Esther Kahn

Esther grows up in the East End of nineteenth-century London, where the Jewish immigrants live, and works in her family's tailoring workshop. She speaks to nobody and says she feels nothing. One night she goes to the theatre and wants to learn what the people on the stage are doing. She decides to become an actress and leaves home. Arnaud Desplechin directed the film from a story by Arthur Symons, and it is the French director's first production in English. Summer Phoenix takes the lead, with Ian Holm as the old actor who teaches her. The telling does not present talent as a gift somebody is born with; Esther learns to act through suffering and repetition.