So far, the first and largest Jewish film festival on the planet has shown more than 1,300 movies over the course of three-and-a-half decades. Screenings and related events strive to build and community celebrate independence — which seems like a treacherous balancing act, but these programmers make it look easy. Identifying as a Jewish event might imply religiousness as a priority, but really the emphasis here is more broadly cultural. In the realm of visual art, aside from The Art Dealer, a modern drama about a Jewish woman trying to recover Nazi-looted paintings, and the self-explanatorily titled Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, there's also Plastic Man: The Artful Life of Jerry Ross Barrish, about the San Francisco bondsman, filmmaker, and transformer of scavenged plastic detritus into elaborate sculptures. Of course many kinds of music are represented, from In Silence, a Czech docudrama about musicians killed in the Holocaust; to Danny Says, a portrait of punk godfather and Ramones manager Danny Fields; to As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM, about the late young rap-rock-remix maestro. On the literary front, The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer introduces the young women who translated the great writer's books from Yiddish into English. And on the literary-pictorial front, Very Semi-Serious does likewise with The New Yorker's cartoonists. You'll notice a majority of the films in any given SFJFF cross-section are documentaries. This year's festival is so thick with documentary riches that it even includes a documentary about a documentary, and its maker: Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah revisits the still-essential Holocaust epic, from 1985. And somewhere else entirely on the movies-about-movies spectrum, there's The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, about the two Israeli cousins who built a Hollywood-schlock production empire — possibly the only thing John Cassavetes and Chuck Norris ever had in common. See, there you go: building community and celebrating independence, all at once.
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