Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
I saw a really great movie as part of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin: "Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish."
It was just as quirky, funny and touching as the title suggests. Basically, a secular Jewish woman is pushed into translating Romeo and Juliet into Yiddish, as part of her master's degree. Knowing no Yiddish, she gets on board the project a couple of young guys who are ex-ultra-Orthodox - having left their insular community in Brooklyn and now supporting themselves with various small scams and thefts - who speak Yiddish as a native language, but have never heard of Shakespeare.
That story - the secular Jew who has to come to terms with the ultra-Orthodox, and the former ultra-Orthodox struggling to get by in the English-speaking modern world of New York - is liberally interspersed with reimaginings of Romeo and Juliet that are set in the present-day, yet fittingly old-fashioned, Brooklyn world of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. It's worth seeing this movie just for the shots of young Orthodox guys in long black coats and sidelocks loafing around New York subway stops, declaiming familiar lines of Shakespeare, but in Yiddish.
This show was the world premier of the movie, and the director as well as several of the actors were in attendance - it turns out the actors themselves were all amateurs (something that always captures my heart, and immediately forgives the occasional wooden-sounding delivery of a line) and all former members of the Orthodox community.
Go see this movie if it shows somewhere near you - better yet, since the director didn't seem real clear on whether it would get picked up by a distributor or where it would be shown, call your TV station and tell them you want them to air "Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish"! Somebody told me it won the festival here, but I can't seem to confirm that anywhere online.
It was just as quirky, funny and touching as the title suggests. Basically, a secular Jewish woman is pushed into translating Romeo and Juliet into Yiddish, as part of her master's degree. Knowing no Yiddish, she gets on board the project a couple of young guys who are ex-ultra-Orthodox - having left their insular community in Brooklyn and now supporting themselves with various small scams and thefts - who speak Yiddish as a native language, but have never heard of Shakespeare.
That story - the secular Jew who has to come to terms with the ultra-Orthodox, and the former ultra-Orthodox struggling to get by in the English-speaking modern world of New York - is liberally interspersed with reimaginings of Romeo and Juliet that are set in the present-day, yet fittingly old-fashioned, Brooklyn world of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. It's worth seeing this movie just for the shots of young Orthodox guys in long black coats and sidelocks loafing around New York subway stops, declaiming familiar lines of Shakespeare, but in Yiddish.
This show was the world premier of the movie, and the director as well as several of the actors were in attendance - it turns out the actors themselves were all amateurs (something that always captures my heart, and immediately forgives the occasional wooden-sounding delivery of a line) and all former members of the Orthodox community.
Go see this movie if it shows somewhere near you - better yet, since the director didn't seem real clear on whether it would get picked up by a distributor or where it would be shown, call your TV station and tell them you want them to air "Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish"! Somebody told me it won the festival here, but I can't seem to confirm that anywhere online.