During the 2006 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a summer heat wave hit the Bay Area hard. Inside the Castro Theatre, which has no air conditioning, filmgoers shvitzed in misery.
That’s when one elderly woman approached festival executive director Peter Stein, her finger wagging. “You’re the director,” she screeched. “Do something!”
“I smiled,” Stein remembered, “and said something like, ‘There are some things that even the executive director cannot control.’ ”
Soon, Stein will have even less control. After an eight-year tenure as the festival’s director, he is stepping down Oct. 3 — and once again becoming a regular film festival fan.
“It’s bittersweet,” Stein said of his impending departure, “because I really love the organization, the colleagues and the community. I’m mindful that this is a very unusual job and organization, and that it’s been a great privilege to be involved.”
Festival board president Dana Doron said Stein will be missed.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better executive director,” she said. “He’s grown the organization in so many ways, and brought a standard of excellence that is unparalleled.”
Doron said the board is still actively recruiting his successor.
Stein plans to continue volunteering for the festival, helping to shore up its endowment through the Future Focus Fund, a program affiliated with the S.F.-based Jewish Community Endowment Fund’s Community Legacy Project.
As for his career plans, he is already researching a new project that may end up as a documentary film or a stage play. He also hopes to leverage his skills as a moderator of panel discussions, a task he performed countless times at festival screenings and would like to replicate at arts discussions around the country.
Looking back, Stein said there was a seat-of-the-pants learning curve to running the festival. Some things are simply not taught in film school.
A third-generation San Franciscan and a Harvard alum, Stein has a background as both a filmmaker and public television producer. His 2001 documentary “The Fillmore” and series “Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco” both aired on PBS.
His connection with the SFJFF began as a fan. Stein then joined the board and in 2003 became executive director.
In his first year as executive director, a packed audience filled the Castro Theatre for a screening of the documentary, “Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust.”
As bad luck would have it the projector malfunctioned a minute into the screening.
“A backup tape was located in our office two miles away,” Stein recalled. “So I hauled the [film’s] director, Danny Anker, onto the stage, and together we improvised a half-hour interview before the film — time enough for the tape to arrive with a panting intern. From then on, we always made sure backups are actually in the booth.”
Some may point to the 2009 screening of the controversial documentary “Rachel” (about Rachel Corrie, the pro-Palestinian activist killed in Gaza) as the defining moment of the Stein era. He acknowledged the significance of that event, and the subsequent turmoil felt throughout the local Jewish community.
“He always took the high road,” Doron said of Stein’s response to the incident. “In the final analysis, that got us past it and kept us a strong and beloved organization.”
Added Stein, “Ultimately this job is like being a ringmaster at more than a three-ring circus. The exciting thing is bringing the film and filmmakers together with audience. Sometimes that’s really productive combustion. Sometimes not.”
He prefers the happier memories of his tenure, none more moving than the 2005 screening of the documentary “Keep Not Silent,” which chronicles the difficult lives of Orthodox Jewish lesbians living under cover.
“We flew one of the film’s subjects to the festival,” he said. “She appeared in the film in shadows, but she decided to use our festival, our stage, as her opportunity to come out for the first time in public. It still gives me shivers. She got a standing ovation.”
How have the eight years changed him? Stein said he has a renewed appreciation for just how hard it is to conceive, produce and distribute a film.
As for how the experience impacted him Jewishly, Stein said he has a deeper sense of the richness and complexity of what it means to be Jewish for different people. “While I was aware of that,” he said, “this has been like a graduate seminar.”
Looking toward his days as a regular SFJFF moviegoer, Stein said he’ll “never get tired of the feeling on opening night, with the lights coming down as the organ in the Castro plays ‘San Francisco’ and descends into the traps, the curtains part and the [festival] trailer comes on. It’s thrilling.”