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Menashe Lustig and Yoel Falkowitz in Menashe.
Menashe Lustig and Yoel Falkowitz in Menashe. Photograph: Photograp/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
Menashe Lustig and Yoel Falkowitz in Menashe. Photograph: Photograp/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

‘There’s enough rabbis – now God wants some actors’: how Menashe put Hasidic New York on screen

This article is more than 6 years old

A film based on the real life story of its lead, a non-actor from Brooklyn, as he fights to keep his son after his wife’s death has connected with festival audiences and critics alike

As a tiny film about a hapless Hasidic Jew, starring non-actors speaking almost entirely in Yiddish, hopes for Menashe’s reception were modest, to say the least. Yet it has connected with festival audiences and critics: note-perfect and with a huge heart, it’s a story about a closed community, but one that ripples with resonance. Whatever our culture, it obliquely suggests, we are fundamentally the same. It’s a tonic.

Menashe’s director, Joshua Z Weinstein, a practising non-Orthodox Jew, was raised in suburban New Jersey, but on weekends he would visit his grandparents in Brooklyn and Queens. There, he would catch glimpses of Hasids, stoking his curiosity. He’s primarily a cinematographer, and extensive work on documentaries has introduced him to myriad cultures, but the one on his doorstep enticed him most. Searching for stories in 2014, Weinstein spent much time in Borough Park, an Orthodox area of Brooklyn, dressed respectfully in a white shirt, black trousers and yarmulke. Eventually, through a film-making friend, he found his man.

Menashe Lustig, 39, works in a grocery store and lives in New York’s New Square, an all-Hasidic, practically private village. A liberal Hasid, for the past decade he has made a name for himself with comic skits on YouTube. “I’m drawn to non-traditional beauty, and there’s something about Menashe that captivated me right away,” says Weinstein, who thought Lustig was hilarious but also saw pain and sadness, and “fell in love with him”. Weinstein learned how, in 2008, Lustig’s wife died suddenly, and that, because the Torah says that: “It is not good for a man to be alone” – ie without a partner – he had his young child taken away from him to live with a foster family. Single-parenting is not permitted in the community. Lustig has not remarried, seeing his son, who lives a couple of blocks away, when he can.

Weinstein took the bones of this real-life story and wrote a script around Lustig, casting him as its lead. The fundamentals are the same – Lustig plays a recently widowed grocery worker who has, via rabbinical power, lost custody of his son. There is further fictionalised conflict, with the on-screen Menashe fighting to prove that he’s a capable single parent, drawing the short straw at every turn. The “emotional truth” is the same, says Weinstein, who capitalises on Lustig’s comic talent, resulting in a Chaplin-esque sad clown, a sensitive goof who can’t help screwing up.

Lustig was fine playing a version of himself; his concern was how it would be handled by his community, which keeps itself clear of modernity. Appearing in a film is a risk, and Lustig was already a marginalised figure in his neighbourhood. Yet he signed up: he loves to entertain, loves making people feel good. He said to Weinstein: “There’s enough rabbis – now God wants to make some actors.”

Filming within the Borough Park community was tough: “The community was against us making this film,” says Weinstein. Bits of the funding, which was multisourced, fell away due to local pressure. Actors quit. Cast and crew were ejected from locations. To complicate things further, each scene was rehearsed and set up in English, then filmed in Yiddish, often with numerous takes due to the actors’ lack of film experience.

It was clear though, says Weinstein, that Lustig was a star – especially considering what the production took out of him. Certain scenes echoing Lustig’s harsher realities were “brutal” for him. “He couldn’t yell at his [onscreen] son, he couldn’t slap him. Because those were real emotions for Menashe, he loves his son so much. To dig dark into those feelings and to think about the cruelties in his life that would make him want to slap his son, those scenes were too much for him.”

Joshua Z Weinstein: ‘Our intentions were just to make something that had integrity, but we had no idea that it would also be popular with audiences.’ Photograph: Francois G. Durand/Getty Images

It all paid off when the film screened at Sundance in January – the first time Lustig had ever been in a cinema. “People were laughing and crying at Menashe on the screen, and Menashe was in the theatre watching this,” says Weinstein. “It was such a cathartic experience for him. No one in his family and his society has ever thought that what he did meant anything. And here was a group of mostly non-Jews in Park City, Utah, not only appreciating the movie but thinking that Menashe was a great artist. I think it was one of the most uplifting experiences of his life. He was crying. It was emotional for all of us.”

Back home, there was trouble for Lustig. “Immediately after Sundance there were very negative repercussions for him,” says Weinstein, “where we were scared that he’d be thrown out of his community. But then … It is frowned upon to see films, but once some of the community started coming to screenings, there was a quiet buzz around it in this world that, ‘Yes, movies are bad, but this one’s not so bad, actually.’ People realise that even though Menashe is in the secular world making a movie, he’s very respectful.

“It’s been amazing to watch the Hasidic world interact with the secular world,” continues Weinstein, who isn’t the only one to have just made a film about such communities. This year also saw the release of a documentary, One of Us, and next summer there’s Sebastián Lelio’s drama Disobedience, about a north London Orthodox Jewish community – star Rachel McAdams asked Weinstein if she could see Menashe as preparation. “People always want to open a door that hasn’t been opened,” he says. “And now we’re at a unique cross-section where enough people from this community are saying, ‘We can be religious and be part of modernity.’”

Most satisfying for Weinstein, though, is that his film is finding such favour. “Our intentions were just to make something that had integrity, but we had no idea that it would also be popular with audiences,” he says. “And that has been the true shock for everyone who made this movie. From the outside it’s like, you wanna watch actors with big beards talk a language which no one really speaks? It’s absurd. But there is this deeper human truth.”

Menashe is in cinemas from 8 December

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