Among that array of features at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is “Remember This,” a gripping one-man tour-de-force staring David Strathairn about the World War II Polish underground resistance hero Jan Karski.
Personal stories often are at the heart of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the world’s biggest and longest-running Jewish film festival, which is being renewed for the 42nd time starting Thursday with 71 films from 14 countries.
The one-man play, also starring Strathairn, debuted at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University, where Karski earned a doctorate and taught at its School of Foreign Service for 40 years. Karski’s story was originally conceived as a multi-actor production in 2014 — the centennial of Karski’s birth — and was co-written and directed by Georgetown professor and artistic director Derek Goldman.
Strathairn, who was a best actor Oscar nominee in 2005 for his portrayal of the towering journalist Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” will make a homecoming for the Castro Theatre premiere of “Remember This,” as he is a San Francisco native and alumnus of Redwood High School. Indeed, one of his first stage roles was in a revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party,” directed by Robert Woodruff, which was presented at the Castro in the early ‘70s.
Nonetheless, for Strathairn, the role of Karski has been unlike any he has performed, as he is not only the lone actor in the film; he also deftly plays characters that Karski interacts with, including British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and, memorably, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“It makes you angry,” Strathairn said. “We tried to evoke the moments, try to be as respectful of how Karski never pointed the finger of culpability at any of them but just reported. ... It’s an interesting window into our own inability to believe something that is too horrific that you can’t believe it would happen, as it was with Frankfurter, who said he didn’t believe Karski was lying but he couldn’t believe something so horrific could be happening.
But as Strathairn points out, it’s also quite a challenge for a cinematographer to create a black-and-white landscape, which in “Remember This” is creatively laid out and appropriately hued in a minimalist set of a table and two chairs that evoke Karski’s often stark, fragile existence and mission.
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