We are please to announce our annual community partnership with the 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 19 – August 5, 2018. Two films showcasing the Latino-Jewish experience shine a light on diversity in the Americas. We encourage you to attend SFJFF to discover new worlds from the cozy seats at renowned art deco landmark, the Castro Theater.
From Argentina, Pablo Solarz’s drama The Last Suit (86 min), winner of the Audience Award and Official Selection at the 2018 Miami Film Festival, makes its Bay Area premiere.
At 88, Abraham Bursztein is seeing his place in the world rapidly disappear. His kids have sold his Buenos Aires residence, set him up to move to a retirement home, and disagree on how to handle his fading health. But Abraham survived the Holocaust, made a successful life in a foreign land, and isn’t about to quietly fade away. Instead, he plots a secret one-way trip to Poland, where he plans to find the friend who saved him from certain death at the end of World War II, and to keep his promise to return one day. Times and tickets: https://jfi.org/sfjff-2018/film-guide/the-last-suit
Comedic and poignant in equal measure, from Argentina to Spain, across Germany and finally to Poland, Abraham is on his own but also accompanied by the characters he meets along the way, who both help him and need his help. A standout among these is the iconic Spanish actress Angela Molina, as the proprietor of the Madrid hotel where he stays. With its klezmer-driven score, evocative cinematography and fleet pacing, THE LAST SUIT approaches its weighty themes with a light touch that illuminates a serious story. And in its mix of Spanish, Yiddish, German and Polish it is a globe-trotting surprise, a late-in-life road movie with planes, trains and heart.
Also playing, The Sentence by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Rudy Valdez. This US made documentary (85 minutes) is the winner of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. HBO has since acquired the U.S. television and streaming rights to the documentary feature film. Don’t miss it on the big screen.
Drawing from hundreds of hours of footage, filmmaker Rudy Valdez shows the aftermath of his sister Cindy Shank’s incarceration for conspiracy charges related to crimes committed by her deceased ex-boyfriend—something known, in legal terms, as “the girlfriend problem.” Cindy’s 15-year mandatory sentence is hard on everyone, but for her husband and children, Cindy’s sudden banishment feels like a kind of death that becomes increasingly difficult to grapple with.
Valdez’s method of coping with this tragedy is to film his sister’s family for her, both the everyday details and the milestones—moments Cindy herself can no longer share in. But in the midst of this nightmare, Valdez finds his voice as both a filmmaker and activist, and he and his family begin to fight for Cindy’s release during the last months of the Obama administration’s clemency initiative. Whether their attempts will allow Cindy to break free of her draconian sentence becomes the aching question at the core of this riveting and deeply personal portrait of a family in crisis. Times and tickets: https://jfi.org/sfjff-2018/film-guide/the-sentence
Go to sfjff.org to see these films and their full program of Jewish film on the silver screens of the SF Bay Area in July.
