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Film

Film review: Menashe

Anne Joseph enjoys a film about a foolish but loving father

December 7, 2017 12:37
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By

Anne Joseph,

Anne Joseph

1 min read

There have been several recent films that have offered a glimpse into the Charedi world, such as Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void, Ushpizin or the more recent documentary, One of Us. But none has been as compelling and sensitively drawn as this charming, tender drama, one of the first to be performed in Yiddish in nearly 70 years.

Set in Brooklyn’s strictly Orthodox Borough Park neighbourhood, it follows kind, hapless, widowed grocery store worker, Menashe (Menashe Lustig) in his struggle to parent his young son.Tradition prohibits Menashe from raising Rieven (Ruben Niborski) alone so, until he remarries, Rieven lives with his uncle and family. Menashe begs his rabbi for an exception to be made and the rabbi concedes, granting Menashe permission to care for Rieven a week before his wife’s memorial, giving him a chance to prove himself worthy of the responsibility.

The film’s strength primarily lies in director Joshua Z Weinstein’s authentic and non-judgmental portrayal of this closed and rigid society.

Weinstein’s background is in documentaries — this is his first feature — and it shows in both his successful rooting of the film on location, using a largely non-professional cast, as well as in his unsentimental but empathetic telling of a real-life story that is loosely based on Lustig’s own.