CELEBRATING 350 YEARS OF JEWS IN AMERICA

This year’s festival coincides with an important milestone: the 350th anniversary of in Jews in America. In celebration, SJFF has created a number of two-minute films, mini-portraits of members of the greater Seattle Jewish community. Each was asked, “How did you come to be Jewish in America?” Their remarkably varied responses will be screened as our Festival Trailers, a different one before each feature film.

YOUR TICKET TO A WORLD OF JEWISH CULTURE

We warmly welcome you to the 9th Seattle Jewish Film Festival! It is thrilling to be a part of the largest annual Jewish cultural event in the Pacific Northwest.

Every year we watch hundreds of new films in putting together our lineup. This is remarkable: how can there be so many films made every year about the Jewish experience? We can point to a few reasons.
First, Jewish culture, in its many manifestations, continues after thousands of years to thrive throughout the world. This week we will travel together from France to Uganda, Ireland to Israel, Seattle to Australia, Norway, and Sweden. The vitality of Jewish culture is illustrated by filmmakers in the variety of locations they use to tell their stories.

Second, Jewish people today find themselves threatened and indeed attacked, perhaps more so than at any time in the past half century. Certainly, film artists from all over feel an urgent need to focus on the roots and results of these attacks. As a program of the American Jewish Committee, which for almost one hundred years has worked to protect human rights worldwide, the Seattle Jewish Film Festival is proud to present a number of compelling films that encourage the dialogue necessary as a first step in addressing these threats. We are particularly pleased to co-present the film Forget Baghdad with Seattle’s Arab & Iranian Film Festival.

All cultures have stories to tell. Few are lucky enough to have the resources to tell these stories on film. These resources include foundations, government agencies, and corporations in the United States and abroad that support the creation of films relevant to the Jewish community. Particularly noteworthy is the state of Israel, which has managed to nurture a new generation of accomplished filmmakers, this year sending us no fewer than eight gems.

We are equally fortunate that there is a long list of individuals and corporations who every year help ensure that festivals like ours continue to thrive and provide a forum where Jewish story telling can be heard communally. We extend our warm thanks to the many corporate sponsors that help make the Seattle Jewish Film Festival possible. Please continue to patronize these businesses that support the festival.

Finally, and most importantly, this network of support includes filmgoers who attend the Seattle Jewish Film Festival. No one in the cast and crew of any of the films we will see this week was driven by the hope that someday their labor of love would be watched in the solitary setting of someone’s living room. Rather, the Cinerama and Pacific Place theaters are a filmmaker’s dream comes true. So, let’s lower the lights and dream together for the next eight days, and for years to come.

Moshe Dunie Pip Meyerson
Leslie Rosen Janet Rosenblatt SJFF 2004 Co-Chairs
Daniel Y. Mayer Managing Director
Gregg LachowArtistic Director