By Joel Magalnick, JTNews Correspondent
With the American Jewish Committee’s Seattle Jewish Film Festival just days away — it runs from March 11–21 — the Transcript decided to find out a bit more about the process of bringing an undertaking such as this to fruition. So we talked to Gregg Lachow, the man who sifts through hundreds of films over several months before picking what he hopes is the best and most diverse of the bunch.
Jewish Transcript: What’s exciting about this year’s film festival?
Gregg Lachow: You know how at the beginning of a festival you see a trailer and you go more than once and you see the same trailer and it’s just kind of old hat? Well, through a combination of wanting to celebrate the 350th [anniversary of Jews in America] and technology just allowing us now, we decided to take advantage of me as a filmmaker and I would make a different trailer for each screening. So we put out a call for anyone who would be interested in participating in telling their story.
We almost did it on a first come first serve, as it turns out. The 18 or so that we’ll show really illustrate the broad diversity in our community: Conservative and Orthodox and Reform, very, very different from all over, so I’m excited about that.
JT: How long are they?
GL: They’re each two minutes, they have the same open and close and there’s two minutes of a portrait of someone and that’s it. It was really exciting to do. You ask them a question and then an hour later…. It was really interesting.
JT: What are some of the highlights this year that personally excite you?
GL: It will definitely be interesting to see how Decryptage plays here and what the response is. It’s the film that details the biased coverage by France of Israel. It created a stir in France, in the way it became almost a happening, especially in Paris for Parisian Jews. From what I read, people would go to wait on line, couldn’t get in, so they’d come back and wait on line again. The effect became as much being on line and talking to other people. I guess a lot of people felt that their understanding of the French media bias was finally portrayed, so I’m interested in that and how people will find that with what we read today.
Dan [Mayer, new SJFF director] asked me to consider choosing a Woody Allen film. We’ve never shown one and people should be reminded he was once a great filmmaker, which he’s not anymore. So I thought Broadway Danny Rose was his best film, and people say, ‘what, are you kidding me? No, such and such is his best film,’ so I’m interested to see how that plays on screen, because I think it’s his best film, and it’s very underrated. We’re going to do a Woody Allen contest as part of that.
Opening night of course [The First Israeli in Space], the director followed Ilan Ramon around for five years, and he had quite an in-depth relationship with him. When I saw this film I was shocked to realize it was already a year ago that the accident happened, because it seemed like so much longer. This film is very much about [Ramon’s] life and work, and his efforts to go into what he was doing and his commitment to Israel. It’s not about space. I think it’s terrific, very interesting, I think it’ll be a big night.
JT: Talk about your job as curator
GL: Well I seek out — and am sought out by — films with Jewish content from all over the world. So I’ll go to other film festivals and see what they’re doing. I watch literally hundreds of movies. It’s remarkable how many films there are every year that are applicable to our festival, and I’ve come to describe it as being due to a few factors, including low-cost technologies so now lots more people can make films and festivals like ours tend to heavily attract documentaries.
We’re still reaping the benefits of the opening of the Iron Curtain. So many stories were never told. The dying out of firsthand witnesses to the Holocaust and the urgent desires of victims to tell stories on film while the people are still alive. And, Israel’s ability to foster a new generation of filmmakers that make films of a general interest.
This year especially I found that Israel is becoming one of the great countries at the forefront of film — of which there are only a handful. How they’ve managed that, I don’t know, to nurture this group of people that are beginning to make their mark. We show a number of films from Israel because they’re great, not because they’re from Israel. This wasn’t the case a number of years ago. And then a sort of feedback happens where these films keep getting made, and festivals keep growing to accommodate them, and then more films get made and they now manage so many film festivals all over the world: literally, over a hundred.
JT: Have you traveled to some of these festivals in other parts of the world?
GL: No I haven’t. I’ve stayed in the States so far. I’m hoping to go to the Jerusalem film festival next summer in preparation for our 10-year anniversary.
JT: Do you find with the explosion of technology it’s harder to find good movies?
GL: No, I haven’t. Probably the number of good films stays the same, while the number of not-so-good films grows.
JT: It’s turned into “any idiot with a video camera,” right?
GL: Before now, it was any idiot with $100,000 or $200,000 or half a million. You don’t become smart because you can raise the money to create the film. Films are more likely not to have the high production values.
JT: How long does it take to get through all of the films?
GL: Four months.
JT: Is it a fairly easy process to find the right movies?
GL: I think it is, and then I’m always a little disappointed to spend a week at another festival and find something I never even knew was there. So you think you had a handle on how many films there are, and then there are just more and more being made. You’d think there’d be fewer and fewer somehow, but there are more and more.
JT: How would you describe the content of this film fest?
GL: The films from Israel are extraordinary. I’m very excited about that. I could have programmed another half dozen really wonderful films from Israel, which was definitely not the case my first year. Otherwise it’s our regular, ecletic films from all over, dealing with the past, present and future. We don’t have any specific themes other than celebration of 350th anniversary of American Jews.
JT: Did Dan Mayer give you any kind of mandate or mission for this year?
GL: Dan was pretty smart. He knew we had a functioning system and structure, and he found ways to change it that made sense for someone coming in for the first time, and other ways to leave it alone. The audience can judge whether it’s for better or for worse, but I still have to do my job.
The board of the AJC is helpful as well. They let me do my job, and I’ve always pushed for artistic merit being the final consideration.
JT: Last year you weren’t going to come back. What made you decide to return?
GL: I felt like in a nonprofit you need to leave after a few years. I felt that the festival had reached a certain plateau and that I wouldn’t be able to come back without repeating myself, and I wasn’t interested in that.
I came back because a project near and dear to my heart, which was to create a filmmaker’s exchange program [where] would send a filmmaker somewhere else — that somewhere else would probably be Israel — a filmmaker from there would come here, and they tell us all the things they do to make movies in their country, and then we would show them.
It was something I had proposed right away when I got the job and it just hadn’t gone anywhere, and then when they said ‘What would it take for you to come back?’ I said, well, I’d like to do something new, and that’s just something I really want to have happen. I got the feeling there was support for it, and that we could make it happen.
Then it became clear as soon as I started that that wasn’t going to happen this year. It was too hard and demanding, but they would attempt it, and it could be our 10-year anniversary program, and let’s do the trailers.
JT: Did the trailers project make up for it?
GL: When I couldn’t do the filmmaker’s exchange, instead I said I’d make a film, and then the trailers came in as well. I overdid it a little. I had wanted to make a film for the festival, it appealed to me, the idea. So I went out and shot the film.
I think it’s really important that nonprofit arts organizations should be run by artists as much as possible, and that those should be working artists. I’m a filmmaker and I should make films for the festival, and you work for the festival and hope that encourages the same thing in others, because people generally in my position would think it’s the last thing they should do, because they don’t want to leave themselves open to ‘how come you get to choose your own?’, which is how it should be, not how it shouldn’t be. You leave yourself open.
JT: Tell us about your own film in the festival, It’s All My Fault.
GL: This film began — and it continues as — having Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts as its basis. In English study programs he’s one of the ones you read from the 20th century, and I had read his stuff and really liked it. I always found it strange the way it appealed to me, I didn’t understand that.
Last year I found out the guy was Jewish, which I had no idea. His films are very Christian, as are his books. Especially Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s about a guy who writes an advice column for a paper. He gets extraordinarily depressing and overwhelming letters from people who are suffering. His advice becomes more and more to turn to Christ. When I found out that he was Jewish, I totally understood the story a lot more, because it’s clearly not written by someone who was a believer in Christianity, but more by someone who is struggling to find a form of belief. The film was loosely based on that, and it’ll be really interesting to see what the reaction is. I’m really glad I did it.
Film is such an important part of American culture, and as it turns out, Jewish culture. Because of the rise of Jewish film festivals, it’s one of the main ways in which we communicate and pass on our culture, and I think both of those — because it’s so important for Jewish culture and American culture — it’s important to seek out ways to expand what our audience definition of film is, which has become very narrow.
Even with a festival like ours, which is adventurous, 98 percent of the films that are sent to me are still within the narrow confines of what we consider film, and so I’m definitely interested in pushing that boundary. It doesn’t matter if people like it or don’t like it, but I think it’s important to expand our understanding what film can be, and I’m helping to do that.
JT: You had another film released locally as well this year, didn’t you?
GL: Two years ago, I thought, I get so many documentaries, and I’d never made one — I have made a number of fiction films. I don’t like the documentary form very much, I don’t think very many people do very interesting things, and I found myself criticizing them. The content was interesting, but the form was very boring.
I’d never made one, and I feel like if I made one I would know more about what I was talking about, so I decided to make a documentary. The one I made [A New Wonder of the World] was about a guy here in Seattle who had an idea for a World Trade Center memorial, and went to New York to try to interest the world.
I did it, I learned a ton, I know more about the form, and I understand the challenges better for the directors. I’m better able to talk about and think about when the director hasn’t attempted to meet those challenges.
JT: Do you want to continue in the documentary direction, then?
GL: I definitely don’t want to make what most people think of as documentaries. In general, I think the form takes things that of necessity are mysterious and pretends that they’re not. While I may wind up factually knowing more about the subject when I leave, I think spiritually and metaphysically I know less and think I know more. Each film has the pretext, and you think, ‘I get it,’ but you don’t. You get less. You feel like you were there, and you weren’t.
I want to point out that when I decided to make a film for the festival I didn’t think we would have a local film. But we do have a local film, A Journey Of Spirit, by Ann Coppel, the Debbie Friedman film.
[Ann’s] been working in this community for a while. In my first three years here, we received one submission, and I certainly tried to encourage more. This year we received three plus mine. So four. That’s good. Ann’s film is there because it’s good, not because it’s local. It’s great that it’s local. I hope we can do more of that. I think a festival like ours – in the way that all politics is local, I think all film festivals should be local, and then reach out to the world to come in.
When we have guests who come, I try to introduce them to local filmmakers when I can, and give people a purer sense that through our festival, contacts can be made.
If we get to do this filmmaker’s exchange program which someone from here — it won’t be me — will go over to Israel, I think it would just be great. We’d get just as much from that person from Israel coming here.
JT: With the short pieces, if you have an hour’s worth of film, people aren’t getting the full effect of the conversation, are they?
GL: With these two-minute trailers, I took an hour tape of each one, and we filled it. I’m boiling an hour down to two minutes. My first concern is the subjects will see it and think, ‘that’s different from what I thought I said,’ but we’re choosing and cutting. I think there your goal is to try to present what you think they think they’re communicating. It’s a guessing game.
JT: Do you have advice for budding filmmakers?
GL: One of the great things about being a filmmaker, if you are someone who has a subject that has Jewish content, is that there are lots of film festivals that your film can play at, and most of them pay. Most of the generic film festivals don’t pay a dime. You can actually make some of your money back by paying the festival circuit and showing it. I think there’s something about showing it to an audience that’s there for a film lover’s reason but also for communal reasons. I know artistically I love the community that’s involved in showing your work. Our festival and others like it have a different place in the world and I like that place a lot more than the generic film festival. I’d rather show my film at our festival when I could, than when it’s one of 300 and it doesn’t have any context. My advice is to make films with Jewish content. They’ll have a home.
JT: What else can you tell us about your job?
GL: The only thing I say in my role as artistic director is for people who haven’t yet been to the festival — and I think this is true for not just ours, but any festival that has a theme to it — it’s really great to see how a film can change when screened in one place versus another. We all experience this at home versus watching in the theater. But watching the very same film within our festival is very different from watching it at the Harvard Exit. Not to say better or worse, but different.
I say better.
It’s something you have to experience to understand. I think it’s the place that many folks want to see it, so there’s this great chance to be part of it, and I think our audience feels that.