The Seattle Jewish Film Festival celebrated its “Bar Mitzvah” last year. As it enters adulthood, festival director Pamela Lavitt and her committee decided the 11-day showcase of Jewish films should become more socially responsible as well — and they’re doing it with a Jewishly environmental spin.
The festival, which runs this year from April 23—May 3, also marks the official kickoff of the Jewish Climate Challenge, a collaboration between Carbon Salon, a local organization that creates small groups to track and reduce energy usage, and Rodef Tzedek, the Seattle-based Jewish justice group that marks environmental awareness as one of its tenets. Throughout the festival, patrons will be asked to make a “covenant” with the planet to measurably (and non-measurably) change their lifestyles in a way that would reduce their energy usage by 2 percent each year.
Participants will post information such as household energy usage — electricity, natural gas and oil — as well as vehicle and air travel into an online data tracker that can show individuals ways to decrease their own energy expenditures as well as join them with other participants in the region to see how everyone is faring overall.
“It will allow them to track their usage, but even more importantly, it will allow us to track the aggregate usage, and that’s part of the power of this project,” said Rabbi Zari Weiss, executive director of Rodef Tzedek. “We want to be able to show that a group of people that comes together, that works together, can really make a difference.”
Rabbi Weiss noted the Jewish Climate Challenge is the first of its kind, and she hopes that its genesis in the Jewish community will lead to climate challenges in other faith groups as well.
“This is really a unique and innovative project that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” she said.
The food at the festival’s various receptions will be subject to sustainability practices as well: Sponsor Tom Douglas, whose restaurants dot the Seattle landscape, has been at the forefront of food composting and recycling, and a volunteer from Hillel at the University of Washington will take care of composting and recycling uneaten and discarded food items so they don’t end up in the garbage.
To save on costs — both in dollars and in the festival’s carbon footprint —the films will all be presented in Digibeta, a format used more often these days by lower-budget filmmakers that retains the picture quality of 35mm film but is much less heavy (and expensive) to ship.
The festival’s culminating “green” event, however, will be its closing films and panel, free presentations of Renewal: Stories From America’s Religious Environmental Movement, a selection of short films, and Fuel, a documentary that portrays America’s addiction to oil and offers solutions on how to wean its citizens onto more sustainable and renewable energy sources.
Prior to Fuel will be a panel and reception that brings together local religious and secular leaders active in the environmental movement such as Mountains to Sound Greenway and Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power and Light, as well as representatives from Jewish National Fund and the American Technion Society. Artists who have taken part in the local “Tikkunim” exhibit being held at Seattle’s Howard House Contemporary Art, a showcase of sustainable art works based upon Jewish ideals, will be on hand as well.
“The most exciting part about the whole energy and green thing was the partnerships, in both dealing with interfaith community partners as well as artists who in many ways are seeing “˜going green’ as something that takes a faith effort,” Lavitt said.
There’s precedent for the Seattle Jewish Film Festival’s environmental theme: The American Jewish Committee, which runs the festival, has launched its own Green Project to update its national headquarters to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green-certified standards, which involved replacing its heating and cooling system with a high-efficiency system and made renovations using sustainably harvested materials and low-energy lighting systems. The 1929 downtown building where the Seattle AJC’s chapter resides recently underwent a renovation using LEED existing building guidelines.
The AJC also has a program that gives its employees credits for purchasing high mileage and flex fuel vehicles.
And then there are the films. In its carbon footprint-reduction efforts, the savings on film shipping will be significant,
as 11 of this year’s 34 films come from Israel. Several more come from Europe and the United Kingdom, and one comes all the way from India. The rest hail from the U.S., with one, Fugitive Pieces, from Canada.
In the past, festival curators had limited Israeli films to four or five, but there are a number of reasons the Jewish State is so well-represented this year: Israel celebrates its 61st birthday smack dab in the middle of the festival. Also, Lavitt said, the films are very good.
“We saw [Yom Ha’atzmaut] as an opportunity to let the floodgates open and not feel self-conscious about the number of Israeli films that we chose,” Lavitt said.
Among those offerings from Israel include two of the country’s most popular TV programs: “Arab Labor,” which was created by a Palestinian journalist and portrays his difficulty in fitting into Israeli society, and “Srugim,” which Lavitt described as “Friends,” but with depth and politics.
“They’re both grappling with very interesting parts of the community, obviously with Palestinians and Israelis, and [“˜Srugim’ is] dealing with Orthodox 30-somethings,” Lavitt said.
These shows’ popularity, she said, comes from “dealing with who’s an insider and who’s an outsider, and how they define ethnicity in what most people would consider to be a fairly obvious singular society.”
Lavitt said that the festival also recognizes the hardship that many of its patrons may be experiencing, and for the first time will offer three films free of charge: The two environmentally based films, Renewal and Fuel, as well as My Left Hand, a film by Seattle resident Joshua Isaac. Isaac, whose hand was amputated after he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer known as epithelioid sarcoma, examines his feelings about God and his beliefs while raising a family and talking about the fears of a reoccurrence. My Left Hand will also be shown on the festival’s last day, Sun., May 3.