Thursday, April 25, 2024

7 PM

In person at the JCC
Picture in the Sand is a historical suspense novel about faith, hope, terror, and the movies.
In 1954, a young movie fan named Ali Hassan gets a dream job working for Cecil B. DeMille on
a film about the greatest of Jewish liberation stories, The Ten Commandments, in Egypt. But
that dream turns into a nightmare when Ali gets caught up in real-life events of the day, including
the aftermath of the war with Israel and his country’s struggles with violent religious fanatics. He
ends up in prison, but he finds salvation there in an unlikely life-saving friendship with a Jewish
filmmaker. It’s a story Ali has kept secret for decades. But now, as an older successful
businessman living in America, he’s forced to share it with a beloved grandson who’s about to
make the same mistakes by going off to fight in a holy war.