FāVS Writers to Participate in Spokane Jewish Film Festival Panel Feb. 1
News Brief by Mia Gallegos | FāVS News
Writers from FāVS News will be participating in a panel discussion on Feb. 1 as part of the 20th Annual Spokane Jewish Film Festival.
“Stay With Us,” with the original title of “Reste un peu,” will be discussed in a virtual panel discussion moderated by FāVS Executive Director Tracy Simmons and including Ask A Catholic columnist Mitch Finley, his wife Kathy Finley and FāVS columnist Matthew Kincanon. Also on the panel will be Neal Schindler of Spokane Area Jewish Family Services, the director of the film festival itself.
Released in 2022, “Stay With Us” portrays the life of a Jewish man who expeditiously decides to return to France after being well-established in the United States in order to convert to Catholicism. His Jewish parents are far from supportive of this idea of his and make the process of his conversion rather painful. His goal is to explain that his love for his parents has not been dampened by his newfound intrigue with Catholicism, specifically with the Virgin Mary.
“This film has a lot going on that we don’t see too often in Jewish film festival selections. There’s the crisis of faith component, as well as the rarely seen impact of a possible conversion from Judaism to another faith on the friends and family of a Jewish person,” Schindler said in an email. “Jewish films are perhaps unusually diverse in that Jewishness is both a cultural identity and, for some, a religious identity.”
The panel will be on Feb. 1 at 7 p.m., via Zoom, and will allow opportunities both for discussion and Q&A.
