Menashe is a drama set amid Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Hasidic community. It is performed entirely in the Yiddish language. It is peopled exclusively by Hasidic non-actors. (Real-life grocer Menashe Lustig plays the title character.) It is small and specific, admittedly, but it also tells a universal story about a father’s struggle to hold on to the son he loves, and it tells this story tenderly, thoughtfully, beautifully. It may even be my favourite frum film of the year. Thus far. (Still a few weeks to go.)
This marks the feature debut of director Joshua Z Weinstein (no relation), who made documentaries previously, and who wrote this with Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed. Weinstein, a secular Jew, had decided he wanted to make a film set within the community, so was hanging around Brooklyn’s Borough Park — home to one of the largest populations of orthodox Jews outside Israel — looking for his story when he discovered Menashe Lustig, a widower with a son who, by his rabbi’s decree, would have to remarry before his son would be allowed to live with him.
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