Director Moshe Rosenthal’s Karaoke is scheduled to open the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Now in its 42nd year, the SFJFF opening night will take place at The Castro Theatre (429 Castro St., San Francisco) on Thursday, July 21, 2022.
Rosenthal will attend in addition to Lior Ashkenazi (Actor), Lexi Leban (Executive Director JFI), Jay Rosenblatt (Program Director JFI) and Joanne Feinberg (Senior Programmer).
From organizers, the Karaoke synopsis:
Meir and Tova are a Sephardic upper middle class couple, seemingly resigned to live out the rest of their semi-retirement in the banal comforts of an upscale apartment complex in a Tel Aviv suburb. When Itsik, a sexy bachelor from Miami, moves into the building’s penthouse, their lives are gleefully upended. Energized by their newfound friendship with Itsik, Meir and Tova undergo personal transformations, but will their relationship as a couple be a casualty of expressing their individual desires? When Itsik begins to pull away from Meir and Tova, the couple’s obsession with the bachelor grows into a full-blown identity crisis. What follows is an entertaining foray into masculinity, the institution of marriage, social status, narcissism and conformity as they relate to a “new Israeli” class identity. Taking inspiration from his own family, director Moshe Rosenthal has created a special film that focuses on a major population in modern Israel—the Sephardic middle class—that is underrepresented in cinema. With its title playing on the duality of the kitschy and the operatic that coincide within the social act of amateur singing, Karaoke is an optimistic portrait of midlife self-discovery, laced with both poignant wisdom and barbed humor.
The Jewish Film Institute (JFI) was founded in 1980 with the mission to champion “bold films and filmmakers that expand and evolve the Jewish story for audiences everywhere.”
The San Francisco Jewish Film Film Festival 42 runs July 21 through August 7, 2022.