Synopsis: Eve Annenberg’s gritty, funny new feature stars predominantly non-actor twenty somethings who grew up speaking Yiddish as a first language in Brooklyn. This is possibly the first narrative film acted by both men and women in this much spoken, colloquial Yiddish in over seventy years.
Ava, a bitter middle aged Brooklyn nurse has to translate Shakespeare’s play from arcane to modern Yiddish for her Master’s coursework. When needs help, she hires gorgeous, charismatic and ethically challenged Lazer and Mendy, two young Ultra Orthodox dropouts living like scam artist-refugees on the streets of Brooklyn in a stolen van. They’ve never heard of the play, the playwright, and don’t know how it ends! As they start to modernize and imbibe the poetry and action, they fall under its rapturous spell and begin to live it in their heads in a gauzy and beautiful alternate reality where everyone is…some kind of Orthodox. And with this immersion comes another new concept: romantic love. The Bard may have never dreamed of the Montagues as Satmar Jews and the Lubavitchers as the Capulets, but in this magical rendition, the story of feuding Orthodox families is universal and timeless.
Opens in LA on May 11.
