Casting

From 1994 to 1998, for 'Madame Jacques sur la Croisette' and 'Voyages', his two fiction films, Emmanuel Finkiel organised a 'wild' casting of non-professionals in the French Ashkenazi community. This was the advertisement: 'Yiddish-speaking men and women between 65 and 90 required for fiction shooting.' We follow an abundant mosaic of faces and personalities through interviews and acting tests. Everyone appropriates the text, says the dialogues with his own accent, comments, digresses, tells his life, nourishes the character with his own experience. Last owners of a unique wit, accent and destiny, for ever linked to Yiddish, childhood language, uncertain and fragile bastion against oblivion. Endowed with irrepressible life energy and indestructible humour, some of them turn out to be wonderful actors. Emmanuel Finkiel chose to make a documentary from those individual interviews and those screen tests where people's real-life and the fiction of characters constantly mingle, according to more or less failing memories, between experience and representation.