Primarily known as a documentarian, Jewish American director Eric Steel is finally dipping his toes into narrative filmmaking, and he’s chosen a story that could hardly be more Jewish.
His first feature, Minyan, is loosely based on a 2002 short story of the same name by Canadian author David Bezmozgis. The film is set in late 80s Brighton Beach near Brooklyn, New York amongst a small Orthodox Jewish Russian community. The film’s title comes, of course, from the quorum of 10 male adults required for communal worship.
A few days ago, I spoke to Steel, via Zoom, from his Long Island home to discuss the film and his own experiences of growing up in New York. He originally read Bezmozgis’s story nearly two decades ago, and its adaptation into a feature film became a real labour of love. “My first thought was to do it as a little short and my agent at the time was like, Short films, oh, that’s ridiculous, you’re making feature length documentaries, why would you go back and make a short? But I don’t know, I just was so in love with this story and that’s really the only way I know how to describe any project I take on or dive into, as it does feel very much like love. Like you’ve fallen, like, it’s sort of, not wholly in my control.”

ERIC STEEL

Eric Steel

Moving Bezmozgis’s narrative from Toronto to Brooklyn, Steel’s early work on the film was an arduous task in terms of understanding the ins and outs of these small pockets of Jewish life in New York. This was because, unlike his main protagonist David (Samuel H. Levine), he didn’t grow up in a close-knit Jewish community and had therefore a lot to catch up on.
“My family was incredibly assimilated, and I never really once went to the synagogue. I was not bar mitzvahed, I went to what we would call a very WASPy, preppy elementary school and boarding school.
“I can’t say that I had a particularly happy childhood. My parents were divorced, my brother died of cancer when he was 17 and my sister was killed by a drunk driver not too long after that. It wasn’t that I was a miserable child — I think I was a pretty happy, smart and well-adjusted child on some levels, but on others, I think the sense of grief and loss were pretty overwhelming and I think in some ways, that appears in David’s character. I mean, the story begins on the heels of his grandmother’s death, and death is pretty much the through line of the story.” Another sort of death was also the subject of with The Bridge, his 2006 documentary about the countless suicides committed each year from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
One especially impressive element of Minyan is its detailed, seemingly authentic portrayal of a small Russian community in 1980s Brighton Beach. Could this be his own way of reconnecting with the community that was so absent from his own early life? “I guess I would say that I must have on some level felt like I had missed having a Jewish education and Jewish upbringing. I love to do research, I love to study, I loved spending time with the old Jews in Toronto. I found the Russian Jews very entertaining and rich – their stories were great and I think the whole diaspora and displacement thing meant that they had recreated these communities elsewhere. I loved that. Then when we moved the story from Toronto to Brighton Beach, it was sort of the same thing all over again. I think Brighton Beach, to people who grew up in New York in the 80s, and the 90s, it’s almost like its own country. I mean, it’s like the next-to-last stop on the subway. So it’s about as far away from downtown New York as you can get.”

Minyan 02

Minyan

In the films David discovers his sexuality in a gay scene which was soon to be ravaged by the emerging AIDS epidemic of the time. I ask Steel his thoughts on the relative lack of big Hollywood films being made on the subject over the last four decades, save for notable exceptions such as Philadelphia, Longtime Companion and Angels in America.
“It’s a very painful piece of history. I think there is clearly a desire in LGBT life to be welcomed and accepted into the same structures that straight people live in, and I think, by and large, straight people didn’t feel AIDS. At least Europe, and America didn’t feel AIDS as a holocaust. I mean I think if it touched them, it touched them, there’s no denying it. But I think there was a sense that it didn’t have that reach.
“In the gay community, I think you have people who survived and it’s not necessarily a trauma that people want to reopen.”
Given his documentary background, I wonder if the experience of Minyan has changed his mind about working in narrative films?
“I love crafting stories, I think of myself as a storyteller. I had a couple of ideas, but one that I really have fallen in love with that is much more from parts of my own life, but there’s no framework yet. So it’s definitely a challenge.”
Another challenge is the continuing uncertainty that stems from the Covid pandemic.
“We used to say, ‘I’m going to the movies’. And now I think people expect movies to be delivered to them in their home. I think even the concept of Minyan, of needing the 10 people… if you couldn’t get 10 people in an auditorium, they weren’t going to show the movie. It wouldn’t last very long in a movie theatre if you couldn’t get 10 people to go.
“So, I think so much of that experience was about a shared journey and a shared incantation of some sort of magic spell or prayer.”