Director Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, the fast-paced crime thriller “Caught Stealing,” featured Carol Kane and Liev Schreiber as Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. There was even a dinner scene with homemade matzah ball soup.
Aronofsky, who is Jewish, has touched on Jewish themes in his work before, most memorably in his cult-classic debut “Pi.” Recently, he’s also been producing projects with Jewish themes, including the documentaries “Shabbat Queen” and “Holding Liat,” and, thrillingly, an upcoming series about Eastern European Jewry from the makers of “Shtisel,” and starring Michael Aloni (“Shtisel,” “We Were the Lucky Ones,” “Scenes from a Marriage”).
The show, a thriller called “Lost Paradise,” which has been in the works for over half a decade, was written by “Shtisel” co-writer and “Kugel” writer Yehonatan Indursky, and is directed by Alon Zingman, the show’s director, who has since gained acclaim for working on shows like “The Conductor,” “Red Skies” and “Manayek.”
Michael Aloni, who also starred in the Jewish period drama “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem,” posted pictures from the set of “Lost Paradise” back in mid-December.
“How can I put down in words these last four months of this heart warming experience of filming LOST PARADISE. Beautiful ppl beautiful moments. This is only part 1 as there are too many people and too many moments. Feeling blessed,” he wrote, as he shared a carousel of pictures from the filming of the show.
In the pictures, he tagged people from the cast and crew and people who visited the set, including the young Israeli actor Jonathan Bar Or, British-Israeli TV star Iddo Goldberg (“Diary of a Call Girl,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Snow Piercer), Belgian actress Clara Cleymans and Belgian actor and musician Pieter Embrechts and Israeli actress and model Agam Rudberg.
Cinematographer Rotem Yaron also posted pictures from the period thriller on his Instagram from the show’s set in Bucharest, Romania.
The show’s co-producer, Alain Goldman, spoke to Variety about it back in April of last year. He shared the show, which apparently started filming in September, will have dialogue in Yiddish, Hebrew and English, and will start off in Lithuania in 1860, charting the lives of Ashkenazi Jews there. Darren Aronofsky is the show’s executive producer, Goldman is co-producing with Patrick Wachsberger. It is backed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Alcon Media Group and the Gesher Film Fund, and was commissioned by France’s Canal+.
“It aims to tell the story of the Ashkenazi people from the mid-19th century to, I hope, the present day. The first season ends in 1880, just before a pogrom that led to the exodus of a large part of the community, but unfortunately not everyone,” Goldman told Variety. “If everyone had left, they would still be alive today, either in America or Israel.”
Calling the show “Lost Paradise” is “a little ironic,” he shared, “because life was so hard where they lived, but they didn’t lose their desire to remain Jewish in almost an esoteric sense.”
The Jewish film producer said he hoped the show would allow viewers to “visualize what these communities were like and how they threatened no one, and that they became the target of all kinds of violence, as they are today, because suddenly, when the world is not doing very well, we become the answer to the world’s problems.”
Here’s hoping we can all watch this exciting and oh-so-relevant TV thriller soon.
