I’ve managed now to preview four films for the upcoming San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, three of them documentaries. Here’s what I thought about them:
A- 100 Voices: A Journey Home, Castro, Thursday, July 28, 8:15 (San Francisco closing night); Oshman Family JCC, Wednesday, August 3, 6:15; Roda, Thursday, August 4, 6:40. In 2009, documentarians Danny Gold and Matthew Asner followed 100 
American cantors as they flew to Poland for a concert tour and a return to their personal and professional roots. The resulting film follows many stories: the art and history of cantorial singing, the long history of Jews in Poland, the Holocaust, and a new, Polish resurgence of interest in Jewish culture. Gold and Asner weave these these threads into a touching, fascinating, and triumphant garment without ever getting them tangled. I do wish, however, that they’d given more time to pre-WWII Jewish-Polish relations. On the other hand, the movie is filled with beautiful music. Some sounds like opera, some like jazz, but all of it is deeply spiritual and unquestionably Jewish.
B+ Mabul (The Flood), Castro, Thursday, July 21, 6:30 (opening night); Roda, Sunday, July 31, 6:30; Rafael, Saturday, August 6, 4:20; Oshman Family JCC, Sunday, 
August 7, 6:15. The plot is similar to A Serious Man and Sixty Six, but Guy Nattiv’s drama about a Bar Mitzvah in a dysfunctional family couldn’t be more different. Bar Mitzvah boy Yoni sells completed homework to other kids, can’t please the rabbi (you’d think a Bar Mitzvah would be easy for a native Hebrew speaker), and deeply resents his parents—with good reason. His mother is having an affair and his father is a irresponsible pothead. To make matters worse, his extremely autistic brother, who really belongs in an institution, comes to live with them. Nattiv doesn’t leaven the story with humor, or even with much warmth, resulting in a harrowing, merciless look at a family coming apart at the seams. The last act, with a suspenseful climax and a somewhat upbeat ending, feels tacked on.
B- Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology, Castro, Saturday, July 23, 4:30. Tiffany Shlain had Tree-of-Life-level ambitions for her documentary about life, human evolution, networking, her father’s terminal cancer, and her own difficult pregnancy. Although she made an entertaining movie, she failed to make a profound one. Like most autobiographical documentaries, much of 
Connected comes off as self-centered. But more of it is Daddy-centered; the movie worships her father (surgeon and best-selling author Leonard Shlain) to the point of near-idolatry. While this is emotionally understandable—she made the film while he was dying—it’s not good filmmaking. When not dealing with family health problems, Connected looks at the networks human beings have created, and the essential connectedness of everything. In doing so, it offers no insights that a reasonably educated and curious person would not have found elsewhere. So why do I give it an even moderately positive B-? Because Shlain is at least an entertaining documentarian if not a deep one. Connected contains many clever, informative, and often funny cartoons (animated by Stefan Nadelman), and uses old movie clips in amusing and original ways.
C+ Next Year in Bombay, Castro, Thursday, July 28, 1:30; Oshman Family JCC, Thursday, August 4, 4:00; Roda, Saturday, August 6, 2:20; Rafael, Sunday, August 7, 
11:20am. Did you know there are Jews in India? Not once-British Jews who stayed behind when the Empire collapsed, but people who are racially and ethnically Indian, yet identify themselves as Jews and practice the religion. For too much of this too-short documentary, filmmakers Jonas Parienté, and Mathias Mangin seem content to let us marvel at that very fact. But in its second half, as it looks at a small, Jewish peasant village (seen through the eyes of a young, urban, educated Bombay Jew), and then deals with questions of immigration to Israel, it dips into profound issues of Jewish identity. But it doesn’t give these issues the time they deserve. The festival will precede this 55-minute feature with a 19-minute short, “Starring David.”
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