Film to screen at Hartford Jewish film fest in March

By Michael Fox

Like “Crossing Delancey,” one of her favorite romantic comedies, Rachel Israel’s narrative feature debut “Keep the Change” is a New York love story with a tangible Jewish undercurrent.

The romantic duo readily self-identify as Jewish, but they share another quality that for most people primarily defines them: David (Brandon Polansky) and Sarah (Samantha Elisofon) are on the autism spectrum.

Refreshingly honest and sexually straightforward in its portrayal of the way people with autism interact with each other, with their families and with strangers, “Keep the Change” received two prizes when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last April.

“Keep the Change” screens in the Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival on Monday, March 12 at 5:30 p.m.

“A few of the characters are naturally unfiltered in the way they talk about sex, and I thought it was a beautiful and fun aspect of the characters,” Israel explained in a phone interview last summer shortly before her film opened the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

“A lot of depictions of people with autism shy away from sex, and I think it’s important to show that people on the spectrum have sex lives,” she says. “To shy away from it is in some way demeaning or infantilizing.”

Israel spent her childhood in the Princeton, New Jersey area and her adolescence and teenage years in Boca Raton before pursuing her undergraduate degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. She moved to New York for her graduate study in film at Columbia, where she refocused her first screenplay from a drama about David’s family to an endearing, awkward and rocky love story between he and Sarah.

Israel set about making a short film, and discovered a community of people with autism at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side. She cast Brandon and Samantha, and some five years later asked them to reprise their roles for a feature.

“Brandon’s search for love and companionship, and possibly sexual experience, is a defining part of his personality,” Israel says on the phone.

“When I met him I didn’t know he was on the spectrum, and even for a while I didn’t know until he told me. When he told me he had autism, it was an awakening, because I thought of someone like Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rain Man,’ someone who shies away from contact. And that was very much not the way Brandon was.”

His character’s Jewishness is front and center, which may feed into some viewers’ judgment of his ostentatiously wealthy parents (played by Jewish actors Jessica Walter and Tibor Feldman). Sarah’s Jewish identity is much less pronounced but it could be a plus – in theory – in winning David’s parents’ acceptance.

“He is quietly desperate to have a girl, so it wouldn’t have stopped him at all [if Sarah wasn’t Jewish],” Israel says. “But it’s a big thing for many Jewish parents for your kids to stay in the tribe. He thinks that it will please his parents.

“But more than that, for himself he wants some traditional things for his life. He wants a permanent loving relationship. I think he thinks that should be marriage. He very much wants the things that he’s seen his peers from childhood acquire, and he doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t have them.”

Audiences will probably conflate Brandon and Samantha with David and Sarah even more than they typically do with actors and the characters they play. In reality, David and Sarah are fictional versions of the real people.

“We wrote it in collaboration with the cast, but they are playing fictional characters,” Israel emphasizes. “They are not playing themselves. We’ve created characters that had some of their tendencies, while other things were different. They could definitely draw upon who they were to inform their characters.”

After Tribeca, Israel screened “Keep the Change” at the Los Angeles Film Festival and at Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, where it won two more prizes. Her grandfather, a financial supporter of the film who escaped Czechoslovakia at 14 on one of the kindertransports organized by Sir Nicholas Winton, attended the festival with Israel and the film.

All in all, Israel devoted six years to “Keep the Change,” from screenplay to the short film to the feature-length version. She’s eager to embark on a new feature, and primed to explore new territory.

“The simple answer is there’s not a sequel right now,” she says. “I don’t think the next chapter is a simple one for these characters.”

The Mandell JCC is located at 335 Bloomfield Ave. For information visit hjcc.org.