Menashe
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Brighton Beach and the East Village in the ’80s: Eric Steel on Minyan
Although primarily known as a documentary filmmaker (his 2006 feature, The Bridge, considered the countless suicides committed each year from the Golden Gate Bridge), director Eric Steel makes his narrative feature debut with Minyan, a faithful yet surprising adaptation of a coming-of-age short story by David Bezmozgis. Set in the Russian Jewish community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the 1980s, Minyan tells the story of David (Samuel H. Levine) who, while helping his grandfather (Ron Rifkin) transition into a retirement home, befriends two closeted gay men. As David begins to identify and expand on his own desires, his sense of self begins […]
by Erik Luers on Oct 27, 2021 -
“We Spent a Lot of Time Choosing Lenses”: Keith Thomas on The Vigil and His Forthcoming Firestarter Adaptation
Unfolding over the course of one evening in the Hasidic community of Boro Park, Brooklyn, Keith Thomas’s debut feature, The Vigil, gets more unsettling the darker the night gets. Dave Davis plays Yakov, a young man experiencing difficulty living a newly secular life. As securing a job has proved difficult, he agrees to a friend’s impromptu request to serve as a shomer, watching over the cold body of a local man, Rubin Litvak, before the deceased is laid to rest. Anticipating an easy few hours of surfing the web on his smartphone, Yakov settles in for his watchman duties. Unfortunately […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 2, 2021 -
DPs Yoni Brook and Joshua Z. Weinstein on Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish Drama Menashe
Documentary director Joshua Z Weinstein makes his first foray into fiction filmmaking with Menashe, a drama set in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park in New York City. Weinstein shot the film with co-DP Yoni Brook, a fellow documentary DP and director. With dialogue almost entirely in Yiddish, the film premiered earlier this week in the NEXT lineup at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker spoke with Weinstein and Brook before the film’s premiere. Below, the two discuss the film’s necessary blend of documentary and fiction techniques, lighting scenes for first-time actors and earning the trust of a notoriously hermetic community. Filmmaker: How […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2017 -
Sundance Dispatch 5: Beach Rats, Menashe
Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats is a logical companion piece to It Felt Like Love. The latter focused on a teen girl whose hellbent determination on losing her virginity ASAP placed her at peril amid a world of the worst possible dudes; here, we have a teen guy coming to terms with his probable queerness in an antagonistically heteronormative milieu. The story’s simple enough: already staggering under the weight of his extremely ill father, dying slowly in the living room, Frankie (Harris Dickinson) cruises webcam sites at night, surreptitiously seeking out hook-ups. “I don’t know what I like,” he tells those who ask […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2017
