SOME WORDS BY OUR CHAIRPERSON

WILL PROPOSED NEW TARIFFS KILL SMALL JEWISH FILM FESTIVALS?

 

When Donald Trump targets the film industry with the threat of a draconian 100 percent tariff on “any and all” movies produced in “foreign lands,” he’s also hitting Jewish film festivals across America – especially small festivals like ours, the East Bay Jewish Film Festival.

Such a move would devastate our festival – and the 60-plus Jewish film festivals in the US. The Jewish film festival in Scottsdale, Arizona is about to show some of the “foreign” produced movies we already featured in February. The Israeli-produced “Soda” is a powerful movie about a group of former partisans who fought the Nazis and now welcome a newcomer to their community in Israel, only to discover she was a “kapo” during the Holocaust. The British film “Midas Man” tells the story of Brian Epstein, the Jewish genius who helped launch the Beatles.
By doubling the cost of showing each film – a cost that we would have to pass on to the filmgoer (half of our audience are retirees on fixed income) – Trump would hobble us, if not nuke us.

Granted, a few Jewish-themed movies are produced in the US and those that are “home-grown” tend to be the Oscar-nominated mega-films like “A Complete Unknown,”  “Real Pain” (Kieran Culkin best actor in a supporting role) and  the Brutalist (Adrien Brody best actor). But even Real Pain was mainly filmed in Poland, Warsaw and the Majdanek concentration camp. And The Brutalist was filmed in Budapest and in Carrara.

Imagine these films without those gut-wrenching scenes?

Trump argues that foreign films are a “national security threat” to the American film industry. He also argues that these films bring “messaging and propaganda” into the United States.

For us, at EBJFF, foreign documentaries highlight antisemitism, racism, sexism, LGBTQI discrimination and injustice – here and abroad – and feature films connect our Jewish community to its past and to different Jewish practices and customs in Asia, Africa, Europe and South America.

Right now, nobody in the Jewish film festival universe seems too concerned by the threat and everyone prefers to “sit it out,” hoping it will pass. But if we don’t speak out now, it may be too late.
 

 

Nadine Joseph is president of the board of the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival