Leonard Cohen documentary to raise 'Hallelujah' at San Diego International Jewish Film Festival in La Jolla

Leonard Cohen, pictured in the late 2000s, is the subject of the documentary "Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song."

Film about the late singer-songwriter’s beloved tune will be screened as part of the festival, which kicks off Wednesday, Feb. 15, at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center’s Garfield Theatre.

By David L. Coddon

Feb. 17, 2023 6:18 AM PT

Whether you saw Leonard Cohen performing “Hallelujah” in person or only in a YouTube video, you can hear in his voice and see in his eyes how much the most famous song he ever composed meant to him.

In the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song,” husband-and-wife filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine reveal how much the song meant to those who recorded it or covered it and those who knew Cohen, who died in 2016.

Their film, which has been streaming on Netflix, is among 35 being featured in the 33rd San Diego International Jewish Film Festival at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center’s Garfield Theatre in La Jolla beginning Wednesday, Feb. 15. “Hallelujah” will be screened at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 20.

“Hallelujah,” which Goldfine said Cohen wrote over the course of seven or eight years, was first released in 1984 on his album “Various Positions.” It’s been recorded in the years since by John Cale, Jeff Buckley, k.d. lang and Rufus Wainwright, to name a few. Bob Dylan has covered it in concert, as have Bono, Bon Jovi, Brandi Carlile and Willie Nelson. “Saturday Night Live” alumna Kate McKinnon memorably performed it on the show, as Hillary Clinton, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president.

“[Cohen] knew he had written a lot of great songs, songs that are well-known,” Geller said. (They include “Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire” and “Sisters of Mercy.”) “But he was clear in seeing that this one song had launched itself in terms of worldwide familiarity beyond any other.”

Geller and Goldfine’s documentary is not a cradle-to-grave retrospective on Cohen’s life. Instead, its focus is on that one song, “Hallelujah.”

“We wanted to look at him in a way that he hadn’t been examined before, to look at the spiritual and religious quest that took him all the way through his life with the song that is most emblematic and captures all that seeking and surging,” Geller said.

Among those interviewed in the film are Cale, Wainwright and Judy Collins, who popularized Cohen’s “Suzanne.”

“[Cohen] knew he had written a lot of great songs, songs that are well-known. But he was clear in seeing that this one song had launched itself in terms of worldwide familiarity beyond any other.”

— Filmmaker Dan Geller

For the filmmakers, “Hallelujah” is a song like none other.

“I can’t imagine another song in the world that I would be able to continue to listen to after listening to it so many years,” Goldfine said. “A lot of it is that spiritual questioning. It’s never going to be anything other than an enigma.

“I look at it differently each day, depending on what mood I wake up in.”

The film was inspired by Allen Light’s 2012 book “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘ “Hallelujah’” and by Geller and Goldfine seeing Cohen perform the song in concert in Oakland.

“When we saw him at the Paramount Theatre,” Goldfine recalled, “we gravitated toward everything about him and that song, and the way he delivered it became this indelible memory.”

For a full film festival schedule, visit 2023sdijff.eventive.org/films.