Succot-themed films are few and far between, but this year we have one to look forward to. Where Life Begins is a moving, thought-provoking drama set on an etrog farm in Calabria, southern Italy. It’s the impressive feature directorial debut of the Cesar-winning French actor Stéphane Freiss, and it will feature at next month’s UK Jewish Film Festival.
The film is a tender, visually sumptuous artistic triumph. It is also, for Freiss, the outcome of a years-long personal journey wrestling with the confusing legacy of his past in order to bring what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it, into focus.
The film’s plot centres on Esther (Lou de Laâge), the 25-year-old daughter of a rabbi, who is alreading chafing against the demands of strictly Orthodox Judaism when her family arrives at the farm of Elio (Riccardo Scamarcio), a non-Jewish Italian farmer, for the annual etrog harvest.
Elio has a comfortable life but, burdened by family tradition and loyalty to his late father’s wishes, is also not living the one he wants. He and Esther form a bond that could change both their lives.
Freiss did not want to make a “Jewish film” — he insists Where Life Begins isn’t one — and setting the film in Italy, where it was easier to engineer a meeting between a Jew and a Christian within a shared event, made it possible to hone his real theme: freedom.
“It’s a film, above all, on freedom, and our capacity to liberate ourselves from [in this case] the weight of this very heavy Jewish Orthodox legacy,” he says. “In my opinion, this is the most difficult thing, just to get free of the weight you have on your shoulders; but not all of it, just the heavy part, the useless part, the part which belongs to the wrong part of the legacy.
“But it takes a lot of courage, a lot of force, a lot of conviction. I want to think that in every life there is an opportunity to get free of our decisions and, above all, of what we received from our traditions and our family. This is more or less what I wanted to write.”
When the film begins, Esther is writing a letter to her father, to whom she feels unable to speak openly, in which she reminds him that he taught her to follow her truth. She now realises that while his truth is black and white, hers is colour. The film is Freiss’s similar message to his mother, Elena Sperling, who died while it was being edited.
“I was so, so sad,” he says, “because I really wanted her to see it because it was my answer to our incapacity to communicate.”
Silence around certain subjects was always a part of Freiss’s upbringing. His paternal grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz, but was rarely mentioned. “My father kept this inside of him very deeply. It was such a wound,” he says. “And so we never talked at home about this.”
Like his father, Freiss’s mother was a hidden child during the war, and like him was not at all religious.
“So, I grew up in a very, I would say, un-Jewish family. We celebrated Christmas and I never heard about Judaism till I was 12.”
Religion suddenly crashed into his life after his parents separated and his mother became involved “very deep in the Lubavitch organisation”. She eventually moved to Kfar Chabad, “the most religious moshav in Israel,” says Freiss. For him and his brother, the change was “very hard, very surprising, and very new. And we were not prepared for that.”
Today, he understands that she was likely looking for somewhere she felt “protected and loved”, “because she was very sad after the separation with my father, and because of her childhood. The accumulation of painful things probably created the need of being welcomed in another community.”
In the film, Esther’s desire to escape expresses in part Freiss’ confusion over why a woman would choose to adopt a way of life that dictates her daily routine, how she sees her body, the clothes she wears, her interactions with men, and, for the digital generation, even her access to the internet.
It also reflects where Freiss was at the beginning of the process of thinking about the film. His parents’ extreme positions on Judaism meant that for a long time, he believed there were only two options for a Jew:
“One was living like my father, refusing completely the religion and talking about Judaism; and the other was living like my mother, completely 100 per cent and more living in this Orthodoxy, and I couldn’t find my place in the middle of that.”
Freiss cannot remember when he decided to start writing Where Life Begins, but recalls wanting to explore making more of his own movies after enjoying success with a short film, It Is Miracul’house, in 2011.
“I moved with it for two or three years all over the world, and it was such a great experience and such a lot of emotions. It gave me the confirmation that it was the moment for me.”
He reduced his acting work to “the things I had to accept for earning my living”, he says, to give himself more time to concentrate on directing and writing, “because I felt that deeply inside of me, I had so many things confused, but which were ready to be written and filmed.”
At the same time, he realised that it was not something that could be done quickly; that for a first draft, he says, using a very French metaphor, you “need the right wine from the grape”.
New vintages do not usually take a decade to develop.
But then it is unlikely that Freiss foresaw himself wasting two years working with a producer who turned out to be the wrong fit for the project; taking years of writing; experiencing ongoing confusion about how to approach the story; and fruitlessly searching for a replacement producer.
However, if any of this was frustrating, the time it gave for the work to mature ultimately paid off.
“I’m happy that it took so long. Although maybe this time it was too long,” he laughs.
He was struggling until a few years ago, when he discovered the tradition of Jews going to Calibria, where local myth has it Moses sent messengers for the same reason, to collect etrogs. “I thought, ‘Now it’s the time to write the story.’”
To write the script, he needed to be able to stop judging his parents, he says, and this became possible when he started meeting and listening to people from the “liberal world”, who helped him to “open my eyes and realise that there were thousands of other options”.
These included groups such as Hillel, in Jerusalem, who “welcome people coming from Orthodox families who wanted to get out of this life”, and France’s trailblazing female rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, with whom he now has a close friendship.
“I share 100 per cent her way of being Jewish today: her modernity, her engagement in the feminist movement, her way to make Judaism possible for everybody, and not only for people who have a certain knowledge of Judaism.
"She tries to put the woman at the right place and to move this patriarchal vision of the relationship between men and women in the Bible. And the film talks about this too, of course.”
Her openness contrasts with the Lubavitch Jews he met at Kraf Chabad. They were “very friendly, very sweet”, which inspired how he portrayed Esther’s father in Where Life Begins.
“I didn’t want to make him a caricature,” he says, “but at the end they always think the truth is on their side. They listen to you, but they will convince you that the truth is somewhere else. This is what I regret and reproach the very Orthodox people for: they cannot listen to you.”
His mother therefore became a “very important” influence on the script, says Freiss, “because I couldn’t talk to her. As soon as I started a conversation about something other than Judaism, it was empty and she had nothing to say.
“Everything had to turn around to the topic of Judaism.”
Knowing that the film is a message to a mother who would never hear it, from a son wanting to be heard, and being denied that by religious orthodoxy and death lends Where Life Begins a profoundly heartbreaking emotional subtext. It is far from just another “flight from Orthodoxy” story.
Farmer Elio’s warm relationship with Esther’s family, the Zelniks, accurately portrays the close ties that Freiss witnessed during a research trip.
“I was very surprised by the fact that even if they [the farmers] don’t earn a lot of money working on this, they keep on having a very tight relationship with the Jews who come, generation after generation.
"So, there is something very special, and I will say quite religious, between those people who are not Jewish, because there is a kind of respect and, what I say in the film, admiration, to their loyalty, and towards the Jews’ way of practising.”
Freiss “doesn’t want to offend anybody [with the film]. It was not my will,” he says.
“I didn’t want to say the truth is on this side or on this one. Maybe Esther is making the wrong choice. We never know. And this is very respectable for me. The thing is, we have to take charge of our lives, to make a decision at a certain moment. That is the topic.”
The UK Jewish Film Festival 2022 takes place in cinemas nationwide from November 10 to 20. When Life Begins is the closing gala on November 20. ukjewishfilm.org
