(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- The Chosen One by Elazar Fine is one of several short films to be screened on the opening night of the 2023 New Jersey International Film Festival on Friday, June 2. It is a powerful film that follows Eli Eisenstein as he is thrown out of his Hasidic family home after impulsively shaving off his beard and sidelocks.
Eli finds refuge with his estranged, ex-religious aunt Shifra, but inner turmoil forces him to flee her apartment in the middle of the night. Stumbling through the streets in a fragile state of mind, Eli experiences a nightmarish transformation that leads him right back to where he started. Over the course of this one painful night, Eli will come to realize that it’s much easier to shave your beard than to shed who you are.
New Jersey Stage reached out to the Los Angeles based filmmaker to learn more about the film.
I love the film’s tag line, “It’s much easier to shave your beard than to shed who you are.” How did you use your own personal experience to create the struggle of the main character?
First things first, all credit for that excellent tagline goes to our producer Kale Davidoff. I'm terrible at the marketing side of things and could never have thought that up.
To answer your question -- while The Chosen One is not strictly autobiographical, it is very much based on my own emotional experience of leaving an insular Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in my late teens. About a year after dropping out of an all-boys yeshiva in upstate New York, I found myself living in a coed dormitory at UMass Amherst. The culture shock was crippling. I spent that year locked away in my dorm room, too scared to talk to anyone, catching up on all the movies I hadn't been allowed to watch growing up.
What I learned is that just because I had made the initial decision to leave my community didn't mean it was going to be easy to feel comfortable anywhere else. The secular world was incredibly foreign to me. I barely knew how to talk to people. It ended up taking a decade of trial-and-error for me to become anything close to functional in the outside world.
This is what The Chosen One is all about. At the top of the film, our main character (played by the amazing Luzer Twersky) takes the momentous step of shaving off his beard and sidelocks. But as much as he might think that this symbolic action will sever his connection to his community and propel him into a dream life in the secular world, he learns that it's not so simple. There's no shortcut. It will take him years to feel like he belongs anywhere else but home.
Can you give me an idea of just how big a step (doing something like shaving off one’s beard) is for someone in the Hasidic community?
Shaving off one's beard is just one of many, many things that someone in Eli's position could do to symbolize his dissatisfaction with the religious lifestyle. But in writing the film, it seemed to me that the iconography of someone shaving off the facial hair that so clearly marks him as an Orthodox Jew was the most cinematic way possible of portraying it. There's probably a subtler way to depict someone trying to sever ties. But it led to what the rest of the film is, so no regrets.
I thought it was a powerful scene when Efrayim was unable to even look at his aunt due to his upbringing and his panic trying to turn the television off or seeing the photo of the friends wearing swimsuits. In a short period of time, I felt you truly showed the walls between the two worlds. How challenging is it to create a short film about a subject like this which will largely be seen by people not of that world? To balance how much you need to show without bogging down the story?
Thanks for the kind words about the film, I'm very happy that the sequence in the aunt's house worked so well for you. In answer to your question, I always find it challenging to be as succinct as you need to be in short-subject filmmaking. The Chosen One in particular is structured very bizarrely for a short--it's almost got a full three-act-structure in and of itself. The production script for The Chosen One was overlong, and our first cut of the film was like 30 mins. We ended up with a 19 minute film, and I'd like to think it ultimately justifies its length, but is still longer than your average short at a festival.
That said, I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time at any point worrying about educating the audience about Hasidic culture. I had faith that even the most unfamiliar viewer could pick things up as they went along, and that even if they were left with specific unanswered questions about the faith/community, they would be able to follow along with the emotional storyline, which is all that really mattered to me.
“The Chosen One” will be screened on the opening night of the NJ International Film Festival. Will you be attending or taking part in a Q&A with the festival? It's pretty nice to be part of the opening night.
We're honored to be an opening night selection! I would love to be there. Unfortunately, I'm based in LA, and financial constraints make it difficult to fly out to the east coast. However, I might be flown in for an unrelated event at the end of May, in which case I will 100% make a point of being at NJIFF on opening night.
Any plans for the film following the festival circuit?
Yes, we've had conversations with a potential distributor. I also have my eyes on a couple streaming sites that do really wonderful short film curation.
Filmmake Elazar Fine discusses a scene with Mike Burstyn
Finally, tell me a little about yourself. How did you get into film? Was there a director or two that led to a love of filmmaking?
This is a long story. I'll try and keep it brief here. Growing up Ultra-Orthodox means very limited access to films or secular pop culture generally. But on the occasion that I was exposed to a movie here or there, I was extremely drawn to it. As I got older I was able to find more ways to get a hold of films, and would watch everything I could.
But I was really only aware of the kinds of films you might see on billboards or cereal boxes--major studio comedies or superhero movies. I didn't really know anything else existed. Until one day my neighbor invited me over and made me watch Pulp Fiction. That really changed the trajectory of my life. I didn't know movies could do any of that. It made me realize that someone was making all these complex decisions behind the scenes, from writing to camera placement to lighting etc etc etc. I then watched every Tarantino movie, followed by every Coen Brothers movie (my true heroes), every PTA movie, before branching into foreign film and classic film and more obscure indie film. At some point along the line I learned of the existence of "film school" and there was no turning back.
You didn't ask this, but the movie that inspired me most recently is a French film called The Five Devils by a director named Lea Mysius. The originality of it and the unique atmosphere it creates just absolutely knocked me out.
Any plans for the next film?
Yes! I'm getting much of The Chosen One cast and crew back together for a film which I'm describing as a Yiddish-language hostage-comedy-thriller. I just hope audiences don't have Yiddish-language hostage-comedy-thriller fatigue by the time we're ready to hit theaters.
The festival's opening night consists of short films ranging from 6 minutes to 19 minutes. The other films being screened on June 2nd include Falls Cry by Joshua Wann, Boxed by Alam Virk, Separation Anxiety by Corey Maloney, Bowling for Eva by Aelfie Oudghiri, A Spot for Frog by Evan Bode, and Resettlement: Chicago Story by Reina Higashitani. All of the films will be available online for 24 hours starting at midnight with an in-person screening at 7:00pm. Click here for information on the films or to purchase tickets.
