Menashe captures rarely seen world
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect that shuns all things tech is challenging subject for film
Filmmaker Joshua Weinstein set out to do the “impossible.” It turned out to be merely highly improbable.
The result is Menashe, a Yiddishlanguage film peopled with nonactors, almost all of whom are Hasidic Jews, a sect that eschews all things modern, including cinema.
“The No. 1 reason (I made it) is because it’s impossible. It had never been done before, no one had ever made a film in Yiddish with real Hasidic actors. Just that challenge made it worthwhile to get up every day and finish it,” Weinstein said.
The film, which opened Fridayin Toronto, is set in Brooklyn’s Borough Park community, an ultraOrthodox Jewish population that largely keeps to themselves, “a society living within (New York City) and yet publicly does not engage whatsoever, is against all forms of modernity from smartphones to internet to televisions to modern music,” Weinstein said.
“It was almost impossible to cast these people. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who speak Yiddish and are ultra-Orthodox, only a few dozen actually agreed to even audition for the movie,” he recalled.
“There’s a million reasons why the film could have fallen apart after we invested a year of our lives. Actors would drop out, and money — no one wanted to fund the thing — and we’d lose locations and we’d be chased off the street,” he added.
Finding the lead actor, Menashe Lustig — who more or less plays himself in a story that largely mirrors his own life — was a huge step forward, Weinstein noted.
“I remember the first tape I did with (Lustig) where you see these sad eyes and he has this Chaplinesque likeness. Obviously the cliché idea of the sad clown depicts him perfectly,” said Weinstein, who served as director.
“I just knew that he was immediately watchable . . . Every movement he did just was exciting to me. That’s a great actor.”
Finding the actor to play Rieven, the preteen son Menashe is in danger of losing unless he remarries, was the second critical element and required going as far afield as Israel.
“Menashe looked at him (Ruben Niborski) with these big, sad eyes and fell in love with him,” Weinstein said. “He’s just the sweetest, nicest kid, who’s shy and endearing and intelligent and affable and they just had chemistry together.”
The filmmaker acknowledged that he was also motivated to explore his own faith, even though “these people (Hasidic Jews) are my brothers yet we’re nothing alike.”
While leaders in the Hasidic community will almost certainly condemn the film and urge their followers not to see it, Weinstein is confident many of them will.
“There are definitely people in the community who have heard about the movie and are upset. They are upset that people in the community participated. Most people who are of this community will not publicly come to see it. If they do come, they’re not going to publicly admit it,” Weinstein said.
“This is a community which sold out two of the biggest sporting stadiums in Queens to have an antiinternet rally, to protest the use of WhatsApp, smartphones, internet, everything,” he said.
Privately, he noted, “we’ve had a number of people come up and tell us how excited about it they are.”