The Faithful

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL is back with a rich slate of docs

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Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

One of the Bay Area’s top cinema events is back – the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF). This year’s festival is a hybrid, with in-person screenings at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre and the Albany Twin in Albany through July 31, with some films streaming from the SFJFF digital screening room August 1-7. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and the program offers over 71 films from over 14 countries (but mostly from the US and Israel), plus 4 programs of short films (Jews in Shorts).

The SFJFF always presents an impressive slate of documentaries, in recent years including What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, Satan & Adam, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, The Mossad and Levinsky Park.

The Must Sees from this year’s documentary program are:

  • Charm Circle: You think YOUR family has issues? In this superbly structured film, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family, a cautionary and ever-surprising chronicle of mental illness.
  • Speer Goes to Hollywood: In this absorbing documentary, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.
  • The Faithful: The King, the Pope, the Princess: Filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines. Who are these faithful, and how did someone they never met “touch their lives”? The journey is sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.

You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF.

THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS: are there limits to devotion?

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Photo caption: THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.

In the documentary The Faithful: The King The Pope The Princess, filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines.

At first, Berman wryly observes the endless variety of cheesy Elvis souvenirs, and the possibly cheesier panoply of Pope souvenirs. She archly interviews a Papal spokesman about the Vatican’s commercial licensing of the Pope’s image. We see what are purported to be Pope lollipops, but when they are unwrapped, the Pope’s image turns out to be on a paper cover, so no tongues actually commit the sacrilege of licking the papal face.

But Berman – herself returning yearly to Graceland and Elvis’ Tupelo birthplace, a London Princess Di shrine and the Vatican – focuses on the faithful. She lets them talk about their obsessions, and how someone they never met “touched their lives”. Berman is remarkably nonjudgmental with these people and their sincere devotion and chooses not to mock them.

THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.

Finally, Berman has to ask herself whether she herself is too obsessed with this project on obsession.

Berman’s narration takes us on a journey that sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.