Director Benny Fredman talks about his movie about haredim, 'Home'

If the details in Benny Fredman’s latest movie, Home, the story of an ambitious young ultra-Orthodox man who opens a computer store in his neighborhood only to see it destroyed by religious thugs, ring true, that’s because it’s based quite closely on the director’s own experiences. 

The movie, which opened throughout Israel on Thursday, is fictionalized, Fredman said, but he lived the basic premise: He built a business in the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem, which was embraced by some haredim (ultra-Orthodox) but demonized by others, who harassed him and eventually burned the place to the ground.

The movie, which won Ophir Awards for its lead actor, Roy Nik, and for supporting actor Dror Keren, Fredman’s co-screenwriter, is an autobiographical film, he said. “The real story happened between 2006 and 2008. Everything that happens in the movie is real; it’s just concentrated. What really happened was more brutal, more violent, with more incidents, and it took place over a longer period of time.”

This is distressing to hear, because what happens in the movie is quite violent. “Since 2008, this kind of thing has spread to other parts of Jerusalem, not just Geula, and to Bnei Brak; it happens over and over, all the time. They burn a store down; everything goes on as usual.

“Great fun,” he said sarcastically.

This is despite the fact that the store sold computers and phones not connected to the Internet – with the permission of the local religious authorities – for people who wanted to write, many of them scholars, and for children to play games. These authorities exacted a steep price for their seal of approval, which was later challenged by zealots who harassed, threatened, and beat Fredman and burned his store.

This harassment had a deep and long-lasting effect on the young entrepreneur who he was back then: he is no longer haredi, and he became a filmmaker, making movies such as the action thriller Suicide in 2014 and the television series Suspect, also a thriller.

“It was very complicated to explain the different factions in the haredi community, their autonomous economy, the supervisors who pull down these high salaries for nothing,” he said. Then there are the extremists “who go by their feelings, and once they have the feeling that something is bad, there’s nothing you can do.” It would take another article to explain all the ways these extremists harassed Fredman and his family, even blocking the street where they lived so traffic could not pass on multiple occasions. “And you never know when it’s going to end.”

The romantic element of the film

But there is another side to this story, which is a key part of the film: his relationship with his wife, to whom he was married when he opened the store and to whom he is still married. “I was haredi, and she is still haredi. And what interested me when I made the film was, Why did we stay married after what happened?”

Much of the movie details their relationship, showing how his wife, called Nava in the movie and portrayed by Yarden Toussia-Cohen (the granddaughter of renowned Jerusalem lawyer Shlomo Toussia-Cohen, who even had a street named after him), is at first upset that her husband chooses to become a businessman rather than continuing full-time yeshiva study.

“When I went to make the movie, I had two choices: to make a movie about a guy who opens a store and gets into trouble...to tell a story about the reality in Geula, or to tell the story that I chose to tell, a much bigger story about a couple who lives together in the same house and discovers there is no connection between them – not in their dreams or aspirations, on the border of a marriage that is a complete mistake, and what they do with that, how they survive and manage to build a home, how they overcome their differences and stay together.”

This is very much the story of Fredman and his wife, who are celebrating their 21st year of marriage, “in spite of our differences, in spite of the fact that it seems unbelievable.” He worked to develop the movie for 10 years, and “the focus is a love story that develops in unexpected ways... They go through a whole Via Dolorosa to come to a much stronger, happier place.”

He and his wife have four children, two of whom are very observant and two of whom are less strict. Growing up, he enjoyed his studies in a Lithuanian yeshiva from an intellectual point of view. “But the atmosphere suffocated me. You feel you need to breathe,” he said.

As a young man, he was studying near the Jerusalem Cinematheque and started “escaping” to movies there. “I could study Gemara for 12 hours and then see Wild at Heart by David Lynch or Heavenly Creatures by Peter Jackson. I can recite [dialogue] from every movie from the ‘90s.” Growing up with his American grandmother, who would visit for holidays, he was also introduced to some children’s movies, he said.

AFTER THAT period of visiting the cinematheque, he opened his store, and the haredim who wanted it to close “really lynched me.” He ended up in the hospital, beaten within an inch of his life and wiped out economically. He also went through a social crisis. “I had been haredi; I didn’t know who I was anymore; I didn’t recognize myself... Even though I knew the people who did this to me were from an extremist faction and all that, I couldn’t be part of the community anymore.”

The one “who held my hand, who was at my side for all this, who supported me and helped through this difficult period” was his wife. He went on to study filmmaking and was also kept busy with the trials of those who beat him and burned his store, some of whom received prison sentences.

He met actor Dror Keren on the set of Suicide, his previous film, and when Keren saw Fredman’s wife on the set, he was curious, wondering how this secular director and his ultra-Orthodox wife managed to make their marriage work. When he heard the whole story, Keren was enthusiastic about turning it into a film, and, after a period of healing, Fredman was able to work with him on a draft of the script, which they fine-tuned over several years.

“We built it as a Western; the inspiration was High Noon but with a Jewish heart,” he said, referencing the classic 1952 Western by Fred Zinneman, starring Gary Cooper as the only honest man in town facing down the outlaws on his own – a movie that is widely seen as a metaphor for the red-baiting scandals of the 1950s.

But they worked very hard to keep it faithful to the reality of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox community, with his wife and one of the film’s producers, Shalom Eisenbach, who also comes from a religious background, and others on set working to make sure every detail was accurate.

They took particular care with the many outfits worn by the wife in the film, including her wigs, which show “the evolution of their relationship” as the main character encourages her to wear still-modest but more flattering and more feminine styles than she was used to. “When she commits to their relationship, it changes the way she sees herself too, and you can see it through the styles she wears.”

Looking back on what happened to him with his store, he feels that he “made the mistakes of a 25-year-old. Now, as a 43-year-old, I would tell myself, ‘Get up and leave; it’s not worth it to stay and get caught up in this.’ You learn to take the craziness of your dreams into perspective. You say, What am I endangering? What am I risking? Is it worth it? But when you’re young, you don’t say that. You’re all in. I built something back then; I didn’t want anyone to take it away.”

Despite of his pessimism about the fate of anyone who dares to open a store like his, he said firmly that Home is not an anti-haredi movie. “It’s not a movie where the haredim are bad and fight a secular figure who is good... In my movie, all the characters are haredi... There’s a real spectrum of haredi characters... Of course, the situation is very charged and tense now, with the proposed bill to draft haredim being discussed, but I don’t think this film will contribute toward anti-haredi feelings. Anyone who gives the movie a chance will understand the complexity of the issues.”