza. This documentary gives us a front-row seat to the unfolding drama that many feared would cause catastrophic violence. Deploying eight camera crews simultaneously, Shamir gains unprecedented access to all sides of the confrontation as it happens.Followed in Berkeley by panel discussion.

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus

Leaving their own young children behind, Jewish Americans Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus took it upon themselves to get 50 Jewish children out of Austria during WWII. This tense and compelling story, narrated by Alan Alda, is brought to life by detailed private journals and a trove of previously unseen color home movies.

51 Birch Street

Veteran filmmaker Doug Block had every reason to believe his parents’ 54-year marriage was a good one, so he’s unprepared when, just a few months after his mother’s death, his father Mike announces that he’s moving to Florida to live with his former secretary. Spanning 60 years and three generations, Block’s superbly crafted documentary about his parents’ marriage eloquently shows what can happen when we question our most fundamental assumptions about family.

93Queen

A cohort of bold ultraorthodox Jewish women battle to create their own all-female ambulance corps.

A mother and son shop for a Bar Mitzvah gift at a 99 Cent store.

9th Circuit Cowboy: The Long Good Fight of Judge Harry Pregerson

9TH CIRCUIT COWBOY is the story of a true mensch. Judge Harry Pregerson served on California's famously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for almost half a century and was known for placing his personal scruples over what he discounted as abstract legalities.

A Father's Kaddish

A FATHER'S KADDISH tells the story of how Steven Branfman used the art of pottery to help him work through his grief after the death of his 23-year-old son. The film is a potent and moving journey through the universal experience of loss, mourning and rebuilding a life.

A.K.A. Doc Pomus

This musically rich biography pays homage to Doc Pomus, the legendary Brill Building songwriter who authored such enduring rock-and-roll hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas” and dozens of others for talents as diverse as Dion, Elvis Presley, Dr. John and B.B. King. Like so many of his R&B songwriting colleagues, Doc Pomus was a city-bred Jew. Born Jerome Felder, he spent a lifetime overcoming both visible and private pain through his extraordinary songs. In this spirited documentary, he is revealed as an American original. [MINIGUIDE 94/100]

Abe | Film & Feast

The Israeli-Jewish side of his family calls him Avram. The Palestinian-Muslim side Ibrahim. His first-generation American agnostic lawyer parents call him Abraham. But the 12-year-old kid from Brooklyn who loves food and cooking, prefers, well, Abe. Just Abe.

Abe and Phil's Last Poker Game (with a tribute to Martin Landau)

Dr. Abe Mandelbaum (Martin Landau) moves into a nursing home and strikes up a friendship with Phil Nicoletti (Paul Sorvino), a notorious gambler and womanizer. Their bond soon gets put to the test when they meet a nurse who thinks that her biological father lives in the home.

Abortion: Stories Women Tell

Award-winning filmmaker and Missouri native Tracy Droz Tragos, director of the Sundance Grand Jury Award–winning documentary Rich Hill and Emmy-winning Be Good Smile Pretty confronts the power of Missouri’s restrictive abortion laws by sensitively telling the intimate stories of women who must surmount every obstacle to access abortion. This timely and relevant film reveals the ultimate connection between the right to choose and the right to live a fully empowered life. —Lexi Leban

Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force

This gripping documentary unfolds like The Great Escape, a true-life wartime adventure story. Produced by Nancy Spielberg and directed by Roberta Grossman (Hava Nagila: The Movie, SFJFF 2012), it celebrates the daring young pilots who volunteered to fly for Israel in the war of 1948. Though their planes were WWII junk heaps, their flight suits Nazi discards, their bravery and skill helped turn the tide of the war.

Absolutely No Spitting

"So, you know how I told you to never spit? And that you're not allowed to spit and you shouldn't spit? SO... I need you to spit" And thus begins a very quirky, sometimes self-deprecating, and always heymish spit-driven DNA-journey-turned-love-letter between Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand, a fifty-something new old mom, and her much beloved and very spunky four-and-a-half-year-old adopted daughter Theo. And thank G-d they call NYC home - because it's the perfect place to embrace life as a multi-racial, multi-cultural, pan-global family.

Adam

Directed by Transparent producer Rhys Ernst and adapted by Ariel Schrag from her novel of the same name, Adam drops us down in the hipster lesbian and trans culture of Brooklyn, 2006. It’s essentially a coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old straight, cisgender male who falls in love with a lesbian after she mistakes him for a transgender man. Adam decides to maintain this Shakespearean deception and a satirical and nuanced exploration of identity ensues.

Adam

When nice Jewish girl Beth (Rose Byrne) moves into a new apartment, the refreshingly literal, brainy guy next door, Adam (Hugh Dancy), is probably not what her upper-middle-class Jewish mom (Amy Irving) and dad (Peter Gallagher) had in mind for her. But cupid’s arrow strikes these two different denizens of Gotham hard; they have major chemistry and within minutes we find ourselves rooting for them to overcome differences in culture and communication styles.

Adventures of a Mathematician

Based on the autobiography by Polish-Jewish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN follows Ulam’s dramatic journey to the United States in the 1930s where he plays a vital role in The Manhattan Project in the creation of the hydrogen bomb while desperately trying to help his sister flee Nazi occupied Poland.

Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

The Adventures of Saul Bellow is the first-ever documentary film on Bellow, the man described by critic James Wood as the "greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century."

After Tiller

Screened to great acclaim at Sundance, this documentary about third-trimester abortion hardly sounds life-affirming on its surface. Yet Martha Shane and Lana Wilson inject a welcome dose of rationality to the incendiary topic. With deliberate pacing and a calming soundtrack, they offer an intimate portrait of the only four doctors in the United States who still perform the procedure, despite the assassination of their mentor Dr. George Tiller by an antiabortionist in 2009.

Afternoon Delight

Rachel is a quick-witted, lovable, yet tightly coiled, thirtysomething steeped in the creative class of Los Angeles’s bohemian Silver Lake neighborhood. Everything looks just right—chic modernist home, successful husband, adorable child and a hipster wardrobe. So why is she going out of her gourd with ennui? Plagued by purposelessness, Rachel visits a strip club to spice up her marriage and meets a stripper whom she becomes obsessed with saving.

Afterward

Ofra Bloch, a New York-based psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family that emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. Disturbed by the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism around the world, Ofra travels to Germany, Israel, and Palestine to confront her own deep-seated feelings about Germans and Palestinians, and the tensions between the Holocaust and the Nakba. In the process, she explores the nature of resistance and the possibility of hope.

Aida's Secrets

Family secrets and lies are revealed in this documentary detective story which begins with World War II and ends with a 21st-century reunion of long lost brothers. With the help of a genealogical search organization, Izak, an Israeli kibbutznik, finally meets the Canadian blind younger brother he did not know he had, when both are in their mid-60s. Embracing one another, they work hard to try to pry secrets loose from their tight-lipped mother Aida. - Sara L. Rubin

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