Jewish Film Fest opens with a comedy
Staff report
YOUNGSTOWN
The 2015 spring Youngstown Area Jewish Film Festival will include three films and will begin Tuesday with a screening of “Cupcakes” at 7 p.m. at Encore Cinema in Niles.
In the comedy “Cupcakes,” a group of friends in Tel Aviv are unimpressed by the official Israeli entry in the “UniverSong” music-competition TV show. Believing that they can do better, they spontaneously create and record their own song on a mobile phone.
Their performance is seen by the show’s judges, and soon they are reluctantly thrown into the spotlight as Israel’s next official entry.
Directed by Eytan Fox, the film includes a feel-good soundtrack by Babydaddy from the band Scissor Sisters.
The next film in the festival will be the documentary “Above and Beyond,” which will be shown at 1:30 p.m. May 3 at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown.
In 1948, just three years after the liberation of Nazi death camps, a group of Jewish-American pilots answered a call for help. In secret and at great personal risk, they smuggled planes out of the United States, trained behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia and flew for Israel in its War of Independence.
The ragtag group not only turned the tide of the war, but embarked on personal journeys of discovery and renewed Jewish pride.
The first major feature-length documentary about the foreign airmen in the 1948 war, “Above and Beyond” includes new interviews and stunning aerial footage.
The final film will be “Run Boy Run,” which will be screened at 7 p.m. May 12 at Cinemark Tinseltown in Boardman.
A saga of courage and compassion, the film tells the extraordinary true story of a Polish boy who seeks the kindness of others in his solitary struggle to outlast the Nazi occupation and keep alive his Jewish faith.
Escaping the Warsaw ghetto at the behest of his father, 9-year-old Srulik flees to the woods. There, he learns to hide from SS patrols and scavenge for food, until loneliness and the harsh onset of winter drive him back to civilization.
Taken in by a kindhearted farmer’s wife, he is given a new identity and travels from village to village, working as a farmhand. Some help him survive, and others betray him.
Tickets for all films are $5 and can be purchased at the door or in advance at the Jewish Community Center, 505 Gypsy Lane. Call 330-746-3250, ext. 195, for information.
The YAJFF is presented by the Jewish Community Center of Youngstown and Youngstown State University’s Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies.