San Francisco Independent Film Featival, Feb. 6-18, 2025

[Chris Knipp]

San Francisco Independent Film Featival, Feb. 6-18, 2025

"SF IndieFest is the one festival of the year where you should throw a dart at the program and take a chance. Not because you’re guaranteed a masterpiece, but because it’s the best fest to see something that would never, ever breach your filter otherwise." -Michael Fox, KQED

AMONG NEIGHBORS (Yoav Potash 2024)
[IMDb:] Seven decades after the end of World War II, award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash uncovers the lost Jewish history of a small Polish town by the name of Gniewoszów. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews peacefully coexisted in this little-known enclave. Today, this sleepy farm town has not a single Jewish resident, and even the Jewish tombstones are gone, having been stolen from the cemetery to be used by locals as grindstones and building materials. . . (Documentary)

ENCRYPTED (Miyoni Nelson 2024)
[Imdb:] We follow a young woman named Gia, as she pushes her way through a brand new journey of self-discovery when she is placed in therapy and is forced to face her inner child for the first time. Her world takes an unexpected turn when she suffers loss, and her mother, whom she has difficult relationship with, insists on help from a professional to address her underlying issues. Across 3 sessions in this purgatory-like office, Gia opens the door of her daunting past, reluctantly peeling back layers of her guarded self.

FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS (Javier Horcajada Fontecha 2024)
[IMDb:]Guns, explosions, musical numbers, zombies, tanks and Youtube. Thousands of hours of Youtube videos turned into a bizarre cocktail to show us the most extreme, wild and crazy gun-loving Americans. But what if they are just ordinary Americans?

INFIITE SUMMER (Miguel Llansó 2024)
[IMDB] Three young women's week at the beach turns into a transhumanist mystery romp in one Estonian summer.

KCSM 91.1 THE BAY AREA’S JAZZ STATION TO THE WORLD
KCSM Jazz 91 - A Documentary Film Celebrating 60 Years of Broadcasting and Jazz

THE KARAMAZOVS (Anna Brenner 2024)
[IMDB] The estranged Karamazov siblings return home to see their dying father and settle a financial dispute, but nothing goes as planned and they find themselves in the middle of a murder case and questioning everything they have inherited.

THE LEGEND OF THE VAGABOND QUEEN OF LAGOS (The Agbojowo Collective 2024)
A young mother from a waterfront slum in Lagos stumbles upon a horde of corrupt blood money.

THE PAPER BAG PLAN (Anthony Lucero 2024)
Oscar has dedicated his life to the well-being of his disabled son, Billy. When Oscar is diagnosed with cancer, he forges a plan to train his son the intricacies of bagging groceries in the hopes of landing Billy his first job and beginning a life of independence.

TIMESTALKER (Alice Lowe 2024)
[Eye for Film] f you’re interested in the idea of toxic relationship cycles that repeat themselves but thought Betrand Bonello’s The Beast rather lumbering and arthouse, then you might find Alice Lowe’s Timestalker hits the spot. In it she tackles the same topic with considerably more comedic snap and crackle not to mention a fair amount of electropop.

Reviews:

[Chris Knipp]

PELAGIA RADECKA

YOAV POTASH: AMONG NEIGHBORS (2024)

A detailed documentary using intervirews and animations recounts the fate of of Jews in Poland during and after WWII, focusing on a single town

[IMDb:] Seven decades after the end of World War II, award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash uncovers the lost Jewish history of a small Polish town by the name of Gniewoszów. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews peacefully coexisted in this little-known enclave. "It was a Jewish town!" says an oldtimer. Today, Gniewoszów has not a single Jewish resident, and even the Jewish tombstones are gone, having been stolen from the cemetery to be used by locals as grindstones and building materials. . . Jews were murdered in this town six months after the end of the war.

Throughout the country, Jewish tombstones have been used as grindstones, as well as for paving, for foundations of buildings, and many other things - part of an effort to forget about Jews and about the harm that was done to them in Poland under the Nazis, before the Nazis in turn began wiping out the Poles. It's recounted in this film how the Germans came to burn down every single house in Warsaw. Yacov Goldstein saw this happen. He was a boy who tells his story here. Yacov survived from Gniewoszów and wound up living in Israel. Toward the end of the war he was given by his parents to be hidden by a Polish (i.e., Christian) family (why were the Jews in Poland not considered as Polish?). This family fled the rampaging German burning Warsaw and left the boy in a loft where they had made him live for over two years, not seeing sunlight, his legs atrophying, tormented by cockroaches at night. Yacov recounts that he survived this harrowing experience largely through the oldest daughter of the Polish family bringing him books to read from the library every day. He couild escape, temporarily, through the world of the imagination found in books.

Eventually after leaving, and waiting a long time in a hospital after being spared by German soldiers from execution by police, Yacov met his mother again, briefly. All this is recounted using flickering hand-drawn black and white animation. A Polish woman named Peligia Radecka, a neighbor of Yacov's family who remained in Gniewoszów after the war also appears in this tale. Six months after the end of the war she was witness to the murder by Polish people of five Jews, which included the mother and father of Yacov. Eventually, she spoke up to filmmakers, and was reunited to Yacov.

It's a complicated story, but the important part to recognize, which has been depicted in films before, is that the Jews in Poland were still persecuted and murdered after the end of the war. But as Yoav Potash, the filmmaker, reveals, and various historical spokesman explain, there are conflicting forces here. The recently ousted right wing government institutd a law (later reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor) prohibiting blaming the Poles for antisemitism or collaboration with the Nazis. Of course the Poles collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. But there were dissenters, and people can be teased out, like Pelagia Radecka, willing, indeed compelled, to remember the wrongs commited against their Jewish friends and to speak about them all these years later.

Yacov eventually is reunited with Pelagia Radecka, then herself in a wheelchair. And when an event was staged to restore the Jewish cemetary of Gniewoszów, hundreds of people showed up, and the school was closed to attend.

All this goes over ground touched on more indirectly by Jesse Eisenberg's much admired new movie A Real Pain, starring Eisenberg himself and an Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin who play Jewish cousins whose grandmother escaped from Poland and from a concentration camp there and came to America. A Real Pain includes a scene exactly like one shown in Among Neighbors, where Jewish visitors from America,"Holocaust tourists," come to a lady in Poland living in a small house that survived the war and asking, "Is this a Jewish house?" and her answering, "Yes."

It's touched on in Among Neighbors that "Make America great again," is code for erasing the ugly side of American history. Potash states that every country has a dark history it would like to erase. Poland's is the treatment of the Jews. America's is slavery. A final onscreen caption is "Nationalist efforts to whitewash Poland's Jewish history ramain popular and active." This film is a valuable record particularly because the living record is disappearing: most of the elders who were interviewed here have since passed away.

Among Neighbors is a painstaking documentary packed with information. But A Real Pain is the movie that many will go to see, and through it glimpse the Polish branch of the history of World War II and the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

Yacov Goldstein, like Pelagia Radecka, both died at the age of 91 after being reunited. Yacov, who became a celebrated historian, and wrote his own memoir Against All Odds, searched for his little brother Ezra all his life. What happened to him was never learned.

The story of Yacov Goldstein can be compared with Herbert Heller's flashback memories of surviving the Holocaust in Avenue of the Giants (2023), which in turn have something in common with Lajlos Koltai's Fateless (2005). There are also several films about Jews who survived in Europe by posing as gentiles such as Agnieszka Holland's 1990 Europa Europa.

Among Neighbors, 100 mins., debuted Nov. 10, 2024 at Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. It was screened for this review as part of SF Indiefest, where it shows at the Roxie Theater Feb. 18, 2025.

[Chris Knipp]

MIYONI NELSON: ENCRYPTED (2024)

A young black woman struggles with a burden of traumas

We follow a young woman named Gia (played by the director, Miyoni Nelson), as she pushes her way through a brand new journey of self-discovery when she is placed in therapy and is forced to face her inner child for the first time. Her world takes an unexpected turn when she suffers loss, and her mother, whom she has difficult relationship with, apparently insists on help from a professional to address her underlying issues. Across 3 sessions in this purgatory-like office, Gia opens the door of her daunting past, reluctantly peeling back layers of her guarded self.

Following a young black woman's sessions with a therapist is enlivened, you might say, by flashbacks to the moments she talks about, starting with her warm interactions as a child with her father. But then he is removed by tragic circumstances, and a scene of clashes with the mother appear. After the loss of her dad, Gia closes down; her mother turns to drink, gets into rehab. A boorish, crude new man comes for mom who Gia hates, but the little brother who arrives as a result turns into Gia's best friend. Following that, a fun moment with her two best friends whom she's since drifted apart from. And then: Elijah (Khyjuan Youngblood), of whom she says they've become each other's only friend. Gia seems to maintain a small world. At the end we learn just how small it has become. . .

THe therapist, Rhonda (Andrea Bluford), is another "only." It's interesting how the relationship develops, the way Gia gradually loosens up. It feels, at this point as if Rhonda loses her professional reserve; perhaps this is what a good patient-therapist relationship is like. (Or perhaps it's not a professional relationship at all.) With Elijah, it's hard not to be one step ahead: Gia pretends to Elijah that their friendship is so special getting closer would "spoil" it, because she's traumatized by losing her favorite person, her dad. And then, as she loosens up to Rhonda, Gia reveals another trauma, of abuse this time. She tries to get back with her two former female best friends, but when she's on the verge of opening up, both get phonecalls and have to go. Privacy invaded by smartphones.

And things get worse still. Why were there so few sessions with Rhonda? The director, star, editor flips the deck, with a surprise that turns everything around. It seems Gia wasn't able to overcome her abandonment issues and trust anyone close to her, including the one who really loves her, Elijah, enough to be helped. This is a "no exit" tale of emotional trauma that the victim never finds relief or escape from, and merely represses and hides until she can bear it no more. Director Nelson is working with a very limited, bleak palette here - but one where the simple emotions feel strong and real.

Encrypted, 51 mins., was part of SF Indie Fest 2025.
Showings:
[Available February 6, 12:00 AM - February 18, 11:59 PM, 2025] Stream online...
Sa.t, Feb. 8, 2025 4:30 PM @ Roxie Theater House 1