April 6, 2025–The Seattle Jewish Film Festival wrapped up last night with the crow-pleaser Bad Shabbos, starring Kyra Sedgwick as a matriarch (I’m in denial that she has aged into that role) whose Shabbat family dinner goes very wrong, followed by an always-welcome matinee sing-along of Fiddler on the Roof on a rainy Sunday to bring the in-person events to a joyful close.
BUT! The great thing about post-pandemic film festivals: There’s often the option to stream festival films for a short time after the in-person events have wrapped… and the Seattle Jewish Film Festival is no exception. Many of the festival’s films are available streaming through April 13th, so jump on the chance to catch up on movies that you may not be able to see anywhere anytime soon!
See what movies are streaming until April 13th.
Here are reviews of a couple of the movies we caught at SJFF 2025, and we’ll follow up with more tomorrow…
The Most Precious of Cargoes (La Plus Précieuse des Marchandises)The Most Precious of Cargoes (La Plus Précieuse des Marchandises)
In this animated fable by Michel Hazanavicius, Academy Award-winning director of The Artist (2011), a swaddled infant is tossed from a train into a drift of snow. The baby is found by a poor, childless woodcutter’s wife, seemingly the answer to her prayers. These prayers are not shared, however, by her burly woodcutter husband, him cursing the child as one of the “Heartless,” demanding that the baby stay in the woodshed (where his wife defiantly goes herself) until he can get rid of the problem. As the baby slowly thaws his frozen, prejudiced heart and he adopts her as his own, the villagers and his woodchopper pals suddenly question how the couple suddenly has a child. It’s a time of war, so you know that bad things are going to happen when their secret is revealed. It’s a sweet tale with of course some images of horror. The word “Jewish” is never said, with other slurs substituting, but it is an interesting, mostly wordless portrayal of how villagers (in this case Polish) can live in a world so small that daily trains crammed full of people headed to a camp nearby don’t cause them to question what is happening. The unique woodcut-print style of animation is lovely, with several moments particularly haunting. The image of a man leaving the camps and seeing his reflection for the first time in years in a shop window, and his realization of horror as to why children were afraid of him, is jarring and devastating, a counter to the sweet images of a child growing up in a (new) loving family.
The Glory of Life (Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens)
Rather than being Kafka-esque, this biopic of the last year and last love of writer Franz Kafka’s short life is a straight-ahead biopic. I was immediately struck by the gorgeously contemporary way that 1923 is portrayed as a sickly Kafka (Sabin Tambrea) meets the younger, glowing-with-health schoolteacher Dora (Henriette Confurius) dancing in the sand at the seaside. He is thin, wan, and literally buttoned up, seemingly always wearing suits while others frolic in as little clothes as a 1923 socialist enclave allows. But they have a meeting of the minds, and their affair soon continues to a poorly-heated, crappy apartment in Berlin that they can little afford. Of course, he writes like a madman in his squalor, stubbornly refusing to ask his disapproving parents for financial help, while his health gets worse and worse. As these are consumptive times, you know that him coughing up blood into a hanky is inevitable, but I kept hoping a giant cockroach would scuttle out from under the bed. As biopics go, this one is solid and straightforward (though a bit revisionist with Kafka’s attitude toward women… in real life he frequented prostitutes, but in this film he is portrayed as almost virginal with bad lady-luck). But the most marvelous find of the film was Manuel Rubey as Kafka’s best friend and publisher, Max Brod. Just like Kafka’s face when he sees his friend, the screen absolutely lights up when Rubey enters a scene. He’s simply marvelous.
