Source: San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), has unveiled an innovative online resource for Jewish film. The new website will offer short films to watch online, easy access to information on hundreds of film titles, downloadable podcasts and videos that add context to film selections, viewer recommendations, educational and curricular materials, social networking opportunities, new tools for audience interactivity in theaters and more. This represents the first phase of an ongoing effort to build the largest and most comprehensive online resource for Jewish film in the world.
Starting with a list of some 1,200 curated titles from its 29-year history, SFJFF’s web-based project will enable hundreds of rare, independent, international and archival Jewish-themed films to find new audiences online, with external links to director websites, videos of filmmaker panels and Q&As, archival photographs and links to purchase the films online, where available.
SFJFF will be the first Jewish film festival in the world to offer its audience the ability to watch festival films in their entirety online, beginning at the onset with a selection of short films. SFJFF will offer select short film favorites from the upcoming festival with additional short films added on a monthly basis after the festival.
For presentation of its curricular resources, created by the Jewish Heritage Video Collection, the organization iwill be using the Moodle educational platform, a free, open-source learning management system that allows teachers to participate in developing and improving educational materials, to pull elements from the curricula to place in their own courses, and to collaborate across institutions and geography. A full list of available curricula will soon appear on the site.
The new website will reflect the design of a Festival website from June 23 – August 11, 2009. On August 11th, it will transition to its year round appearance, with the new web resources featured more prominently on the homepage.