Well, not your heart exactly. You see, “The Day I Saw Your Heart” is the title of a complicated family dramedy that screens next Thursday as part of the Sonoma County Jewish Film Festival. Presented by the Jewish Community Center of Sonoma County, the Film Fest spent a decade at the Rialto’s old home on Summerfield Road in Santa Rosa, and set up temporarily at the 6th Street playhouse, but since Ky Boyd’s Rialto Cinemas has finally moved to Sebastopol, the Jewish Film Festival once again has a permanent home.
On October 18, “The Day I Saw Your Heart” is one of five films shown every other Thursday at both 1:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The others are the coming-of-age German dramas, “Kaddish For a Friend,” October 25; the uplifting English documentary, “Nicky’s Family,” November 8; the rollicking South African comedy, “Reuniting the Rubins,” November 15; and the toe-tapping, musical documentary from the USA, “AKA Doc Pomus,” November 29.
Two other musical films shown Tuesday nights at 7:30 p.m. have special opportunities to see and hear the filmmaker or musical subject in person. The screening of the Joshua Heifitz documentary, “God’s Fiddler,” on October 30, includes an in-person discussion and brief performance by Ayke Agus, the celebrated violinist and pianist who appears in the film, and who was Heifitz’s student, accompanist, and companion. On December 4, filmmaker Roberta Grossman will answer questions following the presentation of her film “Hava Nagila,” which is “musical shorthand for any happy Jewish occasion,” and includes comments about the song from Connie Francis, Harry Belafonte, Glen Campbell and Leonard Nimoy.
Jennifer Devoldere’s “The Day I Saw Your Heart” is representative of the complexities of Jewish familial relationships today. Although it is set in Paris, and the characters speak French, the frustration of having a father who has pushed his daughter away since she was three, but still tightly holds on to part of her life now that she is in her thirties, should reverberate with Sonoma County families. Justine (Melanie Laurent) is a suspicious young woman. When asked for her name at Starbucks, she wants to know why. “So we can put it on the cup and call you when it’s ready,” says the barrista, but she hesitates awhile, and almost leaves the coffee shop. We come to understand where her uncertainty comes from when we meet her father Eli (Michel Blanc). We drop in on the dad’s 60th birthday party as he announces that his second wife is pregnant. The news makes Justine visibly ill, and the effect on her trying-hard-for-years-but-still-childless sister and brother-in-law is almost as bad. As usual, Eli is clueless regarding what a bombshell the news will be. When his girls were young, Eli was a successful jazz musician who was away most of the time on international tours. He wrote postcards to the girls every week, but, because Eli is Eli, he never mailed them, and stacks of them, with unpostmarked stamps still attached, hide in boxes in the attic.
But this familial diffidence continues today. Constantly critical of Justine’s parade of boyfriends, unknown to his daughter, Eli befriends the men after the inevitable breakup, inviting them to play golf and even hiring a couple to run his fabric business. Soon after the baby announcement, Justine eyes the handsome young man who works at the shoe store near the X-ray clinic where she works as a technician. She takes inside-out shots of the shoe salesman, as well as inanimate objects that she uses to create…something. When he sees her films pasted on a window, her father asks “Is this art?” In reply, Justine reminds him about how critical he had been about her drawings. “I told you your drawing was bad,” Eli recalls. “But I was only three,” Justine wails. “You were supposed to praise it and put it on the refrigerator!”
Details about the 17th Annual Sonoma County Film Festival are at http://www.jccsoco.org
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