The 17th annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival (SDJFF) comes to town for 11 days at the AMC La Jolla and Ultrastar Mission Valley. This year’s festival will showcase 40 short, documentary and feature films from around the world.

In addition to their opening night feature, I was able to preview two movies by guest documentarian Alan Berliner and a superb film about the Nazi’s destruction of classic works of art. The festival runs from Feb. 8-18. For a complete list of times and titles, be sure to visit www.lfjcc.org/sdjff.

Written and directed by Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham and Bonni Cohen

Based on the book by Lynn H. Nicholas

117 min.

“Now Hitler, there was a painter. One room, two coats, in an afternoon.” – Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks’ The Producers

My only request to the SDJFF was no Holocaust films. Too many are content to simply rip open old wounds while others, most obviously Schindler’s List, tend to be sickeningly sentimental. Perhaps the Holocaust is the one subject that should never be given the fictional treatment. Besides, to a lot of people, voicing dislike over a film on the subject is tantamount to clicking your heels together, extending your arm and shouting, “Hiel Hitler!”

As a people, Jews have so much more to unify the community than this one horrific moment in history. So unless a film has something original to say on this topic (and I don’t think there’s been one since Europa Europa), I prefer to pass on the usual bulldozers-and-bodies compilations.

Yet, while The Rape of Europa does deal directly with the Holocaust, it also focuses on another aspect of Nazi extermination: the systematic and at times deliberate destruction of art that Hitler deemed degenerate.

The film posits one great “what if.” What if Hitler had been accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna? Would the world’s greatest fascist dictator have been content to live his life as a “bad painter” or would the Academy’s predominantly Jewish jurors have continued to give further justification for Hitler’s anti-Semitism?

Leave it to a Jewish Film Festival to unearth a film that shows a different side of Adolf Hitler. Know your enemy like you would yourself. If you see only one film at this year’s SDJFF, make it this enlightening documentary.

Filmmakers Nicole Newnham and Bonni Cohen will be at the AMC La Jolla when the film screens at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 14.

Rating: 3 1/2 stars

Directed by Robert Cary

Written by Jennifer Westfeldt

Starring: Chris Messina, Jennifer Westfeldt, Maddie Corman and Fred Willard

100 min.

The SDJFF boldly puts its ugliest offering out for display on opening night. Ira and Abby is a meeskite that only a mother could love.

He (Chris Messina) is a self-loathing whiner, annoyed by humanity, who never finishes anything he starts. It is up to his therapist of 12 years to finally show him the door. She (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a perky, sexually voracious sales consultant for a health club who never works out and walks around offering clients fries from a super-size container. They meet at the club, she proposes marriage, and they instantly consummate their honeymoon in her office. Sound cute? That’s only the first 10 minutes!

Both rush to meet their future in-laws. Ira’s folks (Judith Light and Robert Klein) are a pair of consumed psychoanalysts who barely make time on the cab ride to the opera to meet their son’s prize catch. Due to the constant parental interference in his life, Ira is puzzled when Abby’s errant parents (Fred Willard and Frances Conroy) graciously welcome him with no questions asked.

What follows is 100 minutes of manufactured comic calamities that feel like four episodes of a sitcom strung together for a movie of the week. Aside from Willard and Light, small screen sensations Jason Alexander and Darrell Hammond show up to give it an extra layer of network shellac.

Ira and Abby are both thoroughly disagreeable from the outset. These are not the consciously crafted, unlikable characters one would find in an Albert Brooks comedy. They are a pair of emotionally unstable misfits with severe personality disorders that both director and screenwriter/star genuinely want you to feel all warm and fuzzy about.

Screens Thursday, Feb. 8, at 7:00 p.m. at AMC La Jolla and Sunday, Feb. 11, at 4:00 p.m. at Ultrastar Mission Valley

Rating: BOMB

Written and directed by Alan Berliner

Starring: Alan Berliner, Alan Berliner, Alan Berliner and Alain Berliner

60 min.

Woody Allen immortalized the quip about the guy who would never join a club that would have anyone like him as a member. Alan Berliner took it one step further by starting a club whose every member was named Alan Berliner.

There was only one meeting of the 13-member society, and it forms the centerpiece of this engaging and frequently hilarious exploration of how our names affect who we are.

Berliner’s first stop in this age of technological enlightenment was, of course, the Internet. There he found an array of societies dedicated to like-named people. Imagine the surrealist possibility of a baseball game where all 18 players are named Jim Smith.

Mr. Berliner sent dozens of letters across the globe in search of anyone of any age or gender named Alan Berliner. The 12 (all men, all but one Jewish) who responded were flown to New York at the filmmaker’s expense for the gathering.

Occasionally directors get past Directors Guild of America rules, and you’ll find two filmmakers with identical names. It took me forever to figure out that the George Miller who directed the dreary The Man from Snowy River was not the same guy responsible for Mad Max. Such is the case of Alain Berliner. When Belgian Alain directed the wonderful gay coming-of-age film My Life in Pink, documentarian Alan received letters congratulating him on his first narrative feature.

Berliner takes a break from his self-serving observations long enough to ponder one everlasting misnomer. The single bit of eternal knowledge I take from the film is Berliner’s absolute debunking of the notion that guards at Ellis Island had the power to alter immigrant’s names.

As thorough a search for identity as the film is, the question remains how many respondents there would have been had he used his middle name. Perhaps Alan Jay Berliner would have given him the individuality he craved, ultimately producing an even sweeter sound.

Rating: 3 stars

Written and directed by Alan Berliner

90 min.

The Sweetest Sound begins with anonymous shots from Berliner’s collection of home movies that he’s gathered throughout the years. In a film about a search for one’s individuality, it’s somehow fitting to begin with footage of people whose identities the filmmaker will never know.

Berliner is also fond of blending images from found or archival footage in with his work. While this suits a one-hour documentary about identity, the extended collages tend to drag when the subject shifts to a lifelong battle against insomnia.

While The Sweetest Sound played out at a natural pace, much of Berliner’s new film, Wide Awake, seems contrived. The director drinks his first cup of coffee in more than 30 years, and in a caffeine induced burst, suddenly decides to take us on a speedy tour of his audio/visual archives. Borrowing a page from Super Size Me, the results are played up directly for the camera.

You may need a hit of Sominex to get all the way through this one.

The Sweetest Sound and Wide Awake will screen back-to-back on Sunday, Feb. 11, starting at 3:00 p.m. at the AMC La Jolla. Mr. Berliner will be on hand afterward for a discussion with my KPBS Film Club cohort Beth Accomando.

Rating: 2 stars