The festival will open with a screening of Jung-chi Chang’s Touch of the Light, a fact-based feature film about the life of Taiwanese blind piano prodigy Yu-Siang Huang, who plays himself. He will attend the screening and perform before the film. The event will take place in the presence of Welfare Minister Haim Katz, National Insurance Institute CEO Prof. Shlomo Mor- Yosef, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and Yun Sheng Chi of the Taiwan Embassy. Yu-Siang Huang will also perform in a recital later in the festival, completely in the dark, so the audience can better understand his world. Other international guests include Lena Koppel and Peter Kropenin, respectively the director and producer of two Swedish films that will be shown in the festival, The Importance of Tying Your Own Shoes and It’s All About Friends. Importance tells the story of a rebellious young man who finds himself when he gets a job at a community center teaching people with learning disabilities. Friends is about a New York-based filmmaker who gets the opportunity to make a movie in Sweden, only to discover once he gets there that his subjects are disabled, which forces him to confront his own prejudices. Koppel and Kropenin will be present at the screenings. There will be a program of films on mental illness. Dr. Schen and Sylvia Tessler-Lozowick will speak before a screening of Nir Bergman’s film Yona, the story of one of Israel’s most acclaimed poets who struggled with psychosis. His topic is “From Demonic to Ingenious: The Depiction of Madness in Films.” Also screened in this program will be Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, which won nearly 50 awards at international festivals, including the Jury Prize at Cannes. The film is about a widow raising a son prone to violent outbursts. Dr. Max Lachman, a board member of the Israel Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, will speak before a screening of David Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, about a low-functioning introverted young Japanese woman (Rinko Kikuchi, who was nominated for an Oscar for Babel) who becomes obsessed with finding the money buried at the end of the Coen brothers’ Fargo , which she believes to be a true story. Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg will speak afterwards on “The Treasures of the Mind.” Comedian Sarah Silverman has her first dramatic role in Adam Salky’s I Smile Back, a movie about a bipolar housewife whose illness leads her to self-destruct and causes enormous pain to her family. Josh Charles (Will on The Good Wife) plays her husband. Bipolarized is a documentary by Rita Kotzia about Ross McKenzie, a man with bipolar disorder who tries to cope without medication. The screening will be followed by a Skype conversation with McKenzie. James Napier Robertson’s The Dark Horse is a fact-based drama about a bipolar chess champion who returns to his community in New Zealand to work with troubled youth. A screening of James L. Brooks’s As Good As It Gets will be dedicated to the memory of Lia van Leer, the founder of the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and Aviva Meirom, her long-time assistant. The film stars Jack Nicholson in an Oscar- winning performance as a writer with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Justin Lerner’s Girlfriend is about a young man with Down Syndrome who pursues his high school sweetheart, a single mother with a history of disastrous relationships. When he inherits money, his life is turned upside down. The film will be followed by a Skype conversation with the director.

Reframing Reality

A film festival about people facing challenges.

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