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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Todd Yellin is the director of 'Brother's Shadow,' starring Judd Hirsch. The film will be shown as part of the San Jose Jewish Film Festival.

San Jose resident's film in Jewish Film Festival

By Laura Rheinheimer

It makes sense that Todd Yellin's first feature film is about living in a do-no-wrong sibling's shadow. That was his childhood, he says.

"You want to write about things you know about," the San Jose resident says, "especially on your first film. I wanted to make a film about a flawed human being, like the rest of us. This is someone we can identify with, who is filled with real struggles, but gives you hope."

Brother's Shadow will open the San Jose Film Festival on Oct. 14 and 17. Yellin wrote and directed the film.

Films are Yellin's passion. After a successful career as a documentary filmmaker and film critic, Yellin moved to San Jose two years ago to take an executive position at Los Gatos-based NetFlix, where he's in charge of the ratings system on the company's website.

He lives near Santana Row with his wife and two small children but isn't a newcomer to the Bay Area. Originally from New York, he lived in San Francisco during the dot-com era, where he oversaw entertainment content for an Internet startup company that was later bought by Sega.

After he got his master's degree in film production from the University of Southern California, Yellin worked for NewsCorp as a film critic, and launched a career making documentary films.

Yellin has a flair for filming undercover. He became the first filmmaker to record Tibetan refugees escaping into Nepal in 1994. The footage was used in the feature film Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion and bought by the wire service Reuters. He also snuck a camera into Burma in 1998 for a documentary on oppression there.

"I wasn't just about documentaries," Yellin says. "I was more about fiction films." But he adds that fictional narratives require an army of crew and actors, and a substantial amount of money to produce.

Yellin was living in New York in 1998 when he and writing partner Ivan Krim wrote the script that would later become Brother's Shadow. The script sat on a shelf for years, until Yellin caught his lucky break in 2004 when Jonathan Kaplan, Yellin's former boss, agreed to produce the film.

"He really believed in the script," Yellin says, "and I thought it would be a perfect script to make into my first film."

The film is about a parolee who returns to his estranged family and tries to revive its woodworking business in Brooklyn. The film's main character, Jake Groden, is an artistic woodworker. Even though Yellin has less experience in woodworking than he does in sibling rivalry, he researched the character by taking notes from a real-life artist.

During casting, although they auditioned all types of people, three of the four main characters are Jewish, which Yellin feels lends authenticity to the film.

"It's really fun to be doing this locally," Yellin says, adding that it gives him a chance to invite his co-workers and friends to the opening event.