Over-the-Rhine will become a 1940s German town this fall for The Tailoress, a film based on true events about a young Jewish mother who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp by making fine fashion clothing for Nazi wives.
Director-writer-producer Ray Lenard Brown, a Georgia resident, decided to shoot here after meeting Cincinnati’s Jewish community.
“Those conversations changed me. They grounded the film in lived truth,” he says. “By the time I left Cincinnati, I had already made up my mind: This community needed to be part of the storytelling in a real, tangible way. And there is no better way to honor that commitment than to produce the film right there, in the city where their memory, legacy and community converge.”
Brown was invited to Greater Cincinnati by Kathleen “Kat” McEntee, a longtime Northern Kentucky-based talent manager and casting director. She helped cast his 83 Days film about a 14-year-old African American boy wrongly accused and executed for the murder of two white South Carolina girls in 1944.
“It has been my plan for five years to get him to shoot here; Cincinnati has a very vibrant Jewish community,” says McEntee, whose Katalyst clients have included Ciara Bravo (Wayne, Red Band Society, Big Time Rush), Galadriel Stineman (Sugarcreek Amish Mysteries, The Middle) and Margye Solomon (TV commercials for Bob Evans, First Financial, St. Elizabeth Hospital).
Stineman and Solomon will star as the younger and old Adela Berkowitz, a Jewish German mother who is separated from her son during a 1942 Nazi roundup.
At 105, Adela tells her story to young women in her tailoring school about how she was “torn away from her son, shipped to Auschwitz, stripped of her name and forced to survive a world built to erase her," Brown says. "Inside the camp, she finds strength through the women she works beside, seamstresses who hold on to identity through the smallest acts of creation.”
McEntee, also a producer on the film, is scheduling appointments for in-person auditions for men and women 18 and older on May 28-29. There are “a lot” of small speaking parts for soldiers, prisoners and sewing students, she says. The online SignUpGenius can accommodate a total of 216 audition reservations that Thursday and Friday.
“It will be a fairly large‑scale project. Although most of the principal roles have already been cast, several supporting roles are still open,” Brown says.
In addition to Over-the-Rhine, The Tailoress will use locations “in and around Cincinnati and some farms just outside of the city,” he says.
A call for extras and background actors will be held later in the year, according to McEntee.
“It is my intention to start production in October tentatively,” Brown says.
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