JTA — Noam Ash didn’t expect his own life to become the inspiration for his first feature film. But that’s what happened when the then-27-year-old was living with his grandparents in 2018.

The screenwriter’s conversations with his manager about another script he was working on kept turning to how he had moved in with his Holocaust survivor grandfather after breaking up with his boyfriend.

“My manager was like, ‘I think you should actually write about that,’” Ash recalled in an interview.

Nearly a decade later, Ash’s film “Bookends,” which is loosely inspired by his own experience, is the first movie incubated by the Jewish Writers Institute Screenwriters Lab to make it to production. It stars F. Murray Abraham, Caroline Aaron and Charlie Barnett alongside Ash, who portrays a character loosely based on himself.

The film follows a young gay man who moves in with his grandmother and grandfather — a Holocaust survivor — after a bad breakup, and soon confronts end-of-life issues while navigating a new romance with his grandparents’ doctor.

“Bookends,” directed by Mike Doyle, recently premiered at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, where it received the 2026 Stand Up Award sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, and has since drawn offers of distribution.

“Bookends is a work of art that explores the richness, diversity, and complexity of a Jewish family and community,” ADL California regional director Joshua Burt said in a statement. “It is just the sort of storytelling that will help the Jewish community seem familiar to the non-Jewish world, helping everyone embrace one another as part of the wider community.”

For Ash, the film is a testament not only to his own story but to the nurturing that came from the Jewish Writers Institute throughout the process, which overlapped with an increasingly fraught time for Jewish creatives after the war in Gaza was sparked by the Hamas-led onslaught in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

“Over the past couple of years, there has been a lot of fear in Hollywood; there’s a lot of people not knowing if they should........

© The Times of Israel