Three-day “Best of the Fests” Presents Favorite Films from ImageOut, High Falls, and Rochester Jewish Film Festivals.
A collaboration between three of Rochester’s largest film festivals will highlight the “best” movies to a broader film-loving audience. This mini-festival will run three nights at The Little Theatre on Wednesday through Friday, April 27, 28, and 29, with each festival showing two standout movies.
Wednesday, April 27 • 6:00pm
Above And Beyond
Presented by Rochester ...
Three-day “Best of the Fests” Presents Favorite Films from ImageOut, High Falls, and Rochester Jewish Film Festivals.
A collaboration between three of Rochester’s largest film festivals will highlight the “best” movies to a broader film-loving audience. This mini-festival will run three nights at The Little Theatre on Wednesday through Friday, April 27, 28, and 29, with each festival showing two standout movies.
Wednesday, April 27 • 6:00pm
Above And Beyond
Presented by Rochester International Jewish Film Festival
Would you risk everything - your future, your citizenship, even your life - to help a brother in need? 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 U.S., trained behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia and flew for Israel in its War of Independence. As members of Machal – “volunteers from abroad” – this ragtag band of brothers not only turned the tide of the war; they also embarked on personal journeys of discovery and renewed Jewish pride. Above and Beyond is their story.
Wednesday, April 27 • 8:30pm
The Guy With The Knife
Presented by ImageOut: The Rochester LGBT Film Festival
2015 ImageOut Jury and Audience Award Winner for Best Documentary Feature
Twenty years after he helped put Jon Buice in a Texas prison, Ray Hill is fighting to free him. Filmed over eight years, The Guy With The Knife traces the history of the friendship between a prominent gay rights activist and a convicted ‘gay bash’ murderer, set against the backdrop of gay rights, victims’ rights, and prisoners’ rights, in the harsh Texas justice system. The Guy With The Knife will have an updated ending to include developments with the story since our October screening.
Thursday, April 28 • 6:00pm
Yemeniettes
Presented by High Falls Film Festival
2015 High Falls Audience Award Winner for Best Documentary Feature
This uplifting documentary helps give us hope that young Muslim girls might have a chance for a better future. Three Yemeni teenage girls enter a youth Middle Eastern entrepreneurial competition with the innovative solar panel powered devices, designed to compensate for frequent electrical outages in their country. Luckily, their unusually open-minded parents “support” the girls’ ambitions, despite community pressure not to allow their daughters to pursue non-traditional female vocations. Along the way the girls encounter the hardships of a country scarred by a broken educational system, joblessness and threatening Al-Qaeda presence.
Thursday, April 28 • 8:30pm
Dough
Presented by Rochester International Jewish Film Festival
Jonathan Pryce stars as an old Jewish baker whose faltering business is inadvertently saved by his young Muslim apprentice in the British dramedy Dough.
Widowed and down on his luck, Nat Dayan (Pryce) is desperate to save his London bake shop. His customers are dying off, his sons have no interest in keeping afloat the family business, and hostile businessman Sam Cotton (London Film Critics’ Circle winner Philip Davis) has his own greedy plans for the property. In a pinch, Nat reluctantly enlists the help of teenager Ayyash (Jerome Holder), a refugee from Darfur. The Muslim boy assists with the bakery’s daily chores, while selling cannabis on the side to help his struggling mother make ends meet. When Ayyash one day accidently drops his stash into the dough, the challah starts flying off the shelf, and an unlikely friendship forms between the old Jewish baker and his young Muslim apprentice.
Friday, April 29 • 6:00pm
Akron
Presented by ImageOut: The Rochester LGBT Film Festival
2015 ImageOut Audience Award Winner for Best Narrative Feature
Benny and Christopher, college freshmen, meet playing football and begin a relationship. They fall in love supported by their family and friends. As their love for each other grows, a past tragic event involving their mothers comes to light. This revelation tests their own love and Benny’s close-knit family. A unique and compelling story of family, love, loss, and acceptance.
Friday, April 29 • 8:30pm
The Lennon Project
Presented by High Falls Film Festival
2015 High Falls Audience Award Winner for Best Narrative Feature
This much anticipated feature film made a special appearance at High Falls Film Festival-showing audiences what they don’t know about the night John Lennon was killed. The events unfold as seen through the eyes of those that lived it-the good men and women of NYC who did all they could to save a live, some not even knowing it was John Lennon himself. For the first time in decades, the doctor and nurses break their silence about what really happened in the operating room. Based on a true story.