Menashe

“There's nothing orthodox about him.”

Menashe (Menashe Lustig), a widower in Brooklyn's ultra-orthodox Jewish community, has been told his son Rieven cannot stay with him unless he marries again, and he has a week to make a case for himself. Joshua Z. Weinstein shot the film in Yiddish with a cast of first-time actors, so the grocery counters and kitchen tables look lived in. Underneath the custody fight is a plain question of whether a man who loves his child is allowed to raise him alone.