When asked to recall his favorite memory of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Sam Ball responded without hesitation — the night Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg belted a home run out of the Castro Theatre.
“It was surreal in some ways,” the festival’s assistant director said about last year’s “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.”
“Here was this guy coming up to the plate in 1934 and hundreds of people were cheering and shouting for him like it was the seventh game of the World Series at Pac Bell Park.”
Even though Greenberg ultimately hit a homer, his kicks off Thursday at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, will present films jointly with the Arab Film Festival. The festival’s growth, in both size and content, has mirrored the mores of the past 20 years, according to Janis Plotkin, the festival’s executive director.
When the festival first started at San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema, with a budget of $3,000 and a strictly volunteer staff, many of the films constituted what Plotkin called “explore your belly-button cinema.”
“Essentially, filmmakers recognized that since their belly button was Jewish, the rest of them must be as well,” she said in a recent interview, laughing.
In the ensuing 20 years — with a budget approaching $750,000, annual attendance approaching 40,000 and a paid staff of seven — the films at the festival have covered a much broader body of Jewish issues.
Some of those issues will be explored when the Conference of American Jewish Film Festivals convenes for a four-day workshop in San Francisco during the festival.
Meanwhile, after its run in San Francisco, the festival will continue July 29 through Aug. 3 in Berkeley, July 30 through Aug. 3 in Menlo Park and Aug. 5 through 7 in San Rafael.
Among this year’s selections are numerous films from France, including the opening night’s “Cours Toujours” (“Dad on the Run”), along with several works that provide fresh looks at the Holocaust, Israel and Judaism — issues that constitute what Plotkin calls the festival’s “triumvirate.”
“When we show films about the Holocaust,” said Sam Ball, the festival’s associate director, “we like to avoid the clichés of films such as ‘Life is Beautiful’ and ‘Jacob the Liar.’
“Anything that contains sweeping music scores, or over-sentimentalized characters, is out. If someone wants to make a film about the Holocaust in this day and age, it had better have a really good angle.”
To that end, the film festival this year will feature documentaries on two people vilified for their roles in Nazi Germany — Kurt Gerron and Adolph Eichmann.
Gerron, a Jewish actor who played the original Mack the Knife, was a major film star in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. Gerron’s historical blemish occurred when he directed “The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City,” a propaganda film made under the command of Hitler.
“This film [‘Kurt Gerron’s Karussell’] really gave me a new perspective,” said Plotkin. “For the first time, I was able to understand the psychological pressure he was under. In his era, he was reviled as a collaborationist, which I no longer view him as.”
No such empathy is accorded Eichmann, the architect of the “final solution.”
“The Specialist” is culled from more than 300 hours of unreleased footage. Based on Hannah Arendt’s landmark reporting of Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem, the film questions whether Eichmann was an ideologue or an extremely dedicated civil servant.
“In addition to being a riveting courtroom drama,” Plotkin said, “the film hammers home the point that evil doesn’t always come disguised as Darth Vader.”
Israel is the subject of several films in this year’s festival.
“Diogenes: Ansar 3,” which explores the volatile subject of the intifada, is one of three films co-presented with Cinemayaat: The Arab Film Festival. The title refers to detention camps that housed Palestinian activists.
The film, which premiered earlier this year at Israel’s first-ever Human Rights Film Festival, will be followed by an onstage discussion with the filmmakers and Israeli and Palestinian journalists.
Pre-state Israel is the focus of “The Life of the Jews in Palestine,” a newly restored film that depicts early Zionists tilling fields and building cities, schools and hospitals.
The film, criticized at the time for ignoring the Arab population, was meant to encourage viewers to make aliyah.
Jewish baby-boomers who long for the ’70s can find solace in “Vulcan Junction,” a nostalgic look back at nine friends living near Haifa just prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Set against a soundtrack featuring the heavy guitar riffs of Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and King Crimson, the film revolves around the local bar (from which the movie takes its title) where hopes and dreams flow as freely as the booze.
For those whose need for history still hasn’t been mollified, there’s “The Mystery of Paul.”
The Apostle, not the Beatle.
Taking its cue from the classic “road movies,” the documentary explores the contradictory life and times of Saul of Tarsus, a Jewish zealot who became a Christian apostle en route to Damascus. The French actor Didier Sandre travels the globe, interviewing leading Christian, Jewish and agnostic theologians and historians.
That film is a good example of the many “outreach” films that the festival screens, according to Ball.
“A quarter of our audience is non-Jewish,” he said. “That translates to roughly 10,000 people — so there must be a very compelling reason for them to attend.”
That reason, he adds, is the universal themes expressed by many of the films — whether it’s love, loss or the need to connect with others.
“People are very hungry in the information age for cultural sustenance,” Ball said, “and watching a story unfold as a community is more fulfilling than surfing the Internet for three hours.”