FULL LENGTH: THE BIRTHDAY GAME is a romantic epic about a wayward generation of American Jews at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Aspiring novelist Henry Jacobson is exiled from his family, as his father, a doctor, defends a devastating malpractice lawsuit. Henry arranges to spend the summer in the beautiful Upper East Side penthouse apartment of family friends who are expected to be away for the season. At the last moment, however, daughter Chelsea Weiss decides to remain home, leading Henry and Chelsea, two young American Jews, to unexpectedly share the same apartment for the long, hot summer. Chelsea attempts to recover from the devastating end to her junior year of college, which involved an anxiety-inducing relationship with an ultra-conservative literature professor, a man long accused of anti-Semitism, but who still looms large in her mind. Henry works on his novel about an American serviceman after World War II, recovering in a hospital on the Amalfi coast of Italy, who learns to paint.

Drawn to each other, and trapped in an increasingly claustrophobic space, Henry and Chelsea navigate their growing attraction and fraught identities. Matters are complicated further when Henry meets Sylvia, a woman with roots in Libya's vanished Jewish community, challenging his understanding of Judaism and his relationship with Chelsea. As Chelsea's birthday approaches, she introduces Henry to a bizarre and terrifying family ritual, the birthday game…

Set during the summer of 2000, against the backdrop of the presidential race between Bush and Gore, at the dawn of reality television, when the Twin Towers stood proudly over Manhattan, and when there was real hope for Palestinian-Israeli peace, THE BIRTHDAY GAME is a love story about two people, and a nation, on the knife’s-edge of a new century.