Optic Crossings Powerful American shorts casting a fresh eye on the European past.
	Human Remains United States/Denmark, 1998, 16mm, black & white, 30 minutes, German, Russian,Italian, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese w/English voice-over translation. Director: Jay Rosenblatt
West Coast Premiere	Gimpel the Fool United States, 1998, 16mm, black and white, 18 minutes, Yiddish and English. Director: Ezra Schwartz
Bay Area Premiere Filmmaker in Person	Raw Images From the Optic Cross United States, 1998, 35mm, color, 25 minutes, English. Director: Karl Nussbaum Franco with a Super-8 film camera. Acclaimed local filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt's Human Remains is a chilling and surprisingly funny look at the private lives of five infamous dictators: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung. Combining direct quotes and facts sifted from biographies, this entirely factual film illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate and mundane portraits of their everyday lives - favorite foods, films, habits, and sex lives. Foreign voice-over and British translators give the film a BBC-documentary style and adds to the verisimilitude of the film. With no mention of their public lives nor place in history, the intentional omission of horrors for which these men were responsible for hovers over the film. 1998 Sundance Film Festival, Jury award for short filmmaking. 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Filmmaker in Person	Gimpel and Elka's wedding ceremony: the unveiling. Ezra Schwartz's beautiful animated drawings evoke the mythical Eastern European world - and eccentric Jewish logic - of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Gimpel the Fool. All his life the baker Gimpel accepted events without doubt because "Everything is possible." He also ignored people's ridicule and abuse, choosing to "let things pass." This behavior has earned him the nickname Gimpel The Fool. Over the years, he adhered to his Rabbi's advice that "Belief is beneficial. It is better to be a fool all your life than for one hour be evil". However, facing his wife's death-bed confession, Gimpel, for the first time, faces a terrible conflict. Should he revenge his being ridiculed, or stick to his beliefs ?
Filmmaker in Person Special to SFJFF: Conversation with Director Karl Nussbaum	Director Karl Nussbaum (left) and his father A.E. Nussbaum superimposed with a diagram of the Optic Cross symbolizing their two viewpoints on the Holocaust. Raw Images from the Optic Cross is Karl Nussbaum's hallucinogenic journey through Eastern Europe and into his father's pain. He travels to his father's hometown in Germany and follows the path his grandparents took in 1943, eventually ending at Auschwitz. Raw Images is a colorful evocation of the unspoken past and of the fears and ghosts experienced by the child of a survivor. 1998 Sundance Film Festival. PRESENTED IN COOPERATION WITH THE SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE
Screenings	Castro Theatre 10:00 pm Saturday, July 18 Ticket code:   CAS0718C   UC Theatre 10:00 pm Saturday, July 25 Ticket code:   UCT0725C
1998 Festival	Overview Films Filmmakers Schedules Tickets   Press Film Sources Sponsors Get Printed Program Copyright © 1998 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. All rights reserved. The SFJFF World Wide Website address is http://www.sfjff.org