Max Minsky and Me

In the world of Jewish film, an often serious and mature genre, it’s rather rare to come across fun, gentle, family-oriented comedies—so imagine our delight to find Max Minsky and Me, a little gem of a story set, of all places, in modern Berlin. Nelly Sue Edelmeister is a supersmart, rail-thin 12-year-old whose twin obsessions are astronomy and her distant heartthrob (and fellow stargazer), young Edouard, Prince of Luxembourg. Nelly lives in Berlin with her German Christian dad and American Jewish mom, who is very eager for Nelly to crack down on her bat mitzvah studies. Nelly doesn’t take much interest in them, and has even less patience for the very unbookish concerns of her schoolmates, whose lives center on the girls’ basketball team. But when Nelly learns that those who make the basketball team will go to a tournament in Luxembourg hosted by her favorite prince, she negotiates a deal with a 15-year-old neighbor, Max: she’ll do his homework for him if he coaches her to become a clutch basketball player. Thus begins the delicate and unlikely friendship between gawky Nelly and reluctant Max, brought charmingly to life by Zoe Moore and Emil Reinke. The film’s glimpses of today’s Jewish Berlin—Nelly’s gossipy great-aunt, an overearnest rabbi, an insecure mother—are handled with an easy nonchalance, aided by Holly-Jane Rahlens’s jaunty script, full of sharply observed adolescent angst laced with the occasional cosmic fantasy taking us into the outer spaces of Nelly’s vivid imagination.

From 2008 Testival: Director, Germany Anna Justice was born in Muenster. After traveling to Los Angeles to complete her education as a translator, she remained there for five years and gained first experience in the film business. She then studied Filmmaking at the German Film & Television Academy Berlin (dffb) and attended Screenwriting courses with Frank Daniel (University of Southern California) and Don Bohlinger (dffb). A selection of her films includes: the shorts Lupino Brothers, Meryems Arbeit, and Tanz in Pankow, and the features Tut mir leid wegen gestern, Der Sommer mit Boiler, Ich liebe das Leben, Noch einmal lieben, and Max Minsky and Me (Max Minsky und ich).