First Run Features Presents U.S. Theatrical Premiere of Elizabeth Rynecki's CHASING PORTRAITS

First Run Features is pleased to announce that Elizabeth Rynecki's documentary Chasing Portraits will open in New York on April 26 and in Los Angeles on May 17. Elizabeth Rynecki will be present for post-screening Q&A's opening weekend.

The theatrical premiere comes after playing in a number of sold-out festival screenings worldwide including the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and the New York Jewish Film Festival.

Spanning three generations, Chasing Portraits is a deeply moving narrative of the richness of one man's art, the devastation of war, and one woman's unexpected path to healing. Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was a prolific Warsaw-based artist who painted scenes of the Polish-Jewish community until he was murdered at Majdanek concentration camp. After the Holocaust, Moshe's wife was only able to recover a small fraction of his work, but unbeknownst to the family, many other pieces survived.

For more than a decade Moshe's great-granddaughter, Elizabeth, has searched for the missing art, with remarkable and unexpected success. Her commitment was inspired by the obligation she felt to tell the story of her great-grandfather's paintings. Her family lost most everything in the war; given how much of Warsaw was destroyed, and how few Polish Jews survived, it is a miracle that her father, grandparents - and any of her great-grandfather's paintings - survived at all.