By Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf, other
Toronto filmmaker Naomi Jaye is set to produce Canada’s — and possibly North America’s — first Yiddish feature film in more than 70 years.
Jaye, 38, has spent the past four years scripting and developing her film The Pin.
It’s the story of an elderly, isolated shomer who comes face-to-face with his first love, Leah, when her body is brought to him in the morgue. A shomer stays with the body of a Jew who has died between the time of death and burial.
The event triggers a series of flashbacks to Lithuania during World War II, when the young couple spent their courtship on the run and hiding from the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads that killed thousands of Jews and others throughout German-occupied Europe.
Without giving too much of the story away — the film has not even been entirely cast yet — Leah’s re-entry into the shomer’s life all these years later allows him to fulfill a promise she made him swear to keep: To prick her hand with a pin to ensure she is truly dead before burial.
Jaye said the film, which is still in development, was inspired by her grandmother, who had an intense fear of being buried alive and made Jaye’s father promise to stick a pin in her hand after she died to ensure she was dead before being placed in a coffin.
“This story always fascinated me, because it required an act of true love that was also an act of violence,” Jaye wrote in the press kit for the film.
Jaye said the film would be a very “quiet” one, with minimal dialogue. But what dialogue there is will be mostly in Yiddish, the language the shomer and Leah would have spoken as young Jews in Lithuania.
There will be English subtitles.
“It wasn’t my intention to make a Yiddish film,” she said. “It was my intention to make a beautiful, poetic film. It’s a film that speaks to the larger issues of hatred and intolerance, about coming to terms with the past and making peace with it.”
The theme is a familiar one to Jaye, who said she’s always been drawn to stories about men who “have isolated themselves and are then forced to connect again.”
Asked why this is, Jaye laughed and responded she didn’t know. “It must say something about me, but I have no idea what.”
She said she’s always been a huge fan of intimate movies that depict “something of humanity” and wants to emulate that in her own filmmaking.
Jaye, who spends a lot of time in Seattle, said she grew up in a traditional Jewish home, but decided that organized religion wasn’t for her. She said when she turned 18 she rejected her Judaism, but that when she started making films in 1999, she discovered that all her projects were linked by a common thread: Jewish content.
“I have come to realize that my Jewishness is innate to who I am,” she wrote in the literature promoting The Pin. “It is a part of my genetic code, my emotional history, and as such, it forms a huge part of the images that swirl around my imagination and eventually become my films,”
Jaye won the Women in Film and Television Toronto’s 2009 Kodak New Vision Mentorship award.
That award — which provides the recipient with a $5,000 donation of film stock — and subsequent grants of $20,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and an Ontario Arts Council production grant for $39,000 have helped move production along.
For more information, visit www.thepinmovie.com.