Nonetheless, there is one aspect of the Harry Potter universe we have seldom talked about. In perhaps the biggest cultural phenomenon of our generation, the actor who played the eponymous character is a Jew.

That’s right, if you didn’t know this by now, Daniel Radcliffe is part of the tribe, and Tuesday marked 20 years since the release of the first installment of the film series–“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”–in which he was cast to play the lead. The rest is history. 

Despite Rowling’s noble attempt to post-canonically signal representation of Jews at Hogwarts, and then having the Goldstein sisters in the “Fantastic Beasts” prequels, nothing will be as powerful as our Jewish Harry.

Daniel Radcliffe has said he is “very proud to be Jewish,” although he is an atheist. 

With the stardom that came with the Harry Potter movies, Radcliffe became one of the most famous people in the world. Out of everyone, it was someone from our teeny tiny ethno-religious nation. And a very proud one. How fucking cool!

Since Harry Potter, the Jewish star has played both the very famous Jew, poet Allen Ginsburg, and a neo-Nazi, while drawing on his Jewish identity for both parts, as he’s discussed in a few interviews.

Clearly, Daniel Radcliffe is more than just Harry Potter. But for many of us, he’ll always be the boy who lived… and the boy who gave young Jews much needed representation.

We’re excited to see Daniel, along with his co-stars, in the upcoming 20-year reunion of Harry Potter, ‘”Return to Hogwarts” coming to HBO Max on January 1.

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Netflix taketh away, but surely Netflix giveth again.

While a number of films will leave the streaming service come June (bye, Men in Black!), there’s a whole new roster of movies set to take their place, from Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (get you some early Kat Dennings). Plus, a couple of the films, both foreign, are explicitly Jewish. Here’s what you should keep an eye out for:

Maktub debuts on June 15th. The 2017 film is a dark comedy out of Israel. It starts with parallels to Pulp Fiction—a couple of thugs survive violence (a terrorist bombing) when out to eat after a job. Shaken from their experiences, they decide to take another path. The pair steals notes from the Kotel, and decide to make the prayers of supplicants come true, using the skills from their old job (strong-arming). Shenanigans ensue, especially because when the criminals exited their old life, they took the boss’s cash with them.

Maktub stars Israeli TV superstar duo Guy Amir and Hanan Savyon. As of January, the film was even slated for an American remake. So now’s your chance to say that you watched the original before everyone was talking about the English-language version, and that you liked the Hebrew one better.

To Each, Her Own (originally Les Goûts et les couleurs) drops towards the end of the month, June 24th. There’s not much information about the recent French film online, but Netflix describes it thusly: “Just as Simone works up the courage to tell her conservative Jewish family she’s a lesbian, she finds herself attracted to a male Senegalese chef.”

So, not much there, but it’s definitely an LGBTQ flick. The film’s director is Myriam Aziza, who has also done documentary work that touches on her own conflicted Jewish identity.

(Of course, this is only the new stuff. Netflix already has lots of Israeli and/or Jewish movies and TV.)

But if you’ve gotten through everything and need to wait for these movies, in the meantime, you can check out the trailer for Maktub below:

Still from Maktub via YouTube

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Your favorite Jewish/Maori filmmaker/dreamboat is at it again. He has officially announced his next project, but, in traditional Waititi style, it’s not what you expect.

The film is called Jojo Rabbit, which sounds cute enough, and the premise also starts out sweet: It’s the story of a lonely little boy who creates an imaginary friend. That friend happens to be Adolf Hitler.

Waititi, in addition to helming the project, will play Hitler, which is the first hint that everything is going to be OK— a Jewish person of color doesn’t read as the literal Führer. Waititi has explained that this Hitler is “goofy” and “charming” (presumably to absurd, parodic degrees), an invented father figure for the protagonist.

Also starring in the film is Scarlett Johansson, so there’s another Jew in the mix. There have been differing synopses for Jojo Rabbit floating around since Waititi wrote the screenplay six years ago, but it seems that the plot includes the little boy discovering that his mother (Johansson) is hiding a Jewish teenager. In any case, the film definitely takes place in fascist Germany, so it’s going to be a rather dark comedy.

Waititi always has many irons in the fire, so we can also continue to anticipate his stop-motion Netflix movie about Bubbles the Chimp, and his sequel to mockumentary masterpiece What We Do in the Shadows entitled We’re Wolves.

Image via Flickr

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You’ve obviously always wanted to see Abbi Jacobson and Dave Franco onscreen together (nope, The Lego Ninjago Movie doesn’t count). Now, you’ll get your chance, but it isn’t what you expect. The two actors most known for comedy co-star in the direct-to-Netflix drama, 6 Balloons. The film is about a woman (Jacobson) trying to help her brother (Franco), after he has a relapse of his heroin addiction (the 6 balloons probably don’t refer to a kindergartener’s birthday party).

The film is rather bleak, and raw— there’s mundane but crucial matters of insurance, for example, and Franco’s character has a young daughter whom Jacobson has to care for as her brother shoots up. The story is based in part on the experiences of one of its producers, Samantha Housman, who too had a brother— a lawyer, professionally— addicted to heroin. Apparently, the rather short film— less than eighty minutes— is not tied up in a neat bow of recovery, instead focussing on one awful night.

While for Franco this is a not-unheard-of progression from comedy to drama, for Jacobson, this is another surprising development in a hugely diverse career— from podcasting to cartooning, she seems to be good at anything she tries.

The movie, directed by Marja-Lewis Ryan, just had its debut at SXSW, and early buzz is very positive, particularly for Jacobson and Franco’s performances.

The film drops onto Netflix April 6th, and in the meantime, check out the trailer below:

Image from 6 Balloons

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Everyone knows the drill by now. Go out to the movies, order Chinese food— it’s the Jews on Christmas way. But don’t just reach for the kung pao chicken on instinct; you should think very carefully about what dishes compliment your cinematic choice this holiday season (whether you eat before the movie, after the movie, or sneak your food into the theater is up to you). Don’t worry; we’re here to help with some suggestions:

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

The Star Wars franchise is classic, so you gotta go classic— have some lo mein. Like Episode 8, it’s loaded with everything, including a few things that might seem unfamiliar, but the noodles/space opera milieu provide a connection to comfort at its core.

Pitch Perfect 3

Egg rolls are a rare Chinese food you can eat with your hands if you need to, so you can keep eating, but stay ready to do choreography on a moment’s notice.

The Greatest Showman

Sweet, indulgent, but ultimately without much substance? You need something fried, my friend. Try the General Tso’s Chicken.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Get the broccoli stir-fry, and imagine that the greens are a tiny jungle! Whether it’s tofu, chicken, or beef, you can have your own tiny edible the Rock wander through its dangerous terrain wondering why they really needed to reboot this movie!

The Shape of Water

If you don’t keep kosher, you gotta go with shrimp dumplings. Appreciate that human/fish-person romance by having one of your own.

Ferdinand

Similarly, heighten the sense of danger our bull hero is in by eating some beef in black bean sauce. Or use this fact to emotionally destroy the child who made you see the film in the first place.

Coco

Of course— you were waiting to see the latest Pixar movie for when they finally took out that stupid Frozen short. So now, celebrate the film’s Mexican heritage by having one of those fusion burrito things with Chinese food stuffed inside. Culturally questionable? Sure. But we’re in too deep, now.

The Christmas Prince

If you want to stay home and watch the Netflix original rom-com to fulfill the mitzvah of a movie on Christmas, just open a box of fortune cookies. Eventually, one of them will say love will find you.

Image via Vimeo

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It’s awards season! Nominations for the Critics’ Choice Awards, Golden Globes, and Screen Actors Guild have all been announced in recent weeks, all leading up to the Oscar nominees being revealed in mid-January before the trophies are handed out to the winners at the beginning of March.

One of the most interesting categories of the Oscar is Best Foreign Language Film, which honors the best imports from all around the world. Ninety-two countries submitted films, and a list of nine finalists was announced last week. Five films will ultimately make the cut when nominations are revealed on January 23rd.

Israel is the most-nominated country that has yet to win a trophy. The first of its ten nominations came in 1964 for Ephraim Kishon’s Sallah Shabati, featuring future Oscar nominee and Fiddler on the Roof star Chaim Topol. Its most recent bid was for the fabulous Joseph Cedar’s Footnote in 2011.

Israel’s submission each year is determined by the winner of the Best Picture prize from the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, which hands out the Ophir Awards every September. One notable exception was when 2007 winner The Band’s Visit, now a successful musical on Broadway, was disqualified due to its extensive use of English dialogue, and Beaufort was submitted instead and received an Oscar nomination. In Between, which premiered last month at the Other Israel Film Festival, was a top Ophir nominee this year, losing to Foxtrot.

Foxtrot is the second feature film from director Samuel Maoz. It begins with two parents, Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) and Daphna (Sarah Adler), receiving the devastating news that their son has been killed in action. As Michael in particular struggles to cope with the news and with the way in which the Israeli military deals with the death of one of their own, new information comes to light that complicates everything. The experience at a checkpoint by their late son, Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray), and his fellow soldiers also comes into focus as they struggle to deal with an unthinkable mistake.

This film winning the top prize of the Israeli academy created controversy because Israeli Minister of Culture Miri Regev, who hadn’t even seen the film, spoke out against its negative portrayal of the Israeli army. Without spoiling too much of the film’s plot, it’s simplest to say that innocent people are killed and the accident is covered up. In an age where so much involving Israel is controversial, this strikes a particular nerve. Some see Foxtrot as a potential tool to be used as anti-Israel propaganda for portraying crimes the state commits onscreen, while others appreciate its handling of a complex situation that it merely presents without trying to justify or condemn it.

Maoz has given meaningful explanations for what inspired him to make this film and why he included that scene. When his daughter would repeatedly run late to school and take a taxi there, one day he made her take the public bus  to teach her about punctuality. That morning, there were reports of a terrorist attack on that bus route, and he couldn’t reach her by phone for an hour— he thought she was dead. When she returned— safe— later that day, he felt enormous relief, but it left him with a new fascination about that which we can’t control.

Addressing the controversy, he notes that film should create discussion, and it has now become a symbol of the freedom of speech and expression. At a screening in Jerusalem in October, Maoz said, “If I criticize the place I live, I do it because I worry. I want to protect it; I do it for love.”

Foxtrot isn’t the first Israeli film to win acclaim while portraying a complicated view of Israel and the way its military and its citizenry operate. Waltz with Bashir, which explored its director’s memories of the 1982 Lebanon war and included many moral dilemmas, probably came closest to winning the Oscar in 2008 when it split votes with France’s The Class, resulting in a win for Japan’s Departures. Maoz’s first film, Lebanon, released in 2009 and also set in 1982 in Lebanon, explored the effect of war on soldiers and the permanent imprint it leaves.

Unlike Lebanon, which takes place entirely inside a tank, this film is sparse on dialogue, instead spending most of its time focused on the silent reactions of its characters to events around them. Michael’s difficulty accepting what he has learned from the soldiers at his door is felt thanks to the power of superstar Lior Ashkenazi’s muted performance, and moments at the checkpoint have a similar poignancy. There are also moments of creativity in the film involving illustrations to visualize emotion and some dancing that gives the film its title.

The last two Ophir winners, Sand Storm and Baba Joon, centered on diverse communities within Israel. Two other recent choices, Gett: The Trial of Vivianne Amsalem and Fill the Void, both excellent films, dealt with very religious populations and how they handle their affairs in an insular way. The other winner from the past five years, Bethlehem, told a similar story about a Palestinian informant and his Israeli handler as Omar, officially submitted by Palestine as their entry and an eventual Oscar nominee.

Foxtrot zooms out from looking at one representative of a particular Israeli community to the general picture of a country that requires military service for all its citizens. It’s the first Israeli film since Footnote to end up on the list of nine finalists released last week, putting it much closer to becoming the eleventh Oscar-nominated film from Israel.

Films that have tackled the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often from a very critical perspective, have had success, with both The Gatekeepers and Five Broken Cameras earning bids for Best Documentary in 2012. While this film doesn’t dig quite as much into the conflict and instead offers a thought-provoking look at how it affects those involved, it’s still likely to garner votes from those who appreciate Maoz’s willingness to think critically about his country. It’s hardly a lock considering its competition, which includes Sweden’s The Square, Germany’s In the Fade, and Chile’s A Fantastic Woman, but Foxtrot may just make the cut.

Foxtrot is slated for release in the United States on March 2nd, 2018.

Still courtesy Sony Pictures

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Let’s be plain: there are not many good Chanukah movies. For the children, there is the Rugrats Chanukah special. For the adults… It’s A Wonderful Life? (One can only imagine a restless Jewish station manager conspiring to schedule as the yearly Christmas viewing a movie that is 98% human misery and only 2% Christmas.) However, blessed is the Disney Channel, for from this unlikely place came one of our only modern Chanukah classics (the other, of course, being The Hebrew Hammer in all its exploitation glory), Full-Court Miracle.

Inspired partly by the true story of ex-Sixer Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, who coached the girls of Akiba Hebrew Academy so his son (Kobe—you might have heard of him) could play basketball at nearby Lower Merion High, and partly by the real-life Lamont Carr, 2003’s Full-Court Miracle tells a fable of five Philly day school kids and their quest to win a local basketball tournament. There’s T.J., whose temper can only be cooled by his passion for Rebecca Bloomberg; Joker, mouthy and sardonic; Ben, the fat one; Stick, a leggy nice Jewish boy who is clearly the MVP of the movie (he’s the first to dream up that their new coach is Judah Maccabee, is endearingly bookish, and even scores the winning points with his hook shot); and Alex “Schlotz” Schlotzky, our pint-sized, basketball-obsessed hero.

When Schlotz is tired of losing to a team of the most obviously villainous opponents since the 80s, he stumbles upon a former college basketball star, Lamont Carr, who the boys believe to be a reincarnated Judah Maccabee (a classic, I know). A series of obstacles ensue and are overcome, and along the way we all learn the true meaning of Chanukah.

It’s really a miracle that this movie exists at all. Nothing else stands like it in the canon of Disney Channel Original Movies, a staple of many childhoods, with a new movie featuring snowboarding or surfing or motorbiking teens each month. (Sadly for kids today, these are released with much less frequency.)

In Full Court Miracle, there are menorahs on every surface, so you know these characters are really Jewish. The sports-fanatic rabbi has a running joke asking “is there something on your mind beside a yarmulke?” There are explanations of chukim (Lamont responds to the idea with a saying of his grandmother’s about how if we knew everything God knew, we would be God ourselves). There is a moment of tension when, at the Shabbos table, Lamont asks for a glass of milk with his chopped liver—even though, of course, he just ate chopped liver with his gefilte fish. There is a Dreidel, Dreidel rap remix. (I don’t think it can be overstated how much of classic this movie is.)

On the other hand, it’s unbelievable no one made this movie before. Chanukah really is the ultimate sports movie, if you consider sports movies at their hearts to be underdog stories. Who has ever been more underdog than the Maccabees? (Think of how many Jewish sports organizations are somehow Maccabee-derived.) Full-Court Miracle merely mashes up the genres to create the optimal version of the Chanukah story. Instead of the Syrian-Greeks, we have the Warriors—yes, the Warriors—led by the sneering Tyler, who is so evil he calls a timeout to end the final game, and his over-the-top coach, who is begging for a mustache to twirl. Instead of Judah, there is an ex-ballplayer with bad knees who lives in a van down by the river. (License plate: JM 165.) Instead of the hills of Judea, there is a facsimile Philadelphia. And the climax of the movie models both miracles of Chanukah when a bunch of Jewish kids succeed where they are not supposed to by outlasting their rivals and a backup generator overextending its fuel supply.

Of course, this idea makes up the DNA of most Jewish sports movies: when the world isn’t a level playing field, let the playing field level the world.  Even Ernest Hemingway noted it, in his more-than-vaguely anti-Semitic portrait of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton… He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

Consider School Ties, where the protagonist is a Jewish quarterback in an anti-Semitic 50s boarding school, who bests his detractors in the end zone. Consider Chariots of Fire, where the protagonist is a Jewish runner in an anti-Semitic 20s university, who bests his detractors on the track. Consider Race, where in the midst of Jesse Owens’ story, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller cheesily flash their Star of David necklaces in the faces of Nazi guards. Each feels freakish and undermined, and so responds with feats of greatness, avenging themselves and their people in an arena where disadvantages can be surmounted.

To reflect inward a moment, Full-Court Miracle feels like a movie that was designed almost specifically for me: Jews, sports, loving shots of the Philly skyline, Allen Iverson jerseys. But I can sympathize with Schlotz and his Lions even more because my alma mater once cooked up an experiment as to whether or not a Jewish day school could front a competitive tackle football team. There were even pep rallies and cheerleaders. (My school sport was geography, and no, we did not have pep rallies or cheerleaders.) It went about as well as could be expected, but we kept the orthopedic surgeons sharp that season.

The lesson here is not in the failure, but in what makes Full-Court Miracle such a universal movie: it is ultimately about dreams. Dreams we have and dreams we shouldn’t have, dreams we reach for even though we’re told we can’t accomplish them and dreams that change as we change. Maybe a yeshiva boy shouldn’t dream of playing in the NBA, but neither was Judah Maccabee expected to liberate his people. Which is why this is the Chanukah classic we all deserve—because in the face of insurmountable odds, what is really to fail is to never try at all. (And because of the Dreidel, Dreidel rap remix. Of course.)

Image via YouTube

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Imagine a bunch of angry Jewish men in the same place, at the same time. Is it a daily morning minyan at a dying Conservative synagogue? Or is it a Noah Baumbach film? Yep, it’s the second one. The trailer is just out for The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), the writer-director’s latest project, fresh off of Cannes.

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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What does a movie about sex-crazed, abusive nuns featuring a slew of big-name celebrities have to do with Judaism? Not much on the surface, but it should come as no surprise that proper Hollywood Catholic sex comedy wouldn’t be complete without its share of Jews.

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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The true story of Antonina Zabinski and her husband Jan, who helped save many Jews during the Holocaust by sheltering them in their zoo in Warsaw, is currently playing in theaters across the country as The Zookeeper’s Wife. Jewcy had the opportunity to pose some questions about the experience of bringing this film to the big screen to actor Daniel Brühl, who plays German zoologist Lutz Heck, and screenwriter Angela Workman, who adapted Diane Ackerman’s 2007 book.

Jewcy: What originally drew you to this project?

Daniel: First of all, I was fascinated by the story of this very courageous Polish couple who saved so many lives and risked everything in order to do so. My character was a famous scientist at the time who had this crazy vision and idea of recreating and rebreeding extinct animals. He’s a charming smart guy at the beginning, the likable man, and throughout the story is becoming a very different man, quite an evil character. That was an interesting journey, and an interesting arc.

Angela: I was drawn to the project because, as the daughter of Jewish immigrants, whose parents were refugees from Eastern Europe, I felt that writing a film about this subject might honor them. Diane Ackerman’s book is so detailed and colorful that it sparked cinematic images in my head. I felt I could see all the images I needed to make a film. I loved the themes about the natural world: animal nature, animal instincts, and who are the beasts, really?

I loved the idea that nature survived a despot. That this shy, self-effacing woman, Antonina Zabinska, with her singular instincts to protect animals), essentially faced off against Adolf Hitler in his attempts to exterminate the “Jewish animal.” And she saved nearly every person who hid in her zoo. Hitler tried to control nature, he tried to define and perfect the human animal. But he couldn’t control nature, in the end. He lost the war, he died. He took many people with him, we know that, of course. But he didn’t take us all. The Zabinski family, a family of zookeepers, defeated a despot. I loved that idea.

Jewcy: How different is the movie in the end from the book it’s based on?

Angela: The book has been called a novel, but it’s not a novel, it’s nonfiction. It’s stuffed to the gills with Diane’s years of research — she has a very curious mind, she researches everything, and everything went into her book. I had to leave most of that out. I had to find a three-act structure, a very firm storyline, focus, and characterizations. I had to figure out how to move time forward through all the events of the entire second world war. The film is quite different than the book.

Jewcy: What makes this is a story about the zookeeper’s wife rather than about the zookeeper or both of them?

Angela: The story is focused on the zookeeper’s wife simply because that’s Diane’s focus, and that was the focus we chose for a point of view. Most of the film’s focus is on Antonina, although we do see her husband, Jan, in his own personal fight with the underground army. But we’ve seen those male-driven war stories before. We’ve never seen a film story like Antonina’s before.

Jewcy: Can you talk about how the zoo setting enhances or defines this story?

Angela: The zoo setting is everything. It’s what drew all of us, who decided to make a film from the book, into the story to begin with. The film almost entirely takes place inside the zoo, except for scenes in the Warsaw ghetto, and some in Lutz Heck’s flat in Warsaw. The first part of the film establishes the zoo with its animal life (non-human) — eventually the zoo is bombed. Then the Zabinskis create a secret sanctuary for the human animal. The zoo is a metaphor for the whole story.

Jewcy: What was it like working with the animals on set? Can you share any memorable stories?

Daniel: I was a bit annoyed that Jessica [Chastain] was such an incredible animal whisperer – I don’t know how she did it. All of the animals just loved her. They wouldn’t listen to me that well. The elephant was very smart – it took him just a couple of minutes to understand what we wanted. I think he wanted the lunch break as much as we wanted it. There were other animals that Jessica had to deal with, and I was quite impressed because we were dealing with wild animals, which are unpredictable and dangerous, but she was fearless.

Jewcy: When we first meet Lutz, he is an enthusiastic German zoologist, and the next time we see him he is a Nazi official coldly commanding the execution of all the animals because they won’t survive the winter. Did he really change, or is he still an animal lover at heart?

Daniel: He does change, and that was another interesting aspect. That’s one of the very crucial questions for every German, the question of guilt. What would I have done in a situation like this? You can see a man who has probably had other ideals and other human values before. By being given the power of the Nazi regime and supported by guys who are willing to fulfill all his professional dreams, he plays with that power and changes. Giving up his human values was something that interested me, to play that twist. It was also important to keep the balance of never losing his humanity entirely.

Jewcy: Can you talk about working with Jessica and with director Niki Caro? What was it like on set?

Daniel: Niki was very focused and well-prepared, and she had a very clear vision. I think that, as a female director, she had much more authority than most of the male directors I’ve worked with. She was tough and courageous. She wanted the real thing, not CGI, for all of the animals. Maybe because she’s from New Zealand, I can feel that she’s very connected to nature and wanted it to be real and authentic. As we all know, shooting with children and animals can become a nightmare, but it was quite impressive that she always kept her cool. I never saw her becoming nervous or angry.

Jessica is a wonderful actress. I was her biggest fan beforehand and I’m an even bigger fan now. It was such a psychologically demanding part for her, with a lot of emotions and crying involved. I was impressed to see that, off-camera, she would give you as an actor just the same amount of energy.

Jewcy: You played a Nazi hunting for traitors in Alone in Berlin, and you’re well-known for your part as a Nazi film star in Inglourious Basterds. Do you ever feel like you just want to play the good guy in a movie about Nazis?

Daniel: I’ve played the good guy for many, many years, and I’ve become bored of it. With these parts, they are never the cliché, evil Nazi part that you can see in so many other films. In Alone in Berlin, for instance, I’m not a Nazi; I’m a police inspector who has been working a long time before the Nazis came to power, but he’s intimidated by them and is part of the Gestapo. It’s clear in the film that he hates them and he’s an old-school police investigator who’s not part of the Nazi regime.

In Inglourious Basterds, it’s also about a guy who by accident becomes a war hero, and he’s actually the only likable German Nazi guy in the film, at first at least. In this case, I saw it more as a scientist who is seduced by the Nazi ideology. The uniform that he’s wearing wasn’t the most important aspects of the part; he’s a human being who is very ambitious professionally losing his humanity as he gets power.

Jewcy: What was the most challenging part of adapting this story, and what was the greatest opportunity?

Angela: The most challenging aspect of the adaptation is that it really isn’t an adaptation; this is a book of nonfiction, it is heavy with facts and statistics. I needed to turn the story into a dramatic narrative, a story about a six year war that could be told in two hours. I had to leave many, many things out, delicious, colorful, sometimes painful things. And even then, I wrote a very long and very developed screenplay that turned out to be too expensive and big to shoot. It was painful to have to cut, and then it was edited further. The opportunity, though, to tell a female-driven story about zookeepers, animal lovers, who turn their attention to the human animal during the atrocity of the Holocaust, was a great gift for me. I feel grateful to have been able to do it.

Image courtesy of Focus Features

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