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'Praying With Lior'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

February 1, 2008

We can't actually be sure of this, but it seems pretty certain that "Praying with Lior" contains the most heart-wrenching bar mitzvah speech in the history of cinema. Those who don't choke up when Lior Liebling, the subject and hero of Ilana Trachtman's film portrait, speaks to his congregation should check his or her pulse.

A gentle, tender-hearted portrait of a devout young Jew with Down syndrome, "Lior" will not be for everyone. Occasionally, it feels like a home video that's somehow been smuggled out of the Lieblings' Philadelphia home, but its messages of family and love are pretty seductive.

As is Lior. "He's not stupid," says the boy's father, rabbi Mordechai. "He's retarded, it's different. He's not stupid." No, nor is he an object of any kind of derision or pity, not after Trachtman gets done with him.

PRAYING WITH LIOR (unrated). 1:28. At Cinema Village, Manhattan. Coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre.