Casting

Between 1994 and 1998, Emmanuel Finkiel auditioned non-professional actors from the French Ashkenaz community for the production of Madame Jacques sur la Croisette and Voyages. The casting advert read: Looking for Yiddish-speaking men and women, aged between 65 and 90, to appear in a fiction film. From the first interviews through to the trial acting sessions, from the initial stumbling read-throughs up to the sometimes perfectly acted scenes, each masters their lines, lends their accent to infuse a touch of colour to the dialogues, makes comments, digresses, talks about their life, and enriches the character with their experience. Before long, real experience and the film’s fiction intermingle. This profuse mosaic of faces and figures that unfold before us traces a quite unique journey… a single story recounted by several voices. The mark this older generation leave today, with its everyday life, its vanishing culture and still apparent wounds. The final custodians of a singular turn of mind, an accent and destiny that remain forever linked to Yiddish, that childhood language which forms an unsure and fragile rampart against forgetting. With an astounding energy for life and an indestructible sense of humour, some of them prove to have an extraordinary talent as actors.