Slideshow
HESTER STREET
Co-presented by The Tenement Museum
U.S., 1975
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver
Starring Steven Keats, Carol Kane, Mel Howard
Approx. 90 min. DCP.
1896 New York, and Steven Keats’ Yankel transforms himself into the all-American, beardless “Jake,” acquiring a home-grown girlfriend along the way — and then his sheitel-wearing wife Carol Kane (Oscar nomination) shows up on his doorstep, straight from the shtetl … and cultures collide, even as Doris Roberts offers salty advice, and non-pro Mel Howard timidly yearns from the sidelines. Despite its shoestring budget, a strikingly authentic look at late 19th century LES life.
With support from the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film and The Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Films, donated by Leon Constantiner and Family.
Reviews
“Beyond all the details there is the magnificent performance of Carol Kane as Gitl…by the end of the picture she is a triumphant bonfire.”
– The New York Times
"Joan Micklin Silver boasts one of the best filmographies of any American director of the Seventies…[HESTER STREET] re-creates, with low-budget ingenuity, the nineteenth-century Jewish Lower East Side and deftly conceals a modern fantasy of liberation under a welter of social detail and a touching emotional restraint.”
– Dan Sallitt, The Village Voice