Event Listing - City Events, Gay
Wed Jul 30, 2008 - Mon Aug 4, 2008

Facing Windows

The 28th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival


Website
Tickets

Location
Date and Time
San Francisco Locations
Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114 map
cross street: Market
district: Castro/Upper Market

Wed Jul 30, 2008 (6:30pm)
Berkeley Locations
Roda Theatre
2015 & 2025 Addison St.
Berkeley, CA 94704
district: Berkeley (Cal Campus)

Mon Aug 4, 2008 (7pm)

Description
Introductions and Q&A's with Professor Millicent Marcus (Chair, Department of Italian, Yale University), at the Berkeley screening.

Ferzan Ozpetek’s Facing Windows is a stirring example of a contemporary Italian film exploring the legacy of fascism. This award-winning drama (four Donatello Awards, the Italian Oscar equivalent) features dual love stories, one from the 1940s between two Italian Jews and one contemporary story of neighbors who watch each other furtively from facing windows across a street. The sexual tension between a sexy but routine-weary woman (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and her hunky Italian Clark Kent look-alike neighbor (Raoul Bova) gives way to quiet communication and a profound experience when together they befriend an elderly Jewish man with memory problems. Davide (played to perfection by veteran Italian actor Massimo Girotti) turns out to be a master baker, a metaphor for the alchemy of creation not lost on Giovanna, who bakes to supplement her income working in a factory. Davide lived through the October 16, 1943, roundup of Jews in the Rome ghetto and the subsequent deportation and loss of his family and his lover. Ozpetek, an accomplished director, captures the weight of a lifetime of memories as well as the quotidian intimacy and brief exchanges that really make up our lives. His dual cultural background (Turkish and Italian) gives him both an outsider’s and insider’s perspective on how the history of fascism impacts Italians today: perhaps not very much on the surface, but lurking metaphysically in the crevices of their consciousness and in the piazze—which in their mute inertia do not miss the Jews who were deported but witnessed their leaving.

—Nancy K. Fishman