Picon made her film debut in European productions. Otto Freister filmed her first film, Das Judenmadel (The Jewish Girl), in Austria in 1921. The following year, she starred in another Yiddish production, Htet eure Tochter (Watch for Your Daughters). While these films have not survived, Sidney Goldin and Jacob Kalich's 1923 Viennese production of Ost und West (East and West) has become the first surviving Yiddish film. This hilarious depiction of a feisty secularized American Jewish girl visiting her traditional relatives in Europe satirized the gulf that lay between American and European Jewry.