‘Menashe’: Director Joshua Weinstein & His Star On Hasidic Life & The Pleasures Of Quiet Drama [Interview]

You have never seen a movie quite like Joshua Weinstein‘s “Menashe.” The film was shot by Weinstein on a low-budget, in near cinema-verite style, deep in the heart of New York City’s Hasidic community, and it’s presented in Yiddish with English subtitles. Talk about a gamble even for an indie production.

The film chronicles the trials and tribulations of recently widowed Hasidic Jew Menashe (Menashe Lustig in his big-screen debut) whose community forces his son to be raised by his openly contemptuous brother in-law. To get his son back, he will have to marry again, but Menashe isn’t ready for commitment. His first marriage was an unhappy union, and he is less than eager to rush into another matrimonial endeavor. To make matters worse, he must also find stability, which cannot happen with his low-paying, labor-intensive gig at a Jewish bakery. His sole raison d’etre is his son and yet orthodox rule forbids them from living in the same house until he finds a wife. Menashe’s endeavor to regain custody of his son is at the heart of the film’s narrative. This is a quiet drama that stitches together an ordinary life faced with impossibly tasked religious restrictions, yet Menashe persists.

READ MORE: ‘Menashe’ Humanizes Hasidic Life In A Pensive, Emotional Drama [Review]

“Menashe” is a slice of an America that you’ve rarely seen before on screen, a world that largely remains from the mainstream, but to which Weinstein shows us a bird’s eye view of here. I spoke to Weinstein and Lustig about their movie and how they made the impossible a reality by working with a cast of mostly non-professionals, and an orthodox community that forbids moviemaking.

How did this project happen? This movie is truly one a kind.
Joshua Weinstein: It was the first time Menashe was in a movie theater.

Oh, how was that like?
Menashe Lustig: It was incredible. It was the first time I had a response from people.

JW: He didn’t really know what the movie was about until he saw it with an audience.

READ MORE: Experience Brooklyn As You Never Have Before In The Gentle First Trailer For A24’s ‘Menashe’

What are your thoughts on the movie?
ML: I was used to watch things on YouTube. When you watch it in a theater it’s quite different, it takes you away from reality.

JW: Quite literally the odds of this happening were almost impossible. Watching this film is like one unique snowflake gradually coming together by the atmosphere. There were so many moments where the film was close to collapsing. We lost locations, we lost actors, funding…Nobody wanted us to make this movie. Many in the Jewish Orthodox world felt that even if I was respectful, just Menashe staying in front of the camera was too much and breaking too many rules.

What I love is that it’s all in Yiddish. It’s a dying language.
JW: Of course it is.

ML: We actually talk in the movie a very peculiar New York Yiddish. It’s a mix of English and Yiddish. It’s not completely authentic Yiddish. It’s 2017 Yiddish [laughs].

JW: My goal wasn’t to do the impossible and save the language, but if it does save the language that’s wonderful, but there are hundreds of thousands of people in New York City who speak Yiddish so to a large segment of the population it’s not dying at all, it’s thriving. You know there’s also this deep history of Yiddish cinema, pre-second world war. Post-war Hebrew became the de facto language of the Jews and you do have these brilliant Israeli movies that are released every year, but it’s very sad, for the new generation, that brilliant songs, poems, plays, movies that were made in this language are now no more.