Montefiore Einstein’s latest big holiday film channels kid-centric ’80s action comedies like “The Goonies,” featuring five kids with rare diseases who keep New York City festive after the power goes out.

The film, from agency Alto and director Steve Rogers, opens in a home in the Bronx, where a hamster chews through holiday lights, starting a chain reaction that plunges all of New York into darkness. The next morning, the kids—who share the grit of having all battled rare diseases—cook up a plan at their local diner.

Their solution is an epic one: build a rocket, fly it to space and bring back stars from Alpha Centauri to light up the city. Before long, they’re hard at work building the spaceship in a garage.

The three-minute film mixes reality and fantasy as it follows the children’s charming and eventually successful quest. “The rarest stars shine brightest,” says the onscreen copy at the end.

The film, which broke in a TV cut during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, is the latest in a series of big Montefiore productions unveiled during Thanksgiving week each year. It shares themes with last year’s spot, directed by Tom Hooper, in which a boy with cerebral palsy took a fantastical trip around the city on a giant inflatable dog.

Focusing on kids with rare diseases (the children have piebaldism, achondroplasia, amplified musculoskeletal pain syndrome, spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia dwarfism and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome), the creatives on this year’s spot quickly thought about classic movies such as “The Goonies” and “Stand By Me” and how they portray kids as tough and resourceful.

“These kids deal with more in a day than most adults do in a week,” said Hannes Ciatti, chief creative officer at Alto. “It was nice to show their personalities. With preteens, you can really show their wit and highlight the different characters. That also got us to Steve [Rogers], because he has a rare gift of bringing humor and humanity together.”

Filming quickly around NYC

Rogers was drawn to the script because it didn’t have the sentimentality typical of many holiday spots.

“From there, it was about creating a world that felt authentic and credible,” he said. “The kids needed to be part of a world that felt physical, where the challenges were real and the risks were real, rather than something that was too sugar-coated.”

They filmed around New York City over four days. Due to the multiple locations and the limited hours that kids can shoot on set, they filmed quickly, which meant not doing too many takes of any particular moments. Rogers kept the kids engaged with real challenges during the process of building the spaceship.

“There’s difficulties in working with kids who aren’t trained actors, but also great advantages—they haven’t learned the bad bits,” Rogers said. “The intention was always to create a world that felt real for the kids. They were never acting against a green screen. They were always on a physical set with things they could interact with—things they were meant to do rather than pretend.”

Unlike most projects, there wasn’t a large pool of kids to draw from. But the kids were “funny and spirited and generous,” Rogers said. “It wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as I thought it would be.”

Extending the campaign

The film is supported by an out-of-home campaign featuring movie poster style illustrations of the kids by artist Steve Chorney, whose credits include “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.”

There is also a digital experience inviting users to meet the film’s heroes and learn more about rare diseases and Montefiore’s expertise in the field. (Montefiore Einstein is among the top hospitals in the country in diagnosing, treating and researching rare diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 people per condition—most of which have no treatments and typically take five to seven years to diagnose.”)

Telling these stories around Thanksgiving offers Montefiore a way to represent giving thanks for health in general while saluting the medical center’s physicians and other employees who make magic happen every day.

“It’s the most rewarding part of this job, working with these kids and celebrating them, showing them in a new light,” said Ciatti. “I’m sure this film will do a lot for the rare-disease world as well. We got so many letters last year thanking us, especially from parents. I think it will be the same for this one.”