Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival looks to unite community

“I’m starting to realize the intention of producing a Jewish film festival is not necessarily for Jewish audiences,” Joshua Abbey says. “It probably serves a greater purpose by appealing to everyone and engaging everyone.”

The Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival always has welcomed filmgoers of all backgrounds, says Abbey, the event’s director. But with anti-Semitism and xenophobia on the rise, he’s working to make the festival even more inclusive.

“We’re all facing the same challenges,” Abbey says. “And we’re just not going to be able to address them as effectively if we’re not united.”

The festival runs Thursday through Jan. 26. (For a complete schedule of the screenings, all of which are free, see lvjff.org.) The Review-Journal is the festival’s media sponsor.

For its 19th edition, the event is reaching farther outside the tent than ever.

Take “Leona.” The drama, about a young Jewish artist in contemporary Mexico City who falls in love outside her faith, is screening at 7 p.m. Jan. 23 at Maya Cinemas, 2195 Las Vegas Blvd. North — in Spanish. Rabbi Felipe Goodman, a native of Mexico City who’s served at Temple Beth Sholom since 1998, will moderate a discussion after the film.

“Aulcie,” meanwhile, set for 7 p.m. Saturday at the Adelson Educational Campus, 9700 Hillpointe Road, chronicles the rise, fall and re-emergence of African-American athlete Aulcie Perry. The New Jersey basketball player helped lead underdog Maccabi Tel Aviv to its first FIBA European Cup in 1977 before converting to Judaism and becoming the toast of Israel. A decade later, he was sentenced to 10 years in an American prison on heroin charges.

Perry and director Dani Menkin will attend the screening, 48 hours after its debut as the opening-night feature at the New York Jewish Film Festival. “That’s definitely a highlight,” Abbey says. “It’s very exciting to have them here.”

In another attempt at broadening the festival’s audience, Terry Tempest Williams, whom Abbey calls “probably the leading ecological/conservation/environmental writer in the world today,” will read from her latest book, “Erosion: Essays of Undoing,” at 7 p.m. Jan. 24 at the Historic Fifth Street School, 401 S. Fourth Street.

Williams also will moderate a discussion following “Wrenched” (7 p.m. Jan. 25, Adelson Educational Campus), a documentary she’s featured in that chronicles the radical environmentalists of the Earth First movement. The film is a personal one for Abbey, as the group was inspired, in part, by the writings of his late father, Edward Abbey.

“One of the fundamental principles of Judaism,” Abbey says, “is what’s known as ‘tikkun olam,’ which means healing the world. … So this film made sense to me.”

For the third time, Abbey is screening one of his own films — primarily, he jokes, “because it can’t be rejected.”

“Live to Bear Witness” (2 p.m. Jan. 26, Adelson Educational Campus) features a multi-ethnic group of local teenagers answering questions about the Holocaust and its remembrance that are posed by first-generation survivors. The goal, Abbey explains, is to create a peer-to-peer viewing experience for young audiences.

“The statistics are all very clear,” he says. “The message is not resonating among younger people, and, in fact, there’s a growing ignorance and/or disinterest as far as the value and importance of remembering that history.”

The Review-Journal is owned by the family of Sheldon Adelson, who is an executive producer of the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival. The Adelsons also are the founders of the Adelson Educational Campus.

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence @reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.