Although Noé Debré, one of the guests of honor at the 27th Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival, which runs until August 27 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, looks young enough to blend in with the students who are running the festival, he is one of the most successful writer/directors in France.
Debré, who is actually 39, was one of several screenwriters on Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and he has one of the most interesting and varied careers in Europe, moving back and forth between movies and television, comedy and drama.
In the last few years, he has gone all in on embracing his French-Jewish identity and created the HBO series Reformed, about a female Jewish rabbi in France, which was released this year. In 2024, he directed his first feature film, A Nice Jewish Boy, the story of a young man and his mother who are among the last Jews to move out of their neighborhood in a largely Muslim Paris suburb.
Talking about his work
It might sound as if he would have had a hard time with each of these projects, but to hear Debré tell it, it’s been much easier than you might imagine. “It’s been a pleasant ride,” he said, speaking about Reformed, which he co-created with Benjamin Charbit. The series, which is loosely based on the memoir Living with Our Dead by Delphine Horvilleur, the third female rabbi to be ordained in France, has been an unlikely hit in France and the US. Its lead actress, Elsa Guedj, won the best actress award in the French Competition at Series Mania this year. Debré describes this funny, touching, and irreverent series as “BeTipul [the Israeli series about a therapist adapted around the world as In Treatment or In Therapy] meets Curb Your Enthusiasm with a female rabbi.”
While Horvilleur’s bestselling memoir focuses on dealing with death, Debré said he chose to focus on many other issues as well. “We really wrote the episodes in dialogue with Delphine,” he said, who was able to help them with anecdotes from her life as a rabbi.
“I wondered whether people who aren’t Jewish were going to be able to connect with it,” he said, but clearly, they have. He believes that the series has struck a chord with so many because, “It deals with banal crises of middle-class lives” that people consult their rabbi about. These include a new mother whose non-Jewish partner doesn’t want their baby to be circumcised, and a boy who refuses to go through with his bar mitzvah because he’s worried about climate change.
He is curious to see how viewers will respond in Israel when the series is shown here, since Reform Judaism is not nearly as influential here as it is abroad.
“I think in France we’ve been steadily trying for centuries to find a middle way” between a totally secular and religiously observant lifestyle. He grew up in a diverse Jewish community in Strasbourg, where the series is set, the son of an Ashkenazi father and a Mizrahi mother, with grandparents who survived the Holocaust in different ways. “I went to Jewish school in primary school then I went to public school for high school,” he said, leaving him with a religiously mixed group of friends.
Debré's professional journey
Debré was inspired to go into screenwriting when he watched The Big Lebowski on television with his father when he was 15. “I thought, okay, that’s the first time that doing that kind of black comedy crossed my mind,” he said, adding that he had always been a cinephile growing up, and still is. When he noticed a poster on the wall of the room at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque where we were speaking for the 1968 movie Death Laid an Egg, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gina Lollobrigida, he immediately looked it up.
He broke into the movie business by convincing Thomas Bidegain, an experienced screenwriter who often works with Jacques Audiard and who co-wrote Emilia Perez, to take him on as an apprentice. Soon, Debré was getting work both on his own and with his mentor, including on Audiard’s Dheepan, a gripping look at a Sri Lankan family seeking asylum in Europe, just five years after he started working in the industry. He has since written many critically acclaimed and popular films, including Michael Hazanavicius’s fairy-tale story, The Lost Prince, starring Omar Sy, and Yvan Attal’s thought-provoking Le Brio.
Several years ago, he co-wrote a high-profile movie mostly in English, Stillwater, for Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), with the director, Bidegain, and Marcus Hinchey, about an oil-rig worker (Matt Damon) who goes to Marseille to help his wrongly imprisoned daughter (Abigail Breslin). To better understand the working-class hero, he read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, so he could figure out why people supported Donald Trump. “I had to climb the wall of empathy,” he said.
He also created such television series as Parlement, a satire about a young assistant at the European Parliament in Brussels, and made his own short films, including A Progressive Girl, about a yeshiva student and a stripper.
Embracing his Jewish identity
Last year, his feature-film directing debut, A Nice Jewish Boy, was released in France to positive reviews. Asked why he decided to go all-in on embracing his Jewish identity on film, he laughed and said that he chose to do it after seeing Masel Tov Cocktail, a short film by Arkadij Khaet and Mickey Paatzsch about a Russian-Jewish teen in Germany in a housing project, which made him realize, “It’s amazing that a movie about Jews from the suburbs and what’s been happening for 20 years in France has not been made.”
The movie, the French title of which is Le Derniers de Juifs, is about Ruben Bellisha (Michael Zindel), a young Jewish man who lives with his mother (Agnès Jaoui) in an increasingly Muslim Paris suburb, where the synagogue has closed and the last kosher grocery is about to be shut down. After a break-in in which antisemitic graffiti is scrawled on their wall, they face a dilemma – do they leave or stay put? Given the news about rising antisemitism in France, you might be surprised to learn that it’s mostly a comedy.
He credits Zindel, who also starred in his short A Progressive Girl, for enabling him to bring out the comedy in this story. “I believed that if it’s Michael who plays the lead, I can do it in a way that brings me to a place of comedy and poetry that’s going to allow me to not make it too topical.”
He said that doing research and meeting with people from communities like the one depicted in the film also helped him with the mix of comedy and drama he wanted. “It’s always more interesting to be honest. The stories people tell you, they are always more interesting, surprising, weird, and moving than what you make up... I knew I didn’t want to invent anything, especially about antisemitism.”
His research showed him that while the media focus on antisemitic incidents, there is a great deal of peaceful coexistence in these neighborhoods. There is a scene in the film where elderly Muslim women bring food to their Jewish neighbors after a death that many from similar neighborhoods who saw the film said they could relate to.
“Everybody told me, ‘Oh, that happened to me, you know, my mother died and the neighbors, they came and they gave me food,’ and they told me they were very moved.... What’s interesting is that when you show it in more posh neighborhoods, people are like, ‘But isn’t your film a bit naïve, isn’t it a little bit idealized?’ This remark always comes from people who don’t live in a place like this.”
Following the October 7 massacre, Debré’s leading lady, Agnès Jaoui, spoke out about the attack in France because she lost two relatives, autistic teenager Noya Dan and her grandmother, Carmela Dan, who were murdered by Hamas, while three of her relatives, Ofer Kalderon and his children, Sahar and Erez, were kidnapped.
But Debré said that he had not personally faced antisemitism since the war in Gaza started, either in the film industry or in the diverse Parisian neighborhood where he lives. He said that the fact that he has no social-media presence may have played a part.
“It really helped with not getting harassed by random people who want to fight you from behind the screen, which creates so much of the tension,” he said, then headed out into the Tel Aviv sun to be photographed with the festival staff.