Veteran Documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein on his Yiddish Comedy Menashe

Making his scripted feature debut, director Joshua Z Weinstein drew not only on his background as a veteran documentary filmmaker but also on silent films. His Menashe is spoken nearly entirely in Yiddish, even though Weinstein speaks very little of the language, and it stars the largely unknown Hassidic comic and actor Menashe Lusting, whom Weinstein describes as “Chaplinesque.”

Yiddish was necessary because Menashe, a contemporary father-son story.