By B. Ruby Rich

THE SAN FRANCISCO Jewish Film Festival has a long-deserved reputation as the most progressive of its kind, consistently challenging the Jewish American community's comfort zone by pushing questions of identity past the sacred themes of Zionism and Holocaust survival (and family histories, growing up, "my bar mitzvah," etc.). By broadening the scope to include an extended community of "others," the SFJFF has created a rich forum for divergent ideas. It even opened up early on to the work of Palestinian and Arabic filmmakers. This boldness should make it the preeminent event for a July like this one, awash in peace initiatives and Mideast turmoil.

At least it could have been. First, it should be noted that many of the selections arrive here with plenty of festival credentials under their belts, like veteran Israeli director Amos Gitai's Kedma, an alternative view of post-war Palestine and the creation of Israel that might even supplant the classic Exodus, which I was taken to see by my mother as a bas mitzvah treat. I know it occupied pride of place, thanks to Paul Newman, in American post-bas mitvzah girls' sexual fantasies. This one's more serious than cheesecake but not uninteresting. The Glow and Divan are others worth seeing.

Given the events of July 2003, however, the festival has a doubly important role to play in terms of exhibiting documentaries to fill in the holes of headline news and deepen the public's understanding of just what is going on in the Middle East right now, and why. Happily, some do exactly that. Two Israeli-made documentaries (both with Soros Foundation funding), Detained (by Anat Even and Ada Ushpiz) and The Settlers (by Ruth Walk), demonstrate the documentary as horror movie. Both portray life in the occupied territory of Hebron, peopled by furious and fearful Palestinians, jumpily arrogant Israeli soldiers, and fanatical fundamentalist Orthodox settlers. In The Settlers a monstrous Orthodox mother happily raises her brood amid warfare: "It's so interesting here." Another smiles smugly as she describes her total avoidance of her Palestinian neighbors. In Detained three Palestinian widows complain almost as much about their gender fate in Palestinian society as they do about the Israeli soldiers parading up and down their stairwell. The women are trapped not only in widowhood but also in a crazy building on the borderline between Israeli and Palestinian authority, with an Israeli military outpost right on their roof. Really, how can fiction compete?

If documentary is king, autobiography is its favored helpmate. A handful of documentaries by Israeli Jews delve into the anguish of the present situation through the lens of exile. Galoot uses exile as a laboratory of understanding, away from the daily pressures and threats of life back in Israel/Palestine. Filmmaker Asher de Bentolila Tlalim, a Moroccan-born Israeli, follows his wife to London and makes new friends. He presents a picture of Israelis so ignorant of how the rest of the world perceives them that they construe Arab attitudes as paranoia. (One classmate, for instance, thought Tlalim was a Mossad agent.) When Tlalim's wife discovers she's related to a legendary rabbi (who interestingly believed that exile, or galoot, was good for the Jewish soul, an attitude she notes that Zionism refutes), they travel to Poland to visit his grave. There, the film falls under the grip of charismatic fundamentalism that's even creepier than London's self-absorption.

A similar search into personal anguish and divided loyalties, via an exile in reverse, is ex-Bay Area local documentarian Michal Aviad's For My Children, which traces her decision to leave San Francisco and move with her family back to Israel at a time of long-evaporated optimism. Still there, she now employs relentless self-examination, home movies, family histories, and the violence of daily newscasts to draw a chronicle of life in Israel as the second intifada is gathering steam. An intense close-up of family life in a political pressure cooker, her film also demonstrates the extent to which Israeli Jews in the grip of a historical meltdown fail to see their forest for the trees. As in Galoot, they're caught in a willful denial of the full context of their being.

Luckily, the festival includes two documentaries that move well beyond narrow outlooks and take us in different but equally valuable directions.

Udi Aloni's Local Angel is a wonderfully complex view of Israeli contradictions, justifications, histories, and possibilities. An Israeli artist who lives in New York City, Aloni returned to Israel in the wake of Sept. 11 looking for answers in trauma. He must have known he'd have special access: his mother, Shulamit Aloni, has long been one of the leaders of the peace movement in Israel and a hero to a lot of people. What Aloni brings to his task, and what distinguishes Local Angel from the other Israeli documentaries I saw, are three qualities: a deep knowledge of history, an artistic approach to the material, and a willingness to let others speak. Aloni has a great imagination that's not hemmed in by politically induced myopia and, unlike his anguished compatriots, he's an optimist. He introduces us to the rappers DAM, who perform in both Hebrew and Arabic, and other musicians who cross ethnic borderlines; he cites the writings of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Shalom, chats with equal ease with Palestinian intellectuals and Jewish scholars, and most sensationally (it was filmed in January 2002), accompanies his mother and her Palestinian Authority friend Hanan Ashrawi to a meeting with Yasser Arafat in his besieged headquarters in Ramallah.

As smart, brave, and touching as his film, Aloni is coming to the festival to speak after the midday screening. Reached a few days ago on his cell phone, he was driving north on an Israeli road headed to the beach and, later on, the Jerusalem Film Festival, where Local Angel had its world premiere last summer. It's been shown on Israeli television (on the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination) and on French and German television as well. In the United States, it's a different story: Aloni complains of no New York City screenings at all, and so far no U.S. distribution either. So kudos to the SFJFF for standing out, again. Local Angel is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in what's possible when a filmmaker dares to imagine a grand scope of inquiry.

Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection is very much its match. Don't let the clumsy title fool you: its ease in unsettling the most basic assumptions regarding who is an Israeli and who's not, who's a Jew and who's not, will win you over. Video artist Samir displays a mature understanding of Israel as a Middle Eastern country with Arabic Jewish citizens (Sephardim, or Mizrahim) who are decidedly skeptical about the Ashkenazi (European-descended) Jewish society in which they live. Interestingly, this complex portrait of Israel's Iraqi Jews is the product of an Iraqi filmmaker, raised in Switzerland, who reveals that he is not a Jew at all but a Shiite Muslim. Samir describes his project ideologically: his father was a member of the Iraqi Communist Party, and so were the four men he tracks down in Israel and interviews in Arabic (probably a shock to Israeli audiences, given the prominence of one as a writer.) On-screen, Samir plays with images, raiding archives for 1940s Egyptian musicals such as Fatma, Marika wa Rachel and early examples of stereotyping such as the 1964 Israeli film Sallah Shabati. Samir registers disjunctions of time and place with a split screen that manages to work emotionally as something more than a gimmick; he clearly knows his tools and how to use them.

To counterbalance the fine old men in Israel, Samir goes to New York City to interview the wonderfully irreverent scholar of Israeli cinema Ella Shohat, who speaks at length about growing up in Israel as an Iraqi Jew. Shohat even lets us see a tape of her uproarious appearance on an Israeli talk show, when an argument with the host over whether Arabic Jews experience prejudice was settled by a shout-out from the audience. What a breath of fresh air! And extending that breeze, Shohat will be in town for the festival premiere.

Two elements recur in these films and others. One is the image of the World Trade Center, over Shohat's shoulder in Manhattan and over Aloni's, too, as a goad to his investigation. Another is the story of Israel's Black Panthers, named after the U.S. movement but aimed at rights for Mizrahi Jews in Israel. (Though I wasn't able to view it, the feature doc Have You Heard about the Panthers? should fill in the gaps concerning this fascinating and little-known movement.)

In the end, however, the Jewish Film Festival has failed to capitalize on its historic mission and moment: there are no Palestinian films in the festival. The changing of the guard may have left little time for beating the bushes, as both new director Don Adams and new programmer Nancy Fishman acknowledged. And the increasingly high profile of Palestinian films internationally meant that some were lost to other venues, or premiered first at the San Francisco International Film Festival, or perhaps debuted locally at Cinemayaat: The Arab Film Festival. And yes, as they noted, there's now so much work on the occupation as to overwhelm a festival that's more broadly intended.

Well, maybe. Whatever the explanation, the result is unacceptable. In the renaissance of Palestinian film and video right now, there's no shortage of work (last year alone, I saw Rashid Masharawi's Ticket to Jerusalem and Sobhi al-Zobaidi's Obor Kalandia, in addition to Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention). Hopefully, Janis Plotkin's survey, Sharing the Screen: 20 Years of Israeli and Palestinian Cinema at the Jewish Film Festival, will provide some desperately needed historical perspective. To see the future, though, the festival will have to reconsider its curatorial strategies and local position, with the leisure of a full 11 months leading up to the next installment.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival