From indie filmmaker Jonah Feingold comes 31 Candles , a low-budget coming-of-age romantic comedy driven by sincere, relatable characters and a refreshingly thoughtful screenplay.

Feingold casts himself as Leo Kadner, a 30-year-old Jewish filmmaker whose career has thus far amounted to directing saccharine Christmas movies stuffed with shameless product placement courtesy of overbearing studio executives. He is visibly dissatisfied and resigned to his creative rut, but is still driven by the stubborn belief that he has a story worth telling. Given the holiday theme of his work, it is a minor missed opportunity that the script never riffs on the fact that much of the Christmas music canon was written by Jewish composers.

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