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San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2018

We're excited to be co-presenting several films at the 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which runs July 19 – August 5, 2018 throughout the Bay Area! Find out which flicks to catch and how to use AI's special promo code for a discount on tickets. We'll see you at #SFJEWISHFILM this summer! 

Check out the films you don't want to miss this year at the San Francsco Jewish Film Festival! Don't forget to use our special AI promo code for a discount when you order your tickets: ADATH38! 

To Dust

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.

Waldheim Waltz

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 chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache.

The Oslo Diaries

In 1992, with Israeli-Palestinian relations at a low and official communication suspended, an unlikely group of negotiators—two Israeli professors and three PLO members—met secretly in Norway. Faced with a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin needed a new direction. The political drama with all its intrigue, suspicion and discord is told through the actual diaries of the negotiators and the long-discarded footage of the actual Oslo negotiations.

93Queen

Borough Park, Brooklyn is home to the country’s largest ultra-orthodox Jewish community, one guided by conservative principles, including those dictating that women never engage in physical contact with non-familial men. Yet, in medical emergencies, it is the men of Hatzolah Emergency Medical Service who care for women. A mother of six, a lawyer and a tornado-like force, Rachel “Ruchie” Freier and her crew of dutiful yet revolutionary women are ready to change this.

Ashcan

From May to August 1945, 72 top Nazi officials were secretly imprisoned in the former Palace Hotel in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg. This inventive documentary follows 15 actors as they rehearse the 2017 play, Codename Ashcan. Just as the American interrogators learned increasingly more about the extent of the horrors of the Holocaust during those months, so, too, did the actors learn about the petty rivalries and personalities of the Nazis they portrayed.

Commandments

First-time Bay Area filmmaker Elizabeth Rynecki takes us along on a quest to find her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki’s lost artworks. The art disappeared after he was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto and perished at Majdanek. His more than 800 paintings and sculptures portrayed scenes of everyday Jewish life, and although her family was able to save some of it, Elizabeth knew there were many more pieces out there.

The Mossad

Considered one of the elite intelligence agencies in the world, the Mossad was created in 1949 as an insurance policy to defend the state of Israel. Utilizing intimate interviews, first person accounts, startling archival photographs and news footage, some leading figures in Israel’s intelligence community reveal their successes, failures and near misses. Although many were reluctant to discuss highly sensitive topics with the media, the cold calculations of their secret operations gradually unfold.

The Last Suit

Abraham, an 88-year-old tailor in Buenos Aires, has waited decades to fulfill a promise to a distant friend who helped him escape the Holocaust in Poland during the war. The cantankerous Abraham (in a heartfelt performance by Miguel Ángel Solá) clashes with everyone whose help he needs. But he seems to be mysteriously blessed, as the very people he fights with become his guardian angels, helping him each step along the way.

Muruer: Anatomy of a Trial

Vilnius was once known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” but by 1943 its vibrant Jewish community had been decimated from 80,000 before the war to only 600 survivors. Based on records from the 1963 ten-day trial of SS officer Franz Murer, known as the “Butcher from Vilnius,” this transfixing courtroom drama restages the vivid testimonies, World Jewish Congress conspiracy theories and unruly behind-the-scenes machinations of the case with an aptly titled “anatomical” intensity.

Playing God

How much is a life worth? What is the monetary value of a livelihood lost to 9/11? How do you put a price on losses of this magnitude? These are the questions Kenneth feinberg routinely wrestles with in his role as the overseer of funds disbursing tens of billions of dollars for damage claims and death benefits. He inhabits a unique role in the American legal system, where everything - including a life - has a price.

Scaffolding

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.

Wajib

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 different generations of Palestinians in this superbly acted film. 

Simon & Theodore

Simon has a loving wife, a baby on the way and a self-harm problem. Théodore has a bar mitzvah approaching, an absentee father and a penchant for violence. When these two wander together in the streets of Paris over the course of one long night getting angry, scared and close, they lean on each other and attempt to help one another fill in their own blanks before it is too late. ​

Winter Hunt

A young girl goes to a house in the woods to hold the old man, a former Nazi, and his adult daughter hostage. The tension spikes in a series of skillfully directed scenes that depict the balance of power as it shifts between accused and accusers. This harrowing thriller touches upon historical trauma and will make you question who is the hunter and who is the hunted before coming to a shocking and explosive ending.