A Palestinian and son of a Hamas leader, Mosab Hassan Yousef was raised deeply entrenched in the Middle Eastern conflict. In his early twenties, he was captured and interrogated by Gonen Ben Yitzhak, a “handler” working for the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Mosab was convinced to work for the Shin Bet undercover, and did so from 1997 to 2007, providing the agency with intel that helped them stop several terrorist attacks. Together, Mosab and Gonen saved the lives of many.

Eventually, Mosab revealed to his father and the Palestinians that he had been an undercover agent, consequently forcing him to move to the United States and start anew. He converted to Christianity and took shelter in his new home, away from Palestine where he would surely be under grave danger should he return. He wrote a bestselling book, “Son of Hamas”, in which he shared his extraordinary experience as an undercover agent. He was threatened with deportation from the US, however, when claims that his book supported “terrorist organizations” surfaced.

His political asylum threatened, Mosab seemed doomed to return to the Middle East. After years of not speaking, Gonen came to the aid of Mosab, revealing his own identity (a criminal offense in Israel) to testify on his friend’s behalf. Mosab resides in the US to this day, thanks to a friendship forged in the most unimaginable of circumstances.

Filmmaker Nadav Schirman‘s The Green Prince is a documentary not about the Middle Eastern conflict, but about Mosab and Gonen’s unlikely, unbreakable friendship. It’s a doc that feels like pulse-pounding thriller, covering the many close calls, double-crosses, and thwarted terrorist attacks the duo experienced together.

The day after their surprise appearance at a screening of the film at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival a few months ago, we spoke to Nadav, Mosab, and Gonen about the audience’s reaction to their surprise appearance, Nadav’s great responsibility to respect his subjects and the audience, making a doc feel like a Hollywood thriller, Gonen putting his life on the line for Mosab, how the absurdity of undercover work can make you laugh, and much more.

The Green Prince opens this Friday in San Francisco and is playing in select cities.

Mosab Hassan Yousef

What was the audience’s reaction to your surprise appearance at the screening?
Nadav: It was amazing. I think the organizers expected a lot of tumult and polarized political views in light of the current situation [in the Middle East], so there was a lot of security and anticipation. And yet, when the film was over, all we got were standing ovations and a lot of love. The film seemed to unite people rather than divide them.Was that your intent when making the film? To bring people together?
Nadav: I’m a storyteller, my intent was to tell the story. I was touched and gripped by the story because of the hope that it conveys. It’s very rare for us–especially [in the Middle East]–to feel hope. We have a variety of feelings, but hope is not one of them. When I was acquainted with the story and met Mosab and Gonen in person, I felt that hope, the same as when somebody is pinching you. It was very tangible. That’s what compelled me to start the project. I’m very happy that I happened to channel that emotion into an audience.

Mosab and Gonen, what does it feel like to watch the film with an audience?
Mosab: It’s not an easy thing to see your life experiences in a 100-minute time frame. This is not who we are, basically. It’s a part of our experience, captured on camera. You always have more to say. We know that it’s impossible to encapsulate a human experience in film, but I think Nadav and the film team did an amazing job to bring the story to life again and make it visible to many people. We’re very grateful. We try to continue to be non-attached to the story. Whether people treat us as heroes or traitors, this is not who we are. We’re just human beings who were stuck in this situation, and we found a way out. Our goal now is to tell the millions of people still stuck in that war, that captivity, to come out. I hope some people find it educational and inspiring.

You touched on something interesting there. After what you just said, I presume there moments when you’re watching the film with an audience where you feel a desire to explain your experience further.
Gonen: Yes, of course. First of all, Nadav had to put everything we said–hours and hours of interviews–into 100 minutes. He needed to put many things we said aside. The first time we watched it was at Sundance. I don’t remember everything I said when we shot the movie, but this is the way Nadav decided to tell the story. It’s the best way we could ever tell our story. I felt different feelings at the Doc Aviv festival in Israel. Before the screening, I saw some people I knew from the Shin Bet, and suddenly I felt different. When I watched the movie with people from the Shin Bet and my family, it was different. When I talk about things in the film that happened in the agency, now the Shin Bet people are going to think about that.

Nadav: Sundance was the first time Mosab and Gonen saw the film. I was under a great deal of trepidation, because I felt that these two gentlemen had entrusted me with their story, and it was a great sense of responsibility. As Mosab said, you cannot encapsulate somebody’s experiences in a 100-minute film. The life experiences of Mosab and Gonen are mind-blowing. You get a glimpse of it in the film, but it’s much bigger than fiction. Hollywood heroes do not live what these two gentlemen live. There was a great responsibility there.

I think that’s the big difference between fiction filmmaking and documentary filmmaking: In fiction filmmaking, you’re only responsible to the audience, the studio, the financiers…you’ve got to make a great, entertaining film. But you’re pretty much free. Here, we had the responsibility of making the story very captivating and entertaining, but I personally felt a great responsibility towards Mosab and Gonen to be truthful. I felt a channel to the story, and perhaps channels that they were not aware of. It was a great load to carry, and I was very happy when they were pleased with the film at Sundance.

Gonen Ben Yitzhak

The film’s a documentary, but it has many elements of a Hollywood narrative film. What impressed me was that you were only working with two characters.
Nadav: That was a big challenge. We shot footage of other people who gave context to the story, but while editing the film, we realized that this is a story about a relationship, so let’s try to focus on that. Simon Chinn, one of my partners who had produced Searching For Sugarman and Man On Wire, together with John Battsek, they’re pioneers or shepherds of this non-fiction movement that’s taking over non-fiction films. Simon called this film a “two-hander” when we decided to tell the story as gripping as a thriller with just two characters. That became a part of the artistic challenge.

Again, I felt a great sense of responsibility on one hand to Mosab and Gonen, but on the other hand towards the audience, because this is a cinema film. People are going to go and pay money for a ticket, for parking, for babysitters. It costs $50, $60, $100 to see a film. If somebody’s going to pay that amount of money to see a film, you want them to not only be touched, you want them to be entertained.

It was a big team [making this film], and I think what happened was that people were so touched by the story that the whole team put their heart and soul in it. I remember sometimes we would ask Mosab or Gonen questions, and the answers were pouring out of them. I would look left and right and see the sound man and the assistant cameraman crying. I was like, okay, we’re on to something here.

Gonen, you’re used to being in the role of the handler. But in this experience, you were not the handler; someone else was. Did that take some adjustment?
Gonen: Yeah. Because I was working so many years as a handler, I was aware of the fact that I’m now switching places. From one side, I knew that I wasn’t the handler; I was the source. When I first med Nadav, it took time to trust him. But when I knew he was the one to make this project successful, I just forgot it. I went with the project and opened up to him. But in the beginning, I did have the feeling of, “Now someone else is handling the situation.” It was strange.

Was that uncomfortable?
Gonen: It was.

Nadav: What struck me was how similar the job of a film director is to the job of a handler. Basically, handlers create the setting for the source to trust them and go along with things and sometimes go against their own interests. That’s what film directors do all the time. I think, ultimately, you’re successful if the source believes in the cause.

Gonen: When we did all kinds of operations [in the Shin Bet], we needed to build a set–a story–and people were meant to believe it. It was like a movie. As a handler, I built a story for everyone to believe. It was also a very relieving process for me to step forward and tell my story. This was my first opportunity to tell my story to someone. It was always a secret. Legally, I was not supposed to tell anybody. When I told my story to Nadav, I didn’t get commision to tell it, but I felt a very heavy weight was sitting in my heart and I needed to tell the story. Nadav wasn’t just the director/handler, he was also my shrink. [laughs]

Mosab, your friendship with Gonen is out of this world, something most of us will never experience. Did you ever think the story of your friendship would be told to the world?
Mosab: I can’t forget the moment when I received an email from Gonen for the first time after I left the agency. We did not speak for a few years. We were one of the best teams in the agency, fighting terrorism. That was an amazing relationship. For me, it existed only within the agency. Outside of the agency, I didn’t know his real name, his address, his phone number–I didn’t know anything about him. When I left the agency, I left without anything. For me, he did not exist anymore.

When he heard I was struggling in the United States of America and he saw me on the front page of the news, he couldn’t stay silent. He emailed me, and I was really encouraged. The content of the email was his real name, how many children he has, and what he was doing in real life. He left the agency as well and was studying to become a lawyer. That was the first time we connected outside of the agency, on a new basis. This is something profound, something you can’t find. I understand the danger he was in. For him to expose his real identity to a source means going to an Israeli prison for eight years. This is what it took to make that email connection. He took a great risk, and that sustained me and gave me support. I knew that if I told the world my story and our experiences, no one would believe. But when there is an insider witness, it would make more sense. I can’t imagine my journey without his support and sacrifice.

There’s a scene I wanted to ask you about, Mosab, where your father is about to be arrested by the Israelis, and your arrest is going to be faked. You’re laughing. You’re laughing about having dinner with your family before this happens. What were you thinking as you recounted that experience?
Mosab: Working for the intelligence world, you start to differentiate between what is real and what is not real. You see the level of deception. You see the distorted perception of people, governments, media–this brings you to a point where you have no choice but to laugh. Basically, you see how many people are deluded and deceived and how many people aren’t willing to stand up for the truth. You know deep in your heart if you go out and tell the truth, you’ll get killed or persecuted. What else can you do but laugh?

Nadav, we talked a bit about how the film plays like a thriller. What does creating that kind of high suspense and urgency in a documentary entail?
Nadav: I never went to film school, and my whole approach to filmmaking is very intuitive. My film school was these two quotes Billy Wilder had put forward. One was, “Grab the audience by the throat and never let go,” and the other was, “Let the audience add up 2 and 2. They will love you forever.” These were the guidelines of making the film. I love thrillers, and I love suspense. Small screens, big screens–we’re surrounded by screens all the time. iPhones, tablets, TV’s–It becomes challenging to captivate an audience. The challenge was to captivate. From the moment the movie starts, you want the audience to be invested in the story completely. This is a story that has all the ingredients of drama which lead to catharsis. As a storyteller, this is what we live for. We’re here to generate emotions, a purge of emotions.

Nadav Schirman

The aesthetics of the chamber in which Mosab and Gonen are interviewed is so cold and hopeless. I did not expect the film to end up in such a beautiful place. Was that strategic on your part?
Nadav: Very much so. There are three ways to gather intelligence: Visual intelligence, which is using drones and cameras where the human appears as a blip on the screen, devoid of humanity. Then, there’s signal intelligence–tapping in to phone calls and email conversations–which is used a lot today by the NSA. Again, there’s not humanity to this. The last one is human intelligence, and this is what Mosab and Gonen were engaged in. As a filmmaker, what I found interesting was that we had all three levels present in the film.

Going into this process, we knew Gonen and Mosab were masters of deceit. They could manipulate their answers to a great extent, so my role as a director was to “handle” them, as Gonen would say, to put them off-balance and give them the possibility of examining their narrative in a very different way. Mosab had written a book, and he was a very eloquent teller of his own story. Our role was to have him invest in his story in a very different way. I was more interested in the emotional aspects of the story and wanted him to lead us to the darkest corners of his own narrative. As a filmmaker, I was going to use the set, which was very imposing; 30-foot-high walls make you feel very small. We used the Errol Morris Interrotron, which was essential in truth-telling. I told Mosab, “Allow me to push you. Allow me to taunt you.” Sometimes Mosab stormed off the set and got really angry. It was tough, but he’d come back and sit in that chair, which was really hard.

This isn’t a political film at all. It’s a story we can all relate to, a friendship forged from strife. Screening the film in the US, what have been some of the most surprising ways you’ve seen the film touch people?
Nadav: When we screened the film in Park City, I was approached by some bankers from Texas. They said, “We know nothing about the conflict and aren’t particularly interested, but we were very touched by your film.” They were saying that the movie had inspired them to follow their own moral compass. I asked what they meant, and they said, “Every Monday morning, we have staff meetings at the bank.” Usually, the head of the bank outlines the operations for the week or the month. “As workers at the bank, we have two choices: If we disagree with the MO that is being presented, we can either speak up and risk losing our job, or we can lower heads and go with the flow.” They said the movie inspired them to speak up for what they believed in. That was very surprising. It transcended the story itself.

Gonen: There’s a negative approach from the Shin Bet when it comes to me. I got an invitation from a senior personnel who isn’t at Shin Bet anymore but at another organization in Israel. I was invited to a closed screening in Israel, and he told me, “In the agency some people think negatively of what you did, and some people think positively, but in general, people see the humanity of the story, even in the Shin Bet.” For me, this was very, very surprising.

Mosab: This is a story that took place in the Middle East, but it’s definitely a universal story. I think it’s a very important human journey, and not because it’s my journey. Again, I believe many people struggle in their own captivities, and I see on many people’s faces–young and old, men and women–some hope and inspiration to fight for something. It’s worth it to fight for something, even if you have to lose your identity, friends, or even your entire family. You stand for truth, for who we are. I see this already happening, and that’s the core of the message. I’m very happy.

Playing at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival tomorrow night at the California Theater in Berkeley, Austin-based filmmaker Steve Mims’ Arlo & Julie is a quirky indie comedy about the titular couple, who begin receiving mysterious jigsaw puzzle pieces in the mail. More optimistic than your typical suburban indie, the film uses elements of mystery and light-hearted humor to make for a fun, easily-digestible experience.

Steve spoke with us about the project’s origins, the film’s unique comedic tone, finding his actors, the film’s unique mix of genres, and more.

See Arlo and Julie tomorrow night, August 2nd, at 8:55 at the California Theater in Berkeley.

You filmed in Austin, correct?
Steve: Correct. We filmed in Austin and a little bit in West Texas. I had a great time shooting a short with the main actor, Alex Dorbrenko. I talked to him about this idea I had: What would happen to you if you found a piece of a puzzle in the mail and you just kept getting them? My thought was that initially you’d be dismissive, but eventually you’d reach a point where you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. I started writing it for him to be the main character, and he introduced me to Ashley Spillers, so I started writing it for both of them. All of the other actors came through those two, because they knew a lot of people in the area from working here for a long time. The script got populated with actors that they worked with before. I wrote the script over about six months.

Ashley and Alex are so sweet in the film. Are they like that in real life, and did their personalities inform the tone of the film?
Steve: They are a lot like their characters. Ashley’s super charming. You don’t run into people who really have something special all the time, but she has that. The tone of it? It’s obviously a lightweight film. Certain things resonate with people in terms of the embedded issues of truthfulness, but on the whole, you can’t make a movie about people putting a jigsaw together and have it be anything other than fun. To me, the movie closest to this in tone is Stolen Kisses from 1968. If you haven’t seen that movie…you’ve got to see it. It’s really inventive and fun.

The puzzle and the painting that’s involved in the film’s plot are two very striking visual latching-on points.
Steve: I had the idea for the puzzle for a while, and for the painting, I thought it had to be something abstract. I wanted to have it somehow connected to what the characters are going through. We had people on the crew who worked almost full-time trying to put that puzzle together. It’s an abstract puzzle, so there aren’t a lot of edges that you can find to help you along. It drove people crazy. It was 2000 pieces. In reality, Arlo and Julie would have never put that thing together, because we had a team of people working non-stop on that thing!

This film is a mystery, a comedy, and a romance all in one. It’s a great mix for an indie film.
Steve: Thanks so much. I think people have an expectation of what an independent movie is, and I think that’s why the movie’s done so well. People are caught off-guard by the nature of the movie itself. People laugh as well, which is nice.

There’s a very peculiar tone to the film’s humor, and everyone in the cast seems to understand it.
Steve: I’m super lucky. Mallory Culbert, who plays Trish, is really sharp and funny. Her boyfriend in the movie, Hugo [Vargas-Zesati], is also great. They’re the type of actors who can do something five ways and all five ways are really good. The most experienced guy in the movie is Chris Doubek, who plays the mailman. He’s the real deal, and he was terrific. The tempo of the film is fast, with the beats in the dialogue being pretty rapid. It’s not that naturalistic; hopefully it sounds natural, but you can’t really drag these jokes out. It was fun.

The ’20s soundtrack is really great. Did you always have it in mind?
Steve: From the beginning. I was editing the film, too, and I was putting these pop tracks from the ’20s in there. I’m a big fan of that music. There’s a program here in Austin about that music that I listen to every week. Also, Arlo is a historian, so he sort of lives in the past. There’s a visual motif in the movie with a gramophone, and there’s a DJ in Austin who you can hire to use her gramophones and 78s. That music is obviously old, so we wanted to plant that seed early on in the film of, somehow in the logic of this movie, this is where it’s coming from.

How excited are you to screen at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival?
Steve: We’re so thrilled! It’s such an honor, and I can’t wait to get there. It’s going to be such a blast. I’ve been so busy working that I haven’t had time to mention it, but we’re all super excited to be there.

For 100 years, Russ & Daughters has been serving delicious smoked fish to New Yorkers from its original location in the lower-east side. Filmmaker Julie Cohen took it upon herself to celebrate the centennial cinematically with The Sturgeon Queens, a jaunty chronicling of the store’s history that’s both full of attitude and touchingly nostalgic. In a wonderful stroke, Cohen uses faithful Russ & Daughter customers to narrate the film, with talking head interviews with both store employees, past and present, and celebrity devotees (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mario Batali, and others) to round out the warm tribute to the NYC institution.

The film will be screening at multiple venues at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. We spoke to Julie about the project appealing to people of many backgrounds, her first time visiting the store, the idea to have customers narrate the film, the controversy surrounding the “Super Heebster” sandwich (wasabi roe, salmon, and cream cheese on a bagel), and more.

The Sturgeon Queens screenings at SFJFF:

July 26, CinéArts at Palo Alto Square, 4:15PM
Aug 2, Roda Theater, 6:30PM
Aug 3, Castro Theater, 12:15PM
Aug 10, Smith Rafael Film Center, 12:00PM

Where did you get the idea for the project?
Julie: About six years ago, New York PBS asked me to quickly put together a wide-scope film about Jews in New York, basically. I came up with six different slice-of-life stories and put them together for the film. I knew I wanted to do a story about Jewish food on the lower-east side, so that’s how I chose Russ & Daughters as a subject for that film. I thought Russ & Daughters really deserved its own film. The sit-down interview with Anne and Hattie in Sturgeon Queens is from that older film, and I used it because I knew that I had so much great material with these two wonderful characters. I had put the idea for the film aside for some years, but I knew that the 100th anniversary of the store was coming up in 2014, so it seemed like the right time.

As an Asian guy from San Francisco, I’d just like to say that your film makes being Jewish look really, really cool! I’m a little jealous!
Julie: Maybe it’s not as cool as we make it look, [laughs] but I’m really happy that it’s relatable not just to New York Jewish audiences, but also to people with all different kinds of backgrounds. Especially immigrant backgrounds. In the credits, we include the immigrant stories of a lot of our major crew. I had crew members who came from all over the world, with different immigration stories, whose families had a lot of similarities that maybe we don’t think about so much.

Can you recall the first time you stepped into Russ & Daughters?
Julie: My first Russ & Daughters experience was when I was shooting that first movie. I don’t know how I had missed it prior to 2007, but I had! For somebody who grew up eating a lot of that kind of food–smoked fish, borscht–except MUCH less-good versions of it…Ecstasy may be a big word for it, but it’s somewhere around there. That kind of food has a whole lot of emotional content for people of my background. When I have pickled herring, it brings back all kinds of great memories, mostly of eating big brunches with my parents and grandparents. But the version that I was eating 30 or 40 years ago was not nearly the quality of what Russ & Daughters is putting out. Their food is completely delicious and first rate. Usually, things are never as good as you remember them, but Russ & Daughters is what you remember, but better.

Having the customers narrate the film Seder style was a great decision. What I particularly liked was how you included the mistakes they’d make while reading.
Julie: In a way, there’s a tinge of unfairness to it. Even when you have professional narrators, they mess up all the time! You just don’t include it. First of all, I couldn’t even believe what great reads they gave. They did a wonderful job, especially for being paid exclusively in lox. [laughs] I included the mess-ups that were funny. Ben Waxman, the guy in the blue shirt who makes the funniest mistakes, has asked me, “Why didn’t you give us more time to rehearse?!” I included the mistakes because he’s a comic genius. [laughs]

You including the flubs is great because it loosens the film up a bit. It’s informal and allows us to relax a bit as an audience.
Julie: The idea was that I wanted the film not to feel super self-important and pretentious. I was hoping it would have the same warmth as the store does. The Yiddish word for that is “hamish”, which kind of means “salt of the earth.” It’s funny to hear people pointing that out. “It’s not super intellectual!” That’s not exactly what a filmmaker is seeking to hear from people! [laughs] When you call a person “hamish”, it’s good, but like a lot of Yiddish words, it’s not 100% a compliment. But I embrace it, because I want this to be a film for everybody to enjoy. This isn’t Truffaut or Fellini!

What I found striking about your celebrity interviews was how full of love and affection they were. They’re just beaming with joy when talking about the store and their favorite products.
Julie: Particularly from someone like Justice Ginsberg, who is known for her seriousness and intellect. She was almost childlike and giddy in her love for the smoked fish. It goes back to the feelings food can provoke for people who grew up eating it.

My wife and I will be traveling to New York this winter. What do you suggest we get at Russ & Daughters?
Julie: The Gaspe Nova is delicious. They have seven different kinds of lox, and that’s my favorite. I love their pickled herring, and they have a lot of different varieties–mustard, curry–but I prefer the old-fashioned cream and onion variety. The Super Heebster, which is discussed with some controversy in the film, is REALLY delicious. Despite the controversy surrounding the name of it, audiences don’t seem to be bothered when they hear the name. It makes people laugh. During the moment when the green, wasabi-tinged fish roe is spread on the bagel, all of the old Jewish audiences will gasp in horror! It’s scandalous to them, but I would highly recommend the Super Heebster to you and your wife.

The most renowned Jewish film festival in the world, the 34th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, kicks off tomorrow night at the Castro Theater for a three-week run of stunning, independent films from across the globe. Through every genre of cinema–from action, to documentary, to comedy, to romance–the festival’s line-up celebrates Jewish-ness for people from all walks of life to enjoy and embrace.

18 countries are represented in the festival’s 70-film line-up, which includes 7 world premieres. Housing the screenings are several theaters across the Bay Area, including Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater and New Parkway, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, CinéArts in Palo Alto, and more.

Opening the festival is The Green Prince, a poignant docu by Nadav Schirman that follows the journey of Mosab Hasaan Yousef, a young Palestinian who grew up hating Israelites. Following being captured by the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, he comes to realize the true brutality of his own people’s tactics, from suicide bombings to needless torture, compelling him to work for Israel as a spy, the greatest shame known to Palestinians. Pepe Danquart’s sweeping narrative drama Run Boy Run, the festival’s centerpiece narrative picture, tells the story of a young boy struggling to survive in the fields and forests of wartime Poland, evading Nazis and scrounging for food and meeting strangers–both helpful and harmful–along the way.

Diversity is a key theme throughout the festival, exploring subjects that reach beyond the Jewish community, but viewing them from a Jewish perspective. Hannah Espia’s Transit, which screens this Friday at the Castro, follows the hard lives of Filipino workers in Tel Aviv who are under constant threat of deportation. The Village of Peace, a docu by filmmakers Ben Schuder and Niko Philipides, takes us inside the titular community in the Negev Desert, founded by African Americans from Chicago in the ’60s who journeyed a great distance to make a place for themselves in the Promised Land.

On the lighter side of the festival are several comedic films. In Arlo and Julie , by director Steve Mims, a quirky couple in Austin begin receiving a series of envelopes in the mail, with each containing puzzle pieces to a larger jigsaw. Part romance, mystery, and comedy, the film is a lighthearted affair with a great cast and a charming vintage soundtrack. Capturing comedy as a tool for healing is Comedy Warriors, a documentary about military veterans who cope with their injuries by facing their fears in front of an audience and doing stand-up comedy. Seasoned comedians like Lewis Black, B.J. Novak, and Bob Saget act as the soldiers’ mentors, guiding them on their journey to becoming successful comedians.

A personal favorite for me, Julie Cohen’s tight docu The Sturgeon Queens outlines the history of Russ & Daughters, one of New York’s best Jewish smoked fish shops, celebrating its 100-year anniversary this year. Narrated by long-time customers, the film tempts us with delicious-looking food and glowing endorsements by celebrity R&D devotees (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mario Batali), creating a loving portrait of one of the city’s most charming old-school institutions.

Receiving the 2014 Freedom of Expression Award is Theodore Bikel, who will be in attendance for the July 31st screening of Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem at the Castro.

For tickets and more info, visit sfjff.org. Stay tuned for interviews and reviews from the festival.

Life According to Sam subject Sam Berns, 17, died on Friday in Boston, Massachusetts, reports The New York Times.

Sam’s death came as a result of complications of the rare disease progeria, which he had lived with his entire life. Only affecting approximately 1 in every 8 million people, the genetic disorder has degenerative symptoms that resemble extremely accelerated aging at a very young age, including brittle bones, thin skin, and stunted growth. Patients’ average life expectancy is 13, typically dying of cardiac complications.

Sam’s parents, both physicians, established the Progeria Research Foundation in 1999 that managed to isolate the gene that causes progeria in 2003, though there is still no cure.

The documentary, directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, played at several festivals last year including the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where we saw it, and aired on HBO in October. It’s recently been shortlisted for an Academy Award.

As is seen in the film, Sam was a charming, intelligent, perceptive teenager who viewed life optimistically through his round spectacles. He was beloved by his friends, excelled in school, played in the marching band, and had plans to go to college to study genetics. In perhaps the most beautiful moment in the film, he expresses that he finds solace in the thought that, after he’s gone, his mom will be able to rest and not devote her entire life to finding a cure.

“No matter what I choose to become, I believe that I can change the world,” he said in his TEDx talk last year. “And as I’m striving to change the world, I will be happy.”

When I was a kid, movies like Beauty and the Beast, The Sandlot, Toy Story, and Star Wars opened the floodgates of my imagination, inspiring me to dream up some big adventure stories of my own. These films have only grown more precious to me as I get older and, looking back, the common denominator seems to be that they didn’t talk down to me or insult my intelligence. These movies had real danger, intense emotion, and high stakes, unlike a lot of squeaky-clean, pandering, cookie-cutter kid’s movies that made me feel dumber after watching them.

Vincent Bal‘s The Zigzag Kid is a fantastic film that I’d be more than happy to share with my (future) kids. Its wondrous, whimsical imagery, playfully elusive mystery plot, and sprawling sense of adventure make me jealous of any kid who’s lucky enough to add it to their budding movie memory bank (much like Scorsese’s Hugo, which is cut from the same cloth.) The ending has a touch of morbidity that may be a bit too complex and distressing for the youngest of crowds, but it goes to show the respect Bal has for the intellect of his audience. This is a smart film, meant for smart kids—one character in the film sums it up nicely, “Maybe I gave you a hint now and then, but it’s better than being spoon-fed like a baby.”

Nono (Thomas Simon) is a wide-eyed, unusually perceptive kid who wants to be just like his dad, Jacob (Fedja van Huet), the world’s best and most amazing detective. Nono’s been trained since birth to be a formidable super-sleuth by his old man, but he’s more mischievous than his straight-laced dad would like. When at an outdoor Bar Mitzvah, Nono tries to spice up the party by jumping off of the roof of a building with an umbrella. He imagines the feat will be a party-starting spectacle (which we see realized cinematically, a frequent occurrence), but he instead ends up landing butt-first onto the other kid’s cake.

Nono’s mom has never been around (the only evidence he has of her is a photo of her back), but he isn’t lacking female influence—his dad’s “secretary”, Gaby (Jessica Zeylmaker), is a loving, nurturing mother-figure who encourages Nono to be himself and have a blast.

Upset by the Bar Mitzvah fiasco, Jacob sends Nono off on a train to see his uncle to tame his transgressive behavior, two days before his own Bar Mitzvah. On the train, Nono discovers that his father has pulled a fast one on him, and has instead given him the gift of an adventure. He meets a mysterious old man named Felix (Burghart Klaußner, a skilled burglar) who takes him on a wild ride full of cat-and-mouse foot chases, disguises, a giant chocolate factory (so fun), clever deception, and some life-changing revelations. They meet an old chanteuse named Lola (Isabella Rossellini), who Nono heard about through Gaby. As Nono begins to piece together clues that point to the true identity of Felix and Lola, a larger truth—about the true whereabouts of his mother—comes to light.

The Zigzag Kid whizzes by in a flash (the 90 minutes feel like 45), but when you slow down and take a step back, what you’ll find is a story of age-old themes—trust, family, the hero’s journey, self-discovery. Bal frames these classic themes in a world that’s hugely imaginative, stylized, and super cool. The performances by the cast are all fantastic, particularly Simon, a gifted, endearing young actor who hangs beat for beat with the veterans.

Bal and DP Walter Vanden Ende fill the screen with delightfully inventive, wildly varied images that’ll keep your eyes glued. The world displayed is undoubtedly our own, but the colors, compositions, and exhilarating editing up the fantasy factor. In my favorite sequence, we go from a thief tip-toeing across a crane, silhouetted by the pale moon, to the same thief being handcuffed by a policeman while neck-deep in a vat of chocolate. The film’s endlessly amusing, unpredictable moments had me grinning from ear to ear from start to finish.

The film’s final reveal is surprisingly bitter and sobering for such a high-speed joyride, but it doesn’t derail a thing. Actually, it’s nice to see a challenging topic being tackled in a family-friendly film like this. The Zigzag Kid‘s irresistible charm leaps off the screen thanks to Bal’s flourishing imagery and gifted cast. I see it gracing my TV screen for many a family movie night in the future.

The Zigzag Kid trailer

A raw and sensuous tale of forbidden love across a cavernous sociopolitical divide (the Israeli-Palestinian divide, to be exact), Out in the Dark is an impressive feature debut for director Michael Mayer, who studied film at USC. Nimr (Nicholas Jacob) is an intensely driven Palestinian psychology student who studies in Tel Aviv. He has dreams of continuing his education in America, where he can escape the lies, corruption, and hovering tension in his daily life. Roy (Michael Aloni) is a pretty boy lawyer (with a dash of bad boy) who works at his family firm in Tel Aviv. He’s somewhat complacent in his cushy position at the firm and handles the problems life throws his way by flexing his wallet and rolodex with cocksure calmness.

The film opens with Nimr sneaking into Tel Aviv late one night to have some fun at a gay bar. Mayer and DP Ran Aviad are telling a nocturnal story here, with most of the film (or at least the most memorable moments) playing out in the inky, gritty later hours. Nimr arrives at the bar and locks eyes with bad boy Roy. The attraction is immediate and electric (the actors are so handsome it’s hard to imagine how they couldn’t gravitate to one other.) They form a bond almost instantly—in a wonderful sequence, they share a chuckle after they chase two cowardly homophobes down the street, threatening to kick their asses (bromance to the max.) They exchange info before Nimr sneaks back to Palestine, neither of them realizing how dangerously disrupted their lives are about to become.

Because Nimr calls Palestine home, he’s harshly scrutinized by the Israeli authorities and shunned for his nationality when in Tel Aviv. He’s got a courageous soul, so he doesn’t let the hostile environment stop him from pursuing his academic goals or Roy, for that matter. Still, stretching romance across such a volatile divide, all the while keeping his sexuality secret from his family, is a burden perhaps unbearable by even the strong-willed.

Mustafa, an outgoing drag queen and Nimr’s friend from back home (played by Loai Noufi, bursting with vigor and sass) is delighted by the sight of the new couple, giddily egging them on every minute. Tragically, Mustafa becomes a sobering example of how high the stakes are in the inescapable conflict that surrounds them. Nimr’s older brother, Nabil, a bull of a man who—despite the impassioned objections of his younger brother—has involved their family in the conflict on a serious level (he’s stashed a cache of guns and ammunition in their home.) The relationship between the brothers is viciously combative, and yet there is a sense that despite the clash of values and ideals, they care for each other deep down and, had they not grown up in such a tumultuous environment, they might have actually gotten along. Yet another tragedy to add to the stack.

Roy, whose affluent playboy lifestyle has instilled in him a naïve sense of adolescent invincibility, uses questionable contacts to dig Nimr out of some deep trouble with the Israeli government and even puts his own ass on the line in the name of love (in a well crafted but terribly shallow foot-chase climax.) He’s a reckless but endearingly noble beau.

Mayer is a storyteller of taste—he never highlights that it’s a gay romance, aside from examining the challenges of being in one in a society so rooted in tradition. Jacob and Aloni’s scenes together are tender and convincing, which is impressive considering this is Jacob’s debut. Out in the Dark creates an atmospheric sense of tension that soaks into every scene, but what’s slightly lacking here are surprises. Almost every reaction I had to the film felt overly familiar, and while the film engrossing, it never threw me a left hook. Despite all this, Out in the Dark is executed and crafted very well, and that counts for a lot in my book.

Out in the Dark trailer

Writer-director Ziad Doueiri’s new film, The Attack (which I highly recommend), incurred a tidal wave of Arab anger when it was completed last year. By “tidal wave of Arab anger”, I mean this: the film has been banned in 22 Arab nations. It follows an accomplished Arab-Israeli surgeon (Ali Suliman) as he uncovers the truth behind the death of his wife, who took the lives of 19 innocents in a restaurant suicide bombing. The ban was enforced by the Arab League, who cited Doueiri’s collaboration with an Israeli film crew and the un-vilified representation of Israelis in the film as grounds for the massive embargo.

Though it’s been several months since the ban (which still stands), Doueiri’s frustrated rage about the subject hasn’t subsided. “Some Arabs are being assholes about it. That’s the truth. Is the problem that I was working with Jews? Fuck you.”

The Lebanese filmmaker (who worked as a cameraman for Quentin Tarantino for years) sat down with me to discuss the unfortunate imposition by the Arab League and detail the lengthy, arduous process of making the film, which almost didn’t see the light of day.

You’ve been traveling with the film for a while now. I assume, given the film’s setting, that you’ve been engaging in a lot of heated discussions about the Middle Eastern conflict, which I imagine might be taxing. That being said, has showing the film across the world been an enjoyable experience?
Showing the film is always the most joyful [experience.] It’s what matters in the end. It’s nice to see rooms that are filled up. Look…it’s been a very difficult experience. I didn’t think this film would ever be made. It was coming from a very dark place. The fact that it’s done really well…it helps. This is the law of the market: when a film makes money, it encourages people to want to invest again.

What have people’s reactions been to the film? Have they been focusing more on Amin’s story or your political observations?
Both. You can’t separate the two. Most people want to ask me about both. I have a tendency to get away from talking about the film because people are going to see the film, you understand? It’s more interesting to talk about other stuff. The process that went into making the movie, what was going on through my mind. This is what I prefer.

There’s a big story behind how the film got made. Take me to the very beginning.
I got a call from my agent in New York, and she said, “Focus Features is interested in doing a film with you. They have this book; do you want to read it?” I asked what it was about. She briefly told me the premise and I said, “I’m really not interested in doing something about the Middle East.” I just didn’t care about it. I thought, it’s an American company wanting to make a film about the Middle East. It’s certainly a very Orientalist view. I didn’t buy it. She said, “Just read the book.”

I read it, and it was a very powerful book. But, it was a challenge, because most of the book is written in first-person, with a voice talking. Half of the book is about Amin’s past. “I remember when…” How am I going to do this in a film? Lot’s of flashbacks? Voiceovers? Finally, we came up with the idea that the best way to do it was not with a voiceover, but to try to create scenes that are powerful enough that they allow the audience to remain in this guy’s head. We want to feel his pain, his agony, his anger.

I flew back to New York and met with the studio exec at that time. I told him, “This is how I want to do this movie” and he said OK. I went back to Beirut—this is 2006—and me and the co-screenwriter, Joelle Touma, began writing. Two weeks into writing, the Hezbollah-Israeli war started. We lived literally ten blocks from the Hezbollah headquarters. At a certain point, we wondered if it made any sense to do this movie. We felt like, who wants to see fiction when in reality there’s a real war going on that’s well-covered by the media? We had a lot of questions about the movie, but we signed a contract with Focus Features. We had to weigh our “no’s” before we really said “no.” We continued working, and nine months later we finished the script. I started to go to Tel Aviv to do the early preparation work—casting, location scouting—and the studio had second thoughts and pulled out.

Just like that?
Yeah. After they pulled out, we stayed for a long time, not knowing if this film would ever be made. I was involved in a negotiation with the studio to try to get the script back. They didn’t want to give it back. After three years, we got it back. We started from zero to try to finance the movie. That took another two years.

Was that the most difficult part of the process?
Yes. The whole thing I just told you. I was very frustrated by not being able to do a movie that I wrote. I believed I got the script to where it was very good. Somebody telling you, “No we can’t do it”…I just didn’t take it so good. Morally, it didn’t go down well. I was very upset the whole time. Then, I decided to call my career off. I said, “I’m done. I don’t want to work in films anymore.” Finally, we got the script back and we went and did the movie. There were other types of hardships—it was low-budget—but still…we made it.

You got some financial help from a few different countries, right?
We got some money from the Egyptians, the Qatar government, a little bit from France, and the Belgian government. The main party was the Arabs, who—after seeing the movie—pulled their name from the credits.

Why?
They thought that I showed the Israeli perspective too much, that I didn’t show the atrocities that the Israelis do to the Palestinians. They said, “That’s not fair” and we had a long debate. Finally, I said, “OK, take your name out.”

When you committed to this project, were you prepared to receive this kind of backlash?
You’re always prepared for some kinds of “no’s”, but not those. Those people gave us the money, gave us the OK, and changed their minds later. I was prepared, for example, that the Arab world would probably make a stink out of this film, but I didn’t expect the Arab league would be involved in stopping the movie in 22 Arab countries. It’s a political decision. This is not an artistic decision.

That must have been very upsetting…
The most upsetting! Still is! The whole world is seeing the movie. It’s doing extremely well in America. Why can’t the Arab world see it? The Arabs said, “You were unfair. You showed the Israeli victims as much as you showed the Palestinian victims”, which is all true, but…

When you’re preparing to make a film, do you watch other films for inspiration?
I don’t, but there are a couple of movies that I saw and affected me a lot, especially The Tree of Life.

Visually?
Yeah, visually. Tremendously. It really affected me a lot. I didn’t know what to do.

What do you mean
Well, there was a point when I went into pre-production seeing The Attack the way I saw The Tree of Life. I had to cut that thing, delete it from my head. I had to go back to my style.

You fell in love with it.
Tremendously. I saw it seven times in a row. It was a couple of months before shooting, and I was addicted to that movie. It was the way (Terrence Malick) shaped the story, the way he shot the film, the way he edited it—it’s a brilliant movie. It’s one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen. He really knows how to tell a story with a camera. He knows exactly where to place the camera and where to move it. He’s so lyrical with [his camera.]

Did you take certain techniques from his film and implement them in yours?
I was about to. I was seeing the movie shot in super wide angle the way he did in Tree of Life. I had to disconnect. If you’re making a movie because you’re influenced by another movie, you can screw up yours, because it’s someone else’s vision. We always get influenced by many movies, but Tree of Life in particular…I got addicted to it about a month before shooting. That’s dangerous. You have to go back to the way you see those images. I almost ruined the film. But look, I worked as a cameraman for a long time, so I knew how to go back to my instincts.

That’s what I was going to ask. How difficult was it to divorce yourself from that film, which you’d just fallen in love with
It took me a while, but I found my way. I kept reminding myself, “Go back to the way you wrote the film.” Usually, when I write, I see the scene how it’s shot. I see where the camera is. I had to go back to that. I’d written [the script] three years before I shot it. It’s not like I finished the script and immediately started location scouting. I wrote it in 2007 and finished shooting it in 2012.

What was it like revisiting the script after that arduous off period?
I improved it.

Did you make a lot of changes?
No, it was pretty much the same script. I made certain things tighter.

We touched on this earlier, but you said you wanted to convey Amin’s mental state visually, without voiceover. Was that challenging?
No, no. I knew…(trails off). Look—I don’t want to analyze it. It’s instinctual. It just comes. You see it. I knew when I was writing the scenes what music was going to work. I was listening to William Orbit, Moby, Brian Eno. These helped me shoot some of the scenes. I’d bring the music onto the set. It played an incredible factor in writing this film.

So the music informs the film to an extent.
Yes. This is how I like to work. I listen to music and the music brings me images. This is how a lot of the film was done. What was the original question?

It was about the challenge of putting the audience inside Amin’s head, visually.
Right. If I wanted to get inside his head, what if I filmed him from the back of his head, not just face-on all the time? I experimented: If you shoot somebody from behind the back, will it allow the audience to go inside his head more than if you shot them from the front? I started filming from the back, moving the steadycam with him wherever he went. Then, I threw a lot of things out of focus. If you’re with him, the focus is left on the background, not on him. I felt like, the fact that [his image] is soft shows that he’s in a contemplating state—a thinking mode. I think it worked.

Did you immediately recognize that this technique worked as you were shooting it?
Yes. I had it in my mind, and when I started shooting I started getting more ideas. “Let’s throw this more out of focus.”

What were you looking for when you were casting Amin?
When you’re casting, you’re looking for someone who can act, has the right look, and—most importantly—you have chemistry with. I’ve got to be able to get along with this guy. Is he defensive when you give instruction? Is he going to listen, or does he have an ego thing? If he’s a great actor, but we can’t get along, I won’t work with him.

Working with Ali was a peculiar story. He actually is a difficult guy. He’s dyslexic. He can’t read, and I didn’t know that until a month before we started shooting. I was worried because there was a lot of dialogue. I said, “How do you memorize stuff?” He said, “I scan.” I asked, “Can you memorize two pages?” He said, “Don’t worry about it.” Everything is “Don’t worry about it.” When [we started shooting] it was a catastrophe.

So you were looking for someone you had chemistry with…
I had chemistry [with Ali], but it broke. I started to get angry that he would come onto set not knowing his lines. But, he was a brilliant actor. That’s his strength.

Did you make sure he got all the lines?
Oh yes, of course. We just had to do 60 takes. But, he was brilliant as an actor, probably one of the best I’ve ever worked with. It was a very difficult role and he pulled it through. It was just very difficult to get [his performance right], because he can’t concentrate. These are details you don’t think about it when you see him on the screen. His performance is phenomenal. Getting there was a pain in the ass.

You filmed in Tel Aviv and in Palestine. Was it a good experience shooting in both places?
It was wonderful. There weren’t really any problems except that the Israeli Jews were not allowed to enter Palestine. Not by the Palestinian authorities, but by the Israeli authorities. So, we had to replace the crew and it created some logistical problems, but it’s fine. It’s all details. Nobody cares about those in the end. The film works.

It does. But, the fact that you filmed in the actual locations gives it authenticity.
We had to film in the real locations. We couldn’t build sets. I was looking at several cities—Nazareth, Yafo, Ramallah, Jerusalem—nothing looked like Nablus.

So you did look for some place that resembled Nablus.
I scouted for months and months. I found out that Nablus is a great looking town. It’s a tough town—not for me—and a very religious town. It’s fantastic. They helped us a lot.

Would you be opposed to the notion that the film is essentially a mystery movie?
It is. It is a detective movie. The interrogation scenes, a man on a quest. It has a thrilling aspect. At the same time, it has a political aspect and a romantic aspect. You see, you don’t always nail your script. I’m afraid on my next script I won’t be able to nail it. I felt I nailed this one.

But making the next film may be an easier process, no?
Nobody knows. There’s no such thing as an easy process. When you make a movie that does millions and millions at the box office, then you can call the shots. Producers say, “We can make money on this guy’s back.” My film is doing very well in the United States, but it’s not a mega blockbuster. It’s still a tough movie. It’s good enough that it got released.

The Attack played at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It’s playing now in select cities and opens this Friday in San Francisco.

Though set in the trenches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ziad Doueiri’s mystery-thriller The Attack operates predominantly on an intimate, human level, centering on a Palestinian man living in Tel Aviv (Ali Suliman) who’s bent on smoking out the people responsible for somehow compelling his Christian Arab wife to take her own life via suicide bombing (a shock to him), all the while wrestling with suppressed issues of identity. The film, based on Yasmina Khadra’s award-winning novel, is best viewed as a detective story of a man retracing his wife’s footsteps into a shadowy, nebulous world he’s perhaps incapable of understanding rather than a political thriller, though it offers plenty of substance on that front as well.

Suliman plays Amin, a decorated surgeon and the first Arab-Israeli in history to receive a career achievement award (the ceremony opens the film.) He’s reached the pinnacle of his career, and he’s worked hard to become fully integrated into his cushy life in Tel Aviv. Late the next night, Amin is called back to the hospital, not to save a life, but to identify the deformed body of his beloved, wife, Siham (Reymond Amsalem) who he thought had been out of town visiting her grandfather. She’s implicated in a suicide bombing that’s taken the lives of nineteen innocents, including children.

Amin is viciously interrogated and barked at by the police (a trope that’s made interesting by Doueiri’s creative camerawork), and after the authorities conclude that he didn’t, in fact, have any knowledge of his wife’s attack, they let him walk. Amin is vehemently opposed to the notion that Siham was capable of such a senseless act of violence; he believes she’d been “brainwashed”, though the evidence almost concretely confirms her as guilty. Drowning in paranoia and denial (evoked brilliantly by Suliman), he retraces Siham’s steps—gathering clues, interrogating strangers, getting in a scuffle or two—until his searching leads him to Nablus, where he uncovers truths that prove more amorphous than satisfactory.

The tragedy here isn’t simply that Amin’s lost his wife; it’s that her memory’s been tarnished and distorted so badly it’s now unrecognizable to him. In the form of judiciously placed flashbacks and quiet moments of agonizing reflection (at times Suliman resembles a lost child), we see Amin’s world come undone. He recalls an impassioned dispute with Siham over her decision to miss his award ceremony. She was suspiciously evasive in her reasoning for missing the most important day of Amin’s career, and the likely possibility that she ditched him to launch a terrorist attack is as petrifying as it is confounding.

Doueiri doesn’t make any biased political statements about the Middle Eastern conflict, playing it fair in his portrayals of both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. Amin is wary of the Israelis who he believes framed Siham, and he seeks out the Palestinians who “brainwashed” her with a vengeance. Neither side is unfairly vilified, and the narrative is focused squarely on Amin’s plight as opposed to the political baggage inherent in the setting. Any political observations are allegorical, presented in the form of Amin’s festering inner-conflict.

Suliman’s obsessive chase after the image of a mysterious woman lightly recalls James Stewart in Vertigo at times, though he’s not nearly as charismatic. Doueiri has a gift for visual storytelling; he’s able to put us right inside Amin’s state of mind with artfully blocked and composed shots. As Amin walks into the morgue to see Siham’s corpse, Doueiri places the camera inches behind Suliman’s head, making his dread our own. Occasionally, Doueiri’s visual vocabulary outshines his penmanship; some of the expositional dialogue in the latter half of the film is so cryptic it became tiresome for me to follow. However, the lasting images Doueiri conjures are what I ultimately took with me after all was said and done, and the droning, ambient electronic music he pairs with the visuals adds a surprising amount of tension and mood. The Attack’s finale is equal parts thought-provoking and heart-crushing, and a fitting end to an intense rush of a movie that gets more thrilling as it goes.

Following the death of their beloved family matriarch, two sisters (Sandrine Kiberlain and Emmanuelle Devos), their brother (Richard Berry), and their French-Jewish families gather in Paris to mourn their loss (each in their own way), annoy the living daylights out of each other, and blindly attempt to figure out just how in the hell they’re going to get on with their lives. The family dynamic is in a state of disarray, with each of the siblings’ significant others bearing the brunt of their festering frustrations. On top of it all, the siblings have inherited their mother’s cute, old-fashioned apartment on Rue Mandar (Mandar Street) in Paris’ swanky 2^nd arrondissement, and they need to figure out whether to keep it in the family or give it away.

Family dramedies tend to veer into schematic territory in the hands of uninspired directors, but Idit Cebula’s (Deux Vies…Plus Une) Rue Mandar largely evades the trap due to an excellent cast and some crackling (sometimes overly verbose) writing.  The film is hilariously caustic, with just the right touch of sentimentality, and thankfully avoids the overly saccharine, quirky cuteness that is so unappealing in countless American “family reunion” films like this. Cebula lets her characters get their hands (and mouths) dirty, which almost always makes a story more interesting.

The three leads give strong performances across the board, giving the material (which is great on its own) an extra oomph. Berry is a kvetching loudmouth who copes with his loss by remodeling his house, driving his wife insane. Devos plays a shitty therapist who also happens to be tightly-wound alcoholic mess. She cruelly proposes that the free-spirited Kiberlain’s migration from Paris to Israel several years ago may have contributed to their mother’s passing.

The family’s violent verbal push and pull with each other is genuinely funny, well written, and entertaining, but many of the scenes could do with some trimming. Sometimes the core of the scene gets lost in all the wordy rambling, which left me struggling to grasp how it all contributed to the larger story. The script could be leaner, more unpredictable and well balanced, but there’s a lot of good stuff buried beneath the untrimmed fat, and the good stuff is really, really funny: When Berry stubbornly refuses to allow his marriage counselor to probe him, his wife Aline (Emanuelle Bercot) smugly reminds him that he didn’t have a problem with his doctor sticking his finger up Berry’s asshole during a colonoscopy.

The sets—lots of tight corridors, little rooms filled with knick-knacks, and the deceased’s warmly nostalgic apartment—force the camera to capture the family in close proximity, which makes their chaotic get-togethers feel alive and spontaneous. I was reminded of a lot of my own family gatherings and Thanksgiving dinners and couldn’t help but think, “Yeah, this looks familiar.”

Rue Mandar isn’t going to win any awards for creativity or innovation in storytelling, but it introduces a bit of wickedness and morbidity into the family dramedy formula that gives it more resonance. Aside from a terrible sequence involving an old, horny building manager, there’s not a lot to dislike about the film. Cebula’s fashioned a funny, occasionally moving story that could be great, with some tweaking.

Set in a sun-toasted Israel, first-timer Idan Hubel’s The Cutoff Man is a patiently reflective tale of an old man named Gabi (veteran Israeli actor Moshe Ivgy) whose dignity is slowly stripped away by a thankless (putting it mildly) job as a “cutoff man”, disabling people’s water supply when they don’t pay their bills. Hubel explores how a broken economy can drain the humanity and empathy out of a community.

The The Cutoff Man begins with an unemployed Gabi being offered a job as a “cutoff man” at the employment office. He accepts without hesitation, as he’s barely scraping by. We watch as he starts bouncing around town, hunching over in front of pipes and cutting off his fellow townsfolk’s precious water supplies. Hubel’s camera is patient and still, highlighting the elbow grease it takes for Gabi to twist and turn the pipes with his tools. The meditative pace and aura of the film recalls Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry.

Gabi’s first “victim”, an elderly woman, hobbles after him when she discovers he’s just cut off her water. She pleads with him to stop, but he just keeps walking, too guilt-ridden to look her in the eye. His subsequent “visits” don’t get any easier. He gets yelled at, called names, physically threatened, and morally battered. People look at him with utter disdain, like he’s death himself, rendering Gabi’s pride demolished. Still, Gabi trudges on, as not providing for his family isn’t an option. Still, he’s only scraping by, barely able to pay for his son’s goalie gloves. Hubel and co-writer Nimrod Eldar aren’t quite as cruel to their protagonist as, say, the Coen Brothers, but he’s certainly got enough sad-sack in him to fit right in with Jerry Lundegaard and Larry Gopnik.

As Gabi’s list of angry “victims” grows, his reputation as the feared “cutoff man” begins to sabotage his home life. He’s forced to cut off the water of his son’s soccer coach, resulting in the vengeful coach benching Gabi’s son during a game where scouts are in attendance. In a quietly brutal scene, Gabi sinks several hard-earned shekels into a vending machine while he weeps out of desperation and anguish. Ivgy doesn’t have many lines, but he doesn’t need them—you can feel his spirit deflating ever so slowly as his face droops and his tired feet shuffle. By the end of the film, he’s a shell of a man, though his commitment to his family admirably remains intact.

Hubel’s storytelling is deliberately slow-going, and even though the film is visually arresting (his compositions are great), its grip on my attention loosened at times, though it never completely lost me. Ivgy’s slow, gloomy descent into agony and desperation is akin to Antonio Ricci’s downward spiral in Vittorio de Sica’s terrific Bicycle Thieves. While Gabi’s story easily could have been told as a short film, the added length helps the emotional heft of his plight sink in deep.

Alex Karpovsky (most famously known for his work in Lena Dunham’s Girls and Tiny Furniture) plays an (assumedly) extra-neurotic version of himself á la Larry David in Red Flag, a meta dark comedy that’s somehow both navel-gazey and droningly indifferent. The film opens with Karpovsky being unceremoniously booted out of the life (and apartment) of his girlfriend of seven years (Caroline White). With angst and heartache bubbling beneath his Brooklyn-indie button-ups and sweatshirts, we follow him as he tours the Southern states showing his real-life sophomore film, Woodpecker, in tiny arthouse theaters and college campuses, slinging DVD’s for extra cash.

After a routine Q&A, he hooks up with a clingy indie groupie (Jennifer Prediger, playing an obsessive psycho version of Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That.) As the tour rolls on, Karpovsky is joined by the Prediger, his old friend (Onur Tukel, who forms a love connection with Prediger), and White, who he’s convinced to give him a second chance (after loads of overly-wordy begging that echoes John Cusack in High Fidelity.) When the truth about Karpovsky and Prediger’s one-night-stand surfaces, the group implodes.

Red Flag had me chuckling through my nose consistently throughout, but not once did it evoke the kind of belly laughs I get from the work of Woody Allen and Larry David (whose humor Karpovsky clearly derives from.) He’s got the right idea, but lacks finesse. Though I struggled to connect with his style of anxiety-fueled humor, he shows clear potential (a naggy phone exchange with his real-life Russian mother is a highlight.)

The film’s running gags—one involving Karpovsky swapping the word “frittata” for “fuck” as an anger-management exercise, and another in which he pleads with hotel managers for a late morning checkout—woefully fall into “diminishing returns” territory. Every time he’d “nerd-rage” on inanimate objects (a frequent occurrence), the triteness of it all would chop my interest down a notch.

The film looks pretty crummy, as drab as the yellow two-star motels Karpovsky and company laze through. It’s difficult to recall any interesting shots, though the cast occupies the screen well; they all have interesting faces and, more importantly, put on fine performances. Tukel in particular kept me engaged with his infectious bearded grin and weirdo optimism. Karpovsky’s 21^st century neurotic nerd shtick (familiar to fans of his work on Girls) feels energy-deprived here. Whenever the film ventures into dark, existential territory it ends up feeling a bit weightless due to Karpovsky’s apathetic delivery. He does, however, hit his stride in scenes where he’s able to vocalize his character’s labyrinthine thought process.

Karpovsky has easy chemistry with his co-stars and the clever dialogue flows naturally, which shows skill—the script is simply a rough outline for the actors to follow and fill in the blanks as they shoot (a system utilized by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm that affords the actors plenty of breathing room.) Though the premise of Red Flag is meta by nature, at the end of the day it amounts to little more than a decently entertaining yet largely dispensable road trip movie.

Red Flag trailer:

Tonight marks the kick-off of the 33^rd San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and with the fest’s advancing age comes a cinematic expansion of sorts. This year’s theme is “Life Through a Jew(ish) Lens”, the idea being that the films included this year aren’t all necessarily focused squarely on the core Jewish experience. It’s a fun, inclusive, theme that informed atypical festival selections like director Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali, exploring of the social and political climate of the 1960’s through the eyes of “The Greatest”, and Dawn Porter’s Gideon’s Army, which highlights a trio of public defenders from the Deep South.

The festival runs from July 25^th to August 12^th, so if you’re in the Bay Area, there are plenty of chances for you to come out to one of the many festival venues spread out across the Bay, take part in this giant celebration of Jewishness, and most importantly, watch some exciting independent films by some talented directors. You can come out to say hi to me as well! Join me, gentle readers, on a journey of Jew-lightenment and Jew-scovery! Sorry…I um…sorry.

It all starts tonight with the Bay Area premiere of The Zigzag Kid, a family friendly coming-of-age story about a mischievous 13-year-old boy named Nono who embarks on a quest to find a famous singer (Isabella Rossellini).

For the full lineup and ticket info, visit sfjff.org

Stay tuned to Way Too Indie over the next couple weeks for reviews, interviews, and photos from the festival. For now, check out the festival’s hilarious trailer to whet your appetite: