Calendar – Past Event

Who We Are
Founded in 1980, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is the first and largest of its kind in the world. Today, we are more than a festival: we are the leading advocate for independent Jewish cinema. Our programs include:

Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
Our hallmark program is a renowned three-week summer Festival, screening in four Bay Area venues, featuring the highest quality Jewish films from around the world. As the first of more than 100 Jewish film festivals worldwide—and still the largest, with some 30,000 attendees—SFJFF is an influential showcase bringing together filmmakers and audiences to celebrate Jewish cinema and explore its new frontiers.

Year-round Screenings & Events
Throughout the year, SFJFF@YBCA brings monthly screenings to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and special SFJFF@...screenings occur at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and other Bay Area venues. We co-present dozens of films with other Bay Area organizations, including our partner organizations in our year-round home in the 9th Street Independent Film Center, and members of SFJFF's Jewish Film Forum are treated to sneak previews of theatrical features.

Young Adult Education Programs
The New Jewish Filmmaking Project, produced by Citizen Film, is a year-round program of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Since 2002, 50 young adult filmmakers, ages 15-25 have worked with the NJFP to create sophisticated, authentically personal short films. Those films have been viewed by some 300,000 people to date. Half Remembered Stories, which rolled out at the 30th SFJFF last summer, was the first NJFP production to combine today's online multimedia technology with traditional storytelling forms.

Filmmaker Support
Since 2005 our annual Freedom of Expression Award honors film artists whose work is a testimony to the unfettered imagination.

Online Resources
In Spring 2009, SFJFF launched a digital media initiative at www.sfjff.org to expand online access to and knowledge about Jewish-subject film. Created with the support of the Charles H. Revson Foundation and Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, these innovative online resources will include information on the more than 1000 films presented by SFJFF, tools to connect audiences to films and to one another, a rich array of contextual media and the more than 250 titles and accompanying curricular resources of the Jewish Heritage Video Collection (JHVC). For more about our online resources, click here or visit the New Media Initiative section of our website.