A 94-year-old Holocaust survivor makes her feature film debut – and a new star is born

It is rare, I think, to leap from making matzoh balls to making movies. But it is even rarer, I imagine, to land the leap with élan. Yet this is the accomplishment of “Trop d’amour,” a film by a young French actress and filmmaker, Frankie Wallach, starring her grandmother Julia Wallach, the maker of kneidlach and survivor of Auschwitz.

A few years ago, as part of the Grandmothers Project — a series of documentary shorts in which filmmakers’ grandmothers make their favorite recipes — Frankie Wallach, with cameraman in tow, interviewed her mamie in the narrow kitchen of the same Paris apartment where she had lived nearly all of her then-90 years.