Sat-Sun March 8-16 at the Cinerama.
Call 325-6500 for tickets, or visit ajcseattle.org.
Irish Reels Film Festival
Thurs-Sat March 6-8, Sat-Sun March 15-16 at various theaters.
Call 722-2184 for tickets, or visit irishreels.org.
In the dwindling days that lead up to the next Seattle International Film Festival, movie types (does that term sound disdainful?) can always count on a proliferation of smaller, more sharply focused film fests to fill the hours. Unlike the omnibus approach favored by the SIFFs of the world, the tack taken by these lesser exhibitions (and by lesser, I might mean greater) is intentionally specific, and generally denoted by the festival's name. I don't suppose it should come as any surprise, then, that the eighth annual Seattle Jewish Film Festival and the sixth annual Irish Reels Film Festival are dedicated to exposing films and filmmakers who deal with the experiences of two of our world's most fruitful "others," the Jews and the Irish.
It's been said by many that however culturally separate they may be, the histories of Jewish and Irish peoples are, essentially, histories of victimization and peril. One needn't look very far back in history for proof. But such assertions, however provable, don't do much for the cause of understanding the contemporary psyche of either group. (I almost said "race," but that's a whole other discussion.) Presumably, a parochial film festival exists to plumb the reality of its parish, through the eyes of its filmmakers. If the films and videos represented by these two festivals are any indication, victimhood is yesterday's newspapers.
In the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, films like My Terrorist, Divine Intervention, Nowhere in Africa, A Festival Under War, Yellow Asphalt, Moments Israel 2002, and Shoes from America deal, often explicitly, with the complex nature of the Jewish inner life, with the question of self-determination, and with the challenges of developing an identity which both remembers and transcends the past. Though the Middle East conflict is never far from the heart of the discussion, many other films represented in the festival, from Jeff Krulik's warm documentary Hitler's Hat to the restored 1939 Yiddish melodrama Motel the Operator, simply tell Jewish stories, which are almost always worth listening to.
As for Irish Reels, which announces its arrival with customary Irish bravado ("Eire's cinematic Celtic Tiger roars into Seattle"), the dominant idea seems to have something to do with transition and transience. Bloody Sunday is clearly about the troubles, but opening-night features Goldfish Memory, Last Days in Dublin, and Photos to Send are all in some way concerned with Ireland itself, and the very question of whether to stay there or leave, a question that has been at the very center of Irishness since before the famine. That it's still a question is all the more reason for such a festival to exist.
