SF Jewish Film Festival centers diverse perspectives on Israel-Palestine

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has long been a forum for expression of various points of view, including those cinematic themes one might not necessarily consider pro-Israel, like films about Palestinians.

But when the film festival is held for the 44th time from July 18 to Aug. 4, it will present films about Palestinians in the politically and emotionally charged atmosphere that has prevailed since Oct. 7.

On that date, Hamas killed nearly 1,200 people and took hundreds hostage in a deadly attack in Israel. Israel subsequently launched a massive military campaign that has claimed nearly 39,000 lives and precipitated a humanitarian crisis in Gaza .

With such a devastatingly raw backdrop, the film festival’s organizers faced a much more daunting task of curating a selection of films that gave voice to diverse viewpoints on Israel and Palestine, and raised important questions with sensitivity and without undue offense.

“Programming in a difficult moment like this one is a challenge and required a great deal of thoughtfulness and care,” said Guest Festival Director Ash Doyle, who along with Dominique Oneil shaped this year’s SFJFF film offerings. “Ultimately, the works we selected feel like gifts for us and our audiences, and in times like these we turn to artists to make meaning of what is happening around us.”

Doyle, who is a features programmer at the Sundance Film Festival , adds that the films selected for this year’s SFJFF are in conversation with one another and that the film festival invites viewers to seek multiple touchpoints, particularly in the “Ruins and Ruminations” section that was curated to address the current crisis in Israel and Gaza, as well as elsewhere in the programming.

“We believe this slate is kaleidoscopic in a generative way,” Doyle said. “We’re bringing as many filmmakers who want to speak directly to this issue as possible to the festival, as we want them to speak directly to the work and context of these films’ releasing post-10/7.”

“Lyd” is one of the most poignant and frank productions among the five feature films — “The Other,” “Physician Heal Thyself,” “Three Promises” and “The Vanishing Soldier” are the others — as well as “Vantage Points: Perspectives from Sapir College,” which is a collection of shorts, that are included in “Ruins and Ruminations.”

“Lyd” is a sci-fi-animation-inflected documentary about the city known in Israel as Lod that, for centuries, was a cultural and political hub for Palestine and its connection to the world. It raises awareness on a municipal level about how the Nakba — which means “catastrophe” in Arabic — in the wake of Israel’s birth in 1948 resulted in the deaths, exile and despair of many thousands of Palestinians , and how that pivotally sensitive experience remains relevant today.

“I am a Jewish American, and like most of us, I grew up knowing nothing about the Nakba,” said “Lyd” co-director Sarah Ema Friedland. “I read an article in 2015 about the atrocities that happened in Lyd in 1948, and it was literally the first time I had heard anything about any of the history of the Nakba, and it shifted everything for me. I was very moved to try to do something in the way I know how, which is being a filmmaker.”

Friedland explaied that she reached out to a friend who does solidarity work in Palestine, and she put her in touch with Rami Younis, who is a Palestinian journalist and writer born and raised in Lyd. Friedland added that she and Younis hit it off creatively and politically, and together they set about directing their documentary about Lyd, one of the last Palestinian cities to fall during the Nakba.

There were challenges behind the making of “Lyd,” not the least of which was the funding behind it.

“A lot of traditional funders in Israel and elsewhere do not want to touch the Nakba,” Younis said. “And being a Palestinian in Israel, I did not know how to approach funding from Arab countries.”

Ultimately, the film was funded through an Indiegogo campaign that included hundreds of backers, with a lot of Americans, many American and Israeli Jews, and Palestinians — 50% of the funding came from Palestinians, according to the filmmakers.

The film premiered in the Amman International Film Festival in August 2023, where it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Arab Documentary, and it still resonates in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023, Friedland argued.

“We made this film to show the ongoing Nakba that the State of Israel began committing against the Palestinians in 1948 but that continues today,” she said. “The ongoing genocide in Gaza has made this mission a chilling and devastating reality.”

“The Other” is another powerful cinematic portrait of the seemingly hostile-to-solutions landscape in which Israeli-Palestinian relations unfold. Through several personal accounts from both Israelis and Palestinians, the documentary sheds a light on how a lack of knowledge and interaction among people from the two groups — who are more closely related ethnically and linguistically than many people are aware of — has contributed to trauma and mistrust, fear and loathing between them.

For the documentary’s American-Israeli filmmaker Joy Sela, the making of “The Other” was a revelatory experience.

“As I immersed myself deeper into the activism and peace-building communities, I was confronted with a new reality I had not yet known in this land and my whole paradigm shifted,” Sela recalled. “I began focusing heavily on Palestinian culture and narrative as I filmed and engaged in community within the West Bank and Palestinian areas within Israel. When faced with meeting my ‘other’ and the reality on the ground in both mine and their homeland, I experienced the same transformation that I was documenting from my interview subjects.”

While the events of and since Oct. 7 led to postponement of the film’s release, those events also resulted in the production of an epilogue to revisit the film’s interviewees and issues. In the interim, according to Sela, the dialogue-building resolve of its principals has not wavered.

“A few days after the initial shock — I checked in with all Israelis and Palestinians featured in the film to ensure they were all safe and see if anyone wanted to pull out of the film,” Sela said. “To my own disbelief, they all told me they believe in their work more than ever and now is the time in which we must get this message out.”