The 21st edition of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Potsdam opened Sunday night. Its size and scope is bigger than ever. 28 features and documentaries, 4 short films and 5 episodes of a popular BBC series are vying for several awards.
In over two decades, the film festival – purported to be Europe’s oldest and second largest - has gone from being a niche event of Berlin’s Jewish community to a full-fledged independent festival with multiple venues in two major cities with multiple repeat screenings.
The city of Potsdam, capital of the State of Brandenburg, which borders Berlin to the south-west, has already established itself as a JFFB location on equal standing with the German capital.
“When we founded the Jewish Film Festival we never dreamt that it would one day be this big or indeed increasingly successful”, the Festival’s director, Nicola Galliner, said.
“Whereas we began with a handful of films shown at a single cinema, the 21th Jewish Film Festival is being held at 11 venues in Berlin and Potsdam. We will have almost 50 screenings of 33 films from 13 countries in the presence of numerous filmmakers from around the globe,” Galliner added.
50 years of German-Israeli diplomatic relations, the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and Jews and Food are the themes being reflected in many of this year’s films, most of which are being shown in Germany for the first time.
Unlike in the US, where Jewish film festivals are clearly Jewish events, in Germany 80% of the Berlin audience is non-Jewish. In Potsdam, that number is as high as 95%.
“This makes choosing films which audiences understand a challenge,” Nicola Galliner told EJP.
She has been successful at scrutinizing films for their universality – ensuring that their contexts are understood by most of the festival’s audience. “In the end, the festival is a way for Jews and particularly non-Jews to get to know and to understand the different worlds surrounding Jews, their humor, tragedies and ways of life,” she explained.
The importance and success of the festival is not only emphasized by the fact that about half of the films being screened at JFFB are making their German [and some even their world] premieres, but also by the significant prizes awarded.
Less than one decade ago, the festival was seriously threatened by closure due to funding bottlenecks. Although still far from financial independence, the festival’s standing as a pillar of the local cultural calendar has garnered it an impressive list of sponsors and political supporters – most notably the Federal Capital Cultural Fund and the Lottery Foundation.
This year’s highlights include: the first five episodes of the BBC series “The Honourable Woman”; Andy de Emmony’s feature “God on Trial” (UK); Noam Kaplan’s feature “Manpower” (Israel), Zdenek Jirasky’s “V Tichu”/In Silence (Slovakia); Lacy Schwartz’s documentary “Little White Lie” (USA), Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin’s documentary “Sajil Ana Arabi”/Tirshom Ani Aravi/Write Down, I am an Arab (Israel/Palestinian Territories); Ori Grunder’s documentary “Zera Kodesh”/Sacred Sperm (Israel).
The film festival runs from May 10-20.
More information can be found at www.jffb.de