MENASHE is a drama about a young widower trying to win custody of his son. Director Joshua Z. Weinstein spoke to Slant Magazine about the difficulties of capturing the cultural nuances of the Hasidic community on film. Weinstein says, “It was impossibly difficult [to make a film about the Hasidic community] in so many ways. But, you know, I love New York City and I love its confluence of different peoples and ideas and faces. And me and Yoni Brook, who I shot the film with, we’d go all over the city together. I remember one summer I went to every beach in New York City. Like, The Bronx, Staten Island. It’s just different and there’s something special about that. So, it took me to Purim, which is like Jewish Halloween. And we got to go into ultra-Orthodox people’s houses and they gave us drinks and they laughed with us and they connected with us in a way that I found really special because, as you know, even as a Jewish person myself, the ultra-Orthodox are purposefully isolated from us. They purposely don’t wanna engage. If they were engaging, they’d already be talking. I found it just endlessly interesting. And for me, cinema is about learning, so I got to understanding a whole new society through making this movie.
[…] I wanted to create a film that was a storyline I couldn’t make up. You know, the community’s different, their rules are different. I love to understand a society by their laws, and so I just knew that I didn’t know what was right about this world. Early on, I would walk around for months taking notes just witnessing people singing. That was enlightening, and I just knew I wanted to put that in the movie. Especially working with non-actors, you want to write parts that they can embrace and also be easy for them. So I was looking for an actor who could star in the movie who could also loosely be based on himself. And when I met Menashe [Lustig, the lead actor in Menashe], I just knew right away that this Charlie Chaplinesque sad kind of a man was a brilliant actor. There were other actors who I met who I also liked, but Menashe was my favorite. And he told me just two facts about himself: one, that he was a widower and, two, that his son doesn’t live with him. He lives a few blocks away. Then I knew that this was a unique enough story that it could hold a whole film together.”
