JTA – The real Mordechai Samael, in his late 70s, really didn’t want an iPhone in 2015.
The Holocaust survivor, who has lived in South Florida since 2004, didn’t see the need. His tapped flip phone worked fine. But his son Marvin insisted.
The one thing that helped Mordecai accept defeat: the ability to listen to the klezmer music of his youth, provided by an iPhone.
Marvin Semel said, “One day I got off the plane and I called my dad, and I could hear static.”
Soon Mordecai was going to a local store six times a week to learn iPhone.
Marvin said of the lessons, “This is where I see my father holding court, telling stories,” and I said, that’s it. It is a medium of telling the story in the form of a screenplay.”
Thus emerged an unusual comedy film that hits theaters this Friday, inspired by the life of first-time director Marvin Semel, centering on a Jewish family divided by a generational divide.
In the film – as in Semels’ real life – Marvin (played by Sean Astin) attempts to sell his cigar company while his father’s actions constantly get in the way and his mother (Carol Kane), who suffers from Alzheimer’s There is a disease, sometimes it goes astray.
“I had to tone it down for the film, because nobody would believe me if I actually printed the truth. He’s always getting himself into trouble,” Samael said of the real Mordecai, a retired plumber. , who is played onscreen by Tony and Emmy Award winner Judd Hirsch.
Sean Astin, right, plays Marvin Semmel in the new film ‘iMordecai. (Femor Productions via JTA)
At the same time, Marvin’s wife, who has just given birth to twins, is upset with him over the delay in the sale of the company and the family’s resulting cash crunch. Mordecai agrees to take iPhone lessons and befriends the instructor (Azia Diniya Hale), whom he calls “Einstein Nina”, someone with a surprising family background of her own.
Mordecai tells him some stories about his family’s escape from the Nazis when he was a child, showing photographs of his family before the war and noting that he cannot remember his mother’s face. Marvin Samael stated that these stories were more inspired by stories told by Mordecai’s brother, who was older than his own when the family fled. The family left Poland in 1939, when Mordechai was three and his older brother was six. They went first to the Soviet Union and eventually to Brooklyn.
Mordechai’s family was from Janow Podlaskie, a small town in Poland in the center of the region partitioned by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. Some flashback sequences are rendered in animation.
Marvin Semel sold his company, Drew Estate Cigars, in 2014. The film was mostly self-financed, with proceeds from cigar company sales, “all the way through distribution.” While Semal has always loved movies, even after watching movies like “Taxi Driver” and “Hair” when he was too young to do so – “My temple, growing up, was the movie theater , ” he said—he had never before set foot on a movie set—before the first day of filming for “Immordkai.”
Samael taught himself filmmaking by taking online courses through masterclasses from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Jodie Foster, and he even had the chance to meet over dinner with retired basketball star Ray Allen, who starred as a novice Spike Lee’s “He Got Game” appearance when he was in his early 20s. Allen’s advice was to spend some time on a film set to get a feel for things, but there was not much filming in South Florida at the time.
“iMordecai” was shot over 23 days in late 2019, meaning Samael filmed a film with a heavily-accented, old-world setting inspired by a relative of the filmmaker at least a year before Steven Spielberg Hirsch starred as a Jewish immigrant. “The Fabelmans.” Hirsch has been nominated for an Oscar for his role in that film, his first Academy Award nomination since “Ordinary People” more than 40 years ago.
Semel’s film, which features the city of Miami extensively, has been a hit in Florida so far. It had its world premiere at the Miami Jewish Film Festival in January 2022, where it won the audience award for Best Narrative Film.
“I think this film has the potential to impact and resonate with people of all ages,” said Igor Shteyrenberg, executive director of the festival.
Samal is taking the film on a tour that crisscrosses the Sunshine State this month, including 10 shows at The Villages, the world’s largest retirement community. The tour, in which the real Mordecai has been on stage multiple times, heads to New York’s Quad Cinema before a limited theatrical release on February 24 – also heavily in Florida. Samel said tour dates in markets such as Dallas, Phoenix and Chicago are up next before returning to Florida.
Perhaps the success with the older Florida crowd has to do with the universality of the film’s subject matter. Even famed investor Warren Buffett swapped his flip phone for the iPhone back in 2020, when he was nearly 90, even though he had bought several billion dollars in Apple stock by that time.
Yvette Miro, 99, who lives in Tamarack, Florida, said it is “hard to remember not having an iPhone” after getting one to replace her flip phone nearly 10 years ago. A Brooklyn native—she attended Eastern District High School with Mel Brooks, who was a few years younger—Miró has lived in Florida since 1999, and even at her age enjoys weekly Shabbat with her family. She continues to host dinners, which are attended by her nine grandchildren and more than 30 great-grandchildren.
But unlike Mordecai, instead of being bullied into getting an iPhone, he got one himself.
“I heard about it, I wanted it. I’m old, but I had to move with the times,” she said.
She now uses it for “everything… especially FaceTime, where I can see”. [the kids], I use it more than my regular phone.
