Tickling Leo is a 2009

2009 in film

The year 2009 saw the release of many films. Seven made the top 50 list of highest-grossing films, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that as of this year, their Best Picture category would consist of ten nominees, rather than five .- Highest-grossing films :Please note...

 independent drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 about three generations of a Jewish family whose silence about their past has kept them apart. The film was directed by Jeremy Davidson

Jeremy Davidson (actor)

Jeremy Michael Greenberg uses the stage name Jeremy Davidson and is an American actor, writer and director. He has been featured as Jack Randall, Kitty's love interest in the television series Brothers & Sisters. He has also appeared in all five seasons of the Lifetime series Army Wives as SFC...

, and stars Lawrence Pressman

Lawrence Pressman

David M. Pressman, Senior is an American actor, probably best known for roles on Doogie Howser, M.D., Ladies Man, a recurring role on Profiler, the titular character on Mulligan's Stew and as a fictional scientist in the 1971 film The Hellstrom Chronicle.His first role was on the soap opera The...

, Daniel Sauli, Annie Parisse

Annie Parisse

Anne Marie Cancelmi , known as Annie Parisse, is an American television, film, and theater actress, known for playing Alexandra Borgia on the television drama Law & Order, a role she played from 2005 until 2006 in 33 episodes. Parisse is also known for her role of Julia Lindsey Snyder on the...

, Eli Wallach

Eli Wallach

Eli Herschel Wallach is an American film, television and stage actor, who gained fame in the late 1950s. For his performance in Baby Doll he won a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer and a Golden Globe nomination. One of his most famous roles is that of Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...

, Ronald Guttman

Ronald Guttman

Ronald Guttman is a Belgian actor, theatrical producer and film producer.Guttman was born in Uccle. He has appeared in TV shows such as Lost, Lipstick Jungle, Heroes, The West Wing, and Sex and the City. He had a recurring role as Alexander Cambias, Sr...

 and Victoria Clark

Victoria Clark

Victoria Clark is an American musical theatre singer and actress. Clark has performed in many Broadway musicals and in other theatre, film and television work, and her soprano voice can be heard on numerous cast albums and several animated films...

.

Synopsis

When Zak and his girlfriend Delphina visit his estranged father in the Catskills, they find him suffering from dementia and inadvertently uncover a dark family secret from WWII: an impossible sacrifice Zak's grandfather (Eli Wallach) made to join Rudolph Kasztner's controversial freedom train

Kastner train

The Kastner train was a trainload of almost 1,684 Jews who, on June 30, 1944, escaped from Nazi-controlled Hungary, eventually arrived in Switzerland, while some 450,000 members of the Hungarian Jewish community were deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz....

 out of Hungary.

Release

Tickling Leo screened at the Stony Brook Film Festival

Stony Brook Film Festival

The Stony Brook Film Festival, produced by Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University, presents a program of new, independent films every summer since 1996. Features and short films from the U.S. and around the world are screened over ten days at Staller Center, which has been the venue...

on July 25, 2009 and then opened in Manhattan, Queens and on Long Island Theaters on September 4, 2009 with a simultaneous DVD release. The film continued on to play to audiences in NorthEast, Florida and California.