Sandi Dubowski had a lead on a potentially fascinating subject for his 2001 documentary “Trembling Before G-d,” finding out as he looked for Hasidic and orthodox Jews in Jerusalem who had to reconcile their religion’s strictures with their sexual orientation.
“Everyone kept saying, “Well, you should talk to the Chief Rabbi of Israel’s nephew who’s gay,” recalls Dubowski, who naturally was intrigued to learn of Amichai Lau-Lavie, who not only was quite publicly out but regularly performed as a drag queen. “I asked Amichai to be in “Trembling” and he refused because he’s too much of a diva – he wanted his own movie and he said, ‘I don’t do collage.’”
Dubowski would have to make his first feature without Lau-Lavie, but there was no way he wasn’t going to keep tabs on him following that introduction. Even then, the filmmaker couldn’t have possibly known what he was signing up for as he devoted himself to following Lau-Lavie’s spiritual journey, requiring over two decades to fully do it justice as he watches him go from commanding stages at nightclubs to holding court at a synagogue of his own in Brooklyn as a rabbi. If Dubowski had previously found tension across the world in many struggling to balance their faith with their sexuality, he finds Lau-Lavie completely comfortable in his own skin as a gay man, yet grappling with a religion that he initially sees as out of touch with the times in other ways as he can be seeing the film’s opening frames presiding over an interfaith marriage.
“Sabbath Queen” chronicles Lau-Lavie’s construction of the Lab/Shul congregation, a pop-up welcoming to all when touting itself as “God optional” and carries the spirit of the shows he put on in drag when the belief in simply giving others a good time can be rejuvenating, but Dubowski sticks around long enough to see the rabbi start to gravitate towards some of the more conservative strains of Judaism and wonders whether the same person that fearlessly ventured into Occupy Wall Street rallies and the Gaza Strip to preach peace will rethink his approach and he has to consider the people who have come to lean on him for spiritual guidance as he charts his own way forward. Having access to every twist and turn in Lau-Lavie’s transformation by virtue of the time he spent with him, Dubowski is able to elicit his soul searching as externally as his bold personality and despite Lau-Lavie’s remarks about collage, finds his life to be a mosaic full of sharp-edged pieces where the flood of memories actually captured by the camera ably expresses the feelings of acceptance and rejection that have shaped his worldview and channel his spirit by bringing in various elements including animation.
After the film premiered earlier this year at Tribeca, “Sabbath Queen” is now starting its theatrical run that Dubowski intends to deliver as an event worthy of all the time he’s already put into it, previously spending years shepherding “Trembling Before G-d” around the world to change hearts and minds one audience at a time. In the midst of traversing between special events in New York and Los Angeles where the film is now playing, the director spoke about when he knew he might have a major story on his hands in filming Lau-Lavie, how to turn thousands of hours of material into a two-hour film and why distribution is as important a part of the filmmaking process and what he’s able to do behind the camera.
When a film starts out of a friendship and you start recording casually, when does it become something more formal or take shape in your mind as a feature?
I definitely was interested in like the drag performances of this Hadassah Gross [Lau-Lavie’s stage persona] and the counterculture and all of the very wild things that I wanted to just document, but it became more serious when I went back to Poland with him and his family for probably his dad’s last trip, where he was marking his bar mitzvah. I think Amichai started to do real ritual in community for the high holidays. And then all of a sudden he wanted to actually go to rabbinical school and entered seminary to become a rabbi. I was like, “Wow, that is a twist. And he did it conservative. And I thought he’s going to stop doing officiating interfaith weddings because that’s forbidden, but the film will end when he’s ordained as a rabbi. That’s such a natural end, but then I realized that in the mythic hero’s journey, it’s not when someone gets a title. It’s what they do when they get the title and what is the call that they have to meet? Amichai’s real grappling with interfaith marriage and deciding to do this big wedding and paying a price, that’s when I knew, “Okay, this is a narrative [feature]” and the 21 years felt really worth it to really unfold with somebody over time.
Did you actually know a wedding could make a good opening to set up something so sprawling early on or did it evolve?
It evolved. We realized that Amichai had to make a consequential choice that was dramatic and some people would argue for and some would argue against and in some ways, both are valid. There’s a point where Amichai says, “You know what?”We’re not going to know about this choice for 100 years,” and it’s such an act of humility for him to say that as a rabbi, because often our religious leaders are paragons of certainty. But Amichai is constantly questioning. He’s not like a rabbi who pretends to always have the answer, and there is something in that that is really humble. We wanted to let Amichai guide the film in every moment, and his identity is never quite settled. He’s got all these forces on him and that really internal and external struggle was our throughline for the film.
Were there scenes that you could see when you dug back into the footage that you may not have been conscious of at the time, but suddenly made sense as you were going over all of this?
We filmed in 2014 when Israel’s war on Gaza then, and Amichai was at a protest which has become a real fundamental moment in the film and quite shocking. We actually have audiences gasp audibly at that scene. And then here we are all of a sudden facing how to incorporate October 7th into the film. But every image and every word is a minefield. I really had to very carefully and sensitively try to figure out how we can be in the present moment, so there’s things that take on greater significance when you look back. We have this line in the film, “A rabbi never leaves his congregation” that Amichai says about his grandfather who basically walked into the gas chamber with his congregation as a martyr. And then Amichai says it about himself later in the film, so things do take on meaning when we revisit them and revisiting was so much a part of the way that we’ve crafted the narrative.
At what point did you start the editing process?
We probably have one of the longest credit lists in history. [laughs] Over 21 years, thousands of people have been part of this. I cut a fundraising trailer and did 20 benefit parties across the U.S and [early on] I did work with Jeremiah Zagar, an editor who does both fiction and doc, for a summer, and then I cut three scenes. That allowed me to get Sundance Institute funding, so I had been working spot periods with an editor. But the real edit was six years. I worked with Francisco Bello and Jeremy Stolberg [when it took shape as a feature] and we spent an enormous amount of time trying to condense and distill 1800 hours of footage and 1100 hours of archival film and video and hundreds of photographs. So it was a long edit, which had a lot of exploration to it. Then I was filming even while we were doing that and saying, “We need this whole world of archival footage,” so let’s go and get that because Amichai lives in so many worlds. He lives in a queer radical fairy world. He lives in a performance/storytelling world and he lives in that orthodox family that has a deep Holocaust story. There’s like a lot of worlds that we have to create in the film and some of it is through archival or verite interview and then we brought in animation.
The editing was kaleidoscopic and non-linearness became a principle of our editing. Like we could go forward and backwards in time in [the same way] the way that Amichai lives in the ancient and he lives in the very contemporary. He’s always trying to imagine a better future and once we let go of making a linear film, as long as we guided the audience in time, then it freed us creatively. Anything that we couldn’t convey in verite and interview – often things that were about the ancient – we worked with animation. For example, we were trying to create and convey the experience of doing a Friday night Sabbath Queen ritual with Amichai and his Lab/Shul community. That community is friendly to everybody, artist-driven, God-optional, but it’s not always easy to convey these mystical concepts and bringing in animation really helped us like play and imagine and evoke worlds that we can’t see.
How’d you end up with this particular style of animation?
Animation was actually a part that I never anticipated in this film and certainly it didn’t come until later in the process of editing. I worked with the first editor and it would have never happened with him, but then when we parted ways and I brought in this whole team of Francisco and Jeremy, that’s when all these ideas about the archival and creating montages that were like opposition montages was when I really feel like we found the language for the film. I realized that I needed someone [for the animation] who is Israeli, who knew the linguistic and cultural fluency, typography, and just how to convey this, so I had a smaller set of people to draw on.
Yaron [Shin, the animator] was so imaginative and we set our color palette to evoke oranges and blacks and we almost used illuminated manuscripts as our inspiration – all these medieval books with these incredible flat 2D. Once we focused in on that, it allowed us to really find the visual language for the animation. To be able to create a drag character who’s diving to the bottom of the Dead Sea in animation was pretty exciting and for her to meet the feminine divine.
It really is dazzling. Following Amichai probably naturally let the broader attitudes or conversations around Judaism within the community into the film, but as you were putting the film together, how much were you’re conscious of that?
I was always very aware, immersed and very fluent in a lot of these issues and I certainly am not a rabbi, but I seem to make films about rabbis, so I’m pretty steeped. That was helpful. And even little things were also helpful like [asking ourselves] what does it mean to translate or italicize a sentence with one word that’s Yiddish or Hebrew for a non-Jewish audience or a Jewish audience who’s not so literate? I think this is resonating for many people very universally because we have like all kinds of people coming to the cinema now and [I thought about] ways that I could bring people into quite a specific world and allow people to question and grapple with their own ancestries and their own religious traditions and or lack thereof.
That was really my goal to have people who are deeply connected Jews and have people who really like have no idea. And I had a Hindu filmmaker come to the film who said, “I grew up in India and my grandfather was a Hindu priest. He used to make us pray three hours a day at temple every day. And I see my family and my grandfather in your film.” That was really exciting for me to hear because it really connected to her and it’s like we’re all trying to liberate ourselves from these ultra conservative traditions.
It sounds like you’re having a great time with this getting out in the world and when you’ve been carrying this with you for so long, what’s it like to start getting off your shoulders?
The experience is so extraordinary. The festivals have been a dream and now we’ve already been held over a third week at IFC Center, where we had the biggest box office opening weekend of any documentary, so there’s that side, which is the commercial side and satisfying. But what’s happening in terms of people’s transformation and the community building that we’re doing, people are coming to the film multiple times. A mom just came back earlier this week with her 16-year-old daughter who told her mom that the film changed her life. It allowed her to envision herself as a progressive Jew in the world and we’re having these really deep reactions intergenerationally and communally.
I’m not interested in disposable cinema, films that just appear and disappear. And by creating the cinema as a town hall, it’s been really powerful. I’m really investing [time in this] – I’ve been at IFC pretty much every day and meeting audiences. We’ve had Joey Soloway from “Transparent,” and Krista Tippett from On Being and NPR, and Priya Parker, who’s an author. We’ve had mid-queer black and white ministers from Harlem and Brooklyn and such an amazing array of people. It’s the same with L.A. and my whole goal is in this time when the landscape for film distribution is so tough is to do something big, creative, imaginative and meaningful. Because I remember when we opened “Trembling Before God” at Film Forum after 9/11, it was very charged and people really needed to be together. They wanted to be [together] in person. They wanted to be hugging each other and holding each other and crying and laughing. And I’m feeling the same energy in our theatrical. It was very potent and apparent that people really want the cinema to be a collective space of healing. Someone came out the other night and said, “Your film is medicine for the moment,” and I thought “Wow, that’s a beautiful phrase” and it captures the spirit of what’s happening.
You spent years on the release of “Trembling Before G-d” – did the experience in general inform how you think about distribution as an equal part of the process as making the film?
I think of it like our lives and our stories and the release as actually a spiral of time. We really live in this way [where] we’re growing. This is a midlife film, a film building on years and decades of relationships and work. And that is in the cinematography and in the editing and in the movement of the film distribution. I’ve had people from every era of my life come to the cinema. What’s different is the social media and being able to share all of these moments from not just a release, but from this incredible archive of material that I have. I had 1,800 hours of original material and I have 1,798 that I can share. And I see how much that the Instagram campaign that we’re doing is really fueling so much of the movement of the film, which was really different than distribution back in the aughts, so I’m curious to keep exploring that. There’s also certainly something different now than the “Trembling” release [where] I did 850 live events personally all over the world, but I can foresee that here because the demand is huge and I can see people are having profound reactions and I can imagine doing years of distribution with this while I nurture another project that I’ve been cooking up.
“Sabbath Queen” is now open in New York at the IFC Center and Los Angeles at the Laemmle Encino Town Center and the Laemmle Royal. A full list of screenings and dates is here.