Closing Highlights from SJFF’s Pearl Festival

The Seattle Jewish Film Festival (SJFF) wrapped another exciting series of films this year for their Pearl Anniversary (30 years).  

Here are some select highlights that screened in-person and streamed virtually and how you can see some of them:

Bad Shabbos

The Closing Night event was a high point and served as the perfect way to end SJFF with a bang!  Bad Shabbos won the top audience prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and local audiences probably enjoyed it as much as did their Tribeca counterparts. The film screened at the Stroum Jewish Community Center Auditorium on Mercer Island on April 5, 2025, and due to a sold-out crowd and popular demand, the SJFF organizers added an encore showing the following evening.

As this highly entertaining dark comedy opens, we meet an interfaith couple who are engaged to be married and have arranged to have their parents meet for the first time over a Shabbat dinner.  When an accidental death gets in the way, the stakes are catapulted into high gear, and the ensuing mayhem is hilarious to behold. With a tight script, snapping dialogue, and high-energy performances, the ensemble delivers a heaping helping of clever jokes, physical comedy, unexpected plot twists, and satisfying entertainment.

Bad Shabbos is coming this Spring (2025) to theaters nationwide!

Bad Shabbos boasts an excellent ensemble cast

Courtesy of Menemsha Films

Beethoven's Nine: Ode to Humanity

This film about music, war, and hope, follows nine unique individuals, including Ukrainian musicians and their conductor, a deaf composer, a Polish rock star, a best-selling author, a legendary cartoonist, and the director himself, Larry Weinstein, as they talk about how the iconic composer Ludwig Van Beethoven influenced their life and their art. And the influence has been profound.

Weinstein (also the writer of Beethoven’s Nine) attended the screening at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on March 30, 2025, and talked about his initial reluctance to make the film, and how it ultimately became one of his most personal creations. “I had concluded I would not make this film, but then I had an epiphany: What if I got the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which was founded [in 2022] by conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and includes refugees of the war, to perform Beethoven’s Ninth? I mean, Beethoven’s whole thing in this work was about the joy that came from freedom and peace and embracing all of humanity.”

Weinstein did substantial research on Beethoven for his 2005 documentary Beethoven’s Hair, so he had compiled a lot of information on the composer. And so began Weinstein’s journey to make Beethoven’s Nine. This documentary is not a conventional retelling of Beethoven’s life, but rather a peek into the souls of nine artists who have been inspired by a man who lived and created art 200 years before them. They each describe Beethoven in their own way, from “a rebel” and “an optimist”, to “fierce”, “hopeful”, and “joyful”! Weinstein’s sister Judih and brother-in-law were living in Israel on a kibbutz during the filming of Beethoven’s Nine, and the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas actually becomes part of the film as the Weinstein family undergoes the anguished process of searching for Judih and her husband, who were two of the earliest casualties on that day.

The idea is profound: A composer who was deaf, in failing health, and discouraged by the chaos and misery around him, but who could still imagine, in spite of his despair, a world where music had the power to bring peace and freedom to all—and then write an enduring, epic piece of music to illustrate his hope. To see an orchestra exactly 200 years later (made up of refugees and casualties of war from countries currently at war with each other) playing that 200-year-old composition together in perfect harmony and unity actually makes the viewer believe that the power of music can somehow bring about world peace and freedom for all in spite of the chaos and misery we are living through today.

Weinstein said of Beethoven, “He was in a position to write for posterity and he thinks, ‘we will become better people in the future, long after I’m dead.’” Perhaps Weinstein hopes his film will likewise have some answers (or some comfort) for people living 200 years from now.

Beethoven’s Nine: Ode To Joy can be streamed on TiVo and AppleTV+.

Blind At Heart

Based on Julia Franck’s international bestselling novel, the winner of the German Book Prize, and translated into 37 languages, this film screened at The Majestic Bay Theatre in Ballard on April 2, 2025. Barbara Albert’s romantic, sweeping film adaptation vividly portrays Hélène (excellently played by Mala Emde) as she struggles to navigate the rising tensions of Weimar-era Berlin. Arriving with dreams of becoming a doctor at a time when the city’s carefree ambiance is becoming more elusive, Hélène soon confronts personal tragedy and the increasing threat of her Jewish heritage being discovered. When a charming Luftwaffe officer offers her forged Aryan identity papers that comes with a caveat, she accepts, instigating a gripping journey of survival, moral conflict, and facing life as a woman in a patriarchal society.

Blind at Heart is on AppleTV+.

Director and producer of Sabbath Queen, Sandi DuBowski, attended the screening at SJFF and answered audience questions.

The Evergreen Echo

Sabbath Queen

This film follows the Israeli-born Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie’s epic journey as the dynastic heir of an unbroken line of 39 generations of Orthodox rabbis stretching back a thousand years. Lau-Lavie faces an existential dilemma between accepting his ancestral destiny—with all of its rules and traditions—or becoming a drag queen rebel who leads a wholly unconventional but deeply devoted congregation.

The film, which took 21 years to make, opens in the 1990s, when Lau-Lavie arrives in New York, a young gay man performing as his drag persona, the “Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross.” It follows his creative spiritual path from queer dad to founding Lab/Shul—an everybody-friendly, “G-d-optional”, artist-driven, congregation—to his shocking decision to become a Conservative rabbi. Award-winning director Sandi DuBowski (who also made Trembling Before G-d) intimately documents the journey of Rabbi Amichai, whose quest is to creatively and radically reinvent religion and ritual while challenging gender norms and what it is to be Jewish in a rapidly changing 21st century.

Sabbath Queen is showing in select theaters nationwide. 

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More information and trailers for all 30 of the films that screened at this year’s SJFF can be found on their website.