And action!
It's huge.
It's mind blowing.
I have to keep reminding myself that they're not real.
It's like a historical movie, actually, what we are doing here.
This is 90 percent of my filming experience, here?
Is like this.
Come over here to do a show set in Williamsburg,
to do it in Berlin, it kind of, you know, plays with my head.
A series in Yiddish, for me also, personally, I think it's a great thing.
Going to be dealing with a language that no one understands.
I mean, we're dealing with costumes and rituals no one understands.
But the essence of what's happening, that's universally understood.
This very beautiful and unique story
that shows kind of like, both worlds.
I don't think it's a story about the existence of God, or something.
It's more about...the right to have your voice.
And people like me never really had that opportunity.
We never saw ourselves reflected back in the stories being told
in popular culture.
So we didn't really know how to create our own stories.
I think this is the first show, ever, to accurately portray
the Hasidic community.
These are real people, and their experiences are very universal,
and very relatable.
When the community watches it, and there is somebody like me,
watches it, and sees, this girl lived exactly like she lives.
And, she was able to muster the courage to follow her dreams.
Maybe this girl can, too.
When I met Ann and Alexa, and I became friends with them,
I realized, if anybody is ever going to really be able to grasp
what the story is about,
and to really execute it in a way
that is going to have a positive cultural impact,
it's these women.
After I met Deborah, i read her book,
and I thought it was amazing.
I mean, I read it in one sitting. I couldn't put it down.
And then, she said:
"Well, why don't you make my book into a TV show?"
Anna and I wanted to make a show for a while,
in which we could work through a lot of the topics
we discuss a lot, especially about being Jewish in Germany.
To me, the story is about a young woman, who
is searching for herself,
and she is searching for her community in the world.
Esther is a 19 year old girl.
She was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
in the community called Satmar.
- Don't forget, Esty. He speaks first.
She grows up in a very religious neighborhood.
And, frees herself from an unhappy arranged marriage,
and flees to Berlin.
Her story is unique, and romantic.
We just felt it was so different, that somebody would leave
this very insular community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York,
and find their way here, out of choice.
From a very young age, she always felt very different.
She's always been told that she is very different,
because of the fact that she always has questions within her,
and she has that 'chutzpah,' you can say.
The Satmar Jews are a Hasidic community,
originally from the town of Sate Mar, in Hungary.
They are mostly descendants of Holocaust survivors, and
started by Holocaust survivors, in New York, after the war.
This kind of makes them a little bit different
than a lot of other Hasidic communities,
because they really developed what they were about, after the war.
It is founded by people who are struggling with the most immense trauma.
For the first generation,
I would say even for the first two generations,
this trauma was a very driving force
behind the ideological structures of this community.
The Satmar community is also special, in that Yiddish is their native language.
I think they can be credited, to some degree,
with keeping Yiddish alive.
- But why Berlin? - Think about it.
- What? - Her crazy mama lives in Berlin!
It was very important to us, to make changes in the present-day story,
from Deborah Feldman's real life.
Because she is a young woman, she is a public figure,
she is a public intellectual, and we wanted Esther's
Berlin life to be very different from real Deborah's Berlin life.
So, in a sense, the flasbacks are based on the book,
but the present-day story is entirely made up.
You have to go beyond cliche,
beyond our projection into what the life might be.