Sunnyvale resident steers film festival toward online success

While many film festivals have gone back to an in-person format, this year’s Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival is virtual for the third straight year.

Executive director Tzvia Shelef says the online format has drawn the biggest audiences in the festival’s 31-year history.

“It’s convenient on the one side, but I really miss the community and seeing people,” adds the Sunnyvale resident.

The virtual festival still features events designed to build community. The Oct. 23 opening night screening of “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen,” a documentary about the making of the 1971 movie musical,  was set to be followed by an online interview with the three actresses who played Tevye’s daughters—Rosalind Harris, Neva Small and Michele Marsh—along with the documentary’s director, Daniel Raim.

Shelef says the number of documentaries screened at the festival greatly increased in the last few years.

“It’s harder to make a feature film during COVID,” she adds.

The pandemic also changed the way movies are distributed, Shelef says, in that some are picked up for wider release before they’ve finished their run on the festival circuit.

Dealing with distribution was new for Shelef when she took the job as head of the festival 11 years ago. But her work in her native Israel did put her in contact with a lot of people on the talent end of the business, including Steven Spielberg, for whom she was an assistant director on the 1993 film “Schindler’s List.”

At that time, Shelef says, “There were a lot of American action movies being made in Israel. Unfortunately, security issues started hitting pretty hard, and a lot of American productions moved to Morocco.”

For the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival, Shelef has helped bring in talent such as Natalie Portman, Elliott Gould and Larry King. This year’s lineup includes “Tiger Within,” Ed Asner’s last film, in which he plays a Holocaust survivor who develops a friendship with a homeless, anti-Semitic sex worker (Margot Josefsohn).

“He helps her understand why wearing a swastika doesn’t work,” Shelef says.

The festival runs through Nov. 6. A full schedule of screenings and tickets are available at www.svjff.org. Ticketholders will be able to stream movies for up to 72 hours from their scheduled start times.

While she hopes next year’s festival will be a hybrid of in-person and online screenings, Shelef says, “I love that people are seeing way more movies than when they used to come to the festival.”

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