by MATTHEW HAYS

Sandi Simcha DuBowski explains that he’s a wee bit fatigued as we sit down to discuss his feature-length documentary, Trembling Before G-d. He doesn’t much like being on the road for so long, he explains, but that’s what he’s been up to for the past six months. In a sense, DuBowski is a victim of his film’s own success.

Since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January of last year, Trembling Before G-d has won standing ovations on the film-fest circuit, attracted massive audiences (breaking box-office records in many cities for documentary-film attendance figures) and, perhaps most satisfying to the filmmaker, apparently changed more than a few lives.

Watching the film, it isn’t difficult to see why. Trembling is one of those revelatory, outstanding documentaries, one that proves, were there ever any doubt, that truth is often stranger—and infinitely more interesting—than any fiction imaginable. With painstaking care, the film profiles several different gay men and lesbians, each of them dealing, in their own way, with an epic struggle that lies at the core of their very identity: they are homosexual but also Hasidic or Orthodox Jews.

Emotional testimonies

The film begins by outlining the basic dilemma facing those who wish to live honestly as gay while also remain Orthodox or Hasidic. “A man who lies with a man as one lies with a woman,” the Torah states in Leviticus 10:13, “they have both done an abomination, they shall be put to death.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Trembling then allows each of its subjects, many of whom conceal their identities, to tell their often-heart-wrenching stories.

One Orthodox Jew, David, tells of the advice he received from a rabbi after confessing his homosexual feelings to him. David spent years eating figs and saying prayers while flicking a rubber band on his wrist or biting his tongue as aversion therapy. DuBowski facilitates the reunion of David with this rabbi some 20 years later, all of which is captured in the film. Israel is a gay man in his fifties, who recalls the shock therapy that was administered to him as a young ultra-Orthodox man in an effort to cure him of his homosexuality. Long estranged from his father, the film includes a poignant phone call to dad, now 98, who tells his son he is simply too busy to see him. That scene is juxtaposed with an anniversary party, celebrating 25 years of Israel’s relationship with his boyfriend. Another parallel scene has a couple who, while lesbian, also maintain entirely traditional Orthodox lives. One erev shabbat (the Friday afternoon before the onset of the sabbath), one of the women calls her father to wish him a good sabbath. The phone conversation is clearly strained, and after hanging up, she breaks down and cries, expressing the extreme guilt she still suffers about being a lesbian. Rabbi Steven Greenberg is the world’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, who eloquently discusses in detail his own coming out and coming to terms with the contradictions that arrive with being both deeply religious and gay.

Perhaps most revealing, however, is the profile of Mark, an Hasidic Jew who has been kicked out of several yeshivas for being gay. Mark, who has AIDS, is seen doing drag at a gay pride event and seems the most flamboyant of the film’s subjects. But he’s also the most tortured by the contradictions, one who is pained to be so distanced from the traditions afforded those Hasidim who are deeply observant of their religious practices.

Rejecting objectivity

Not surprisingly, it was Mark who first led DuBowski, a Harvard graduate and former Planned Parenthood organizer, to the subject of gay Hasidim or Orthodox Jews—a meeting which led to his six-year filmmaking labour of love. “I met Mark at an international conference of gay Jews. I had been filming a year before that, just generally in the community. Then I met Mark and it became concrete. We became study partners in a yeshiva without walls. He became like my brother. I know Mark so well, he’s like family.”

DuBowski clearly never subscribed to any notions of objective news reporting while connecting with the people who populate his film. And he flinches upon hearing cinema verité godfather Frederick Wiseman’s philosophy, who suggests that he likes to keep a distance between himself and his subjects, neatly avoiding the illusion of any kind of friendship with them. “I don’t believe in that objective documentarian stuff at all,” asserts DuBowski. “Maybe someone can create the myth of that stance. But certainly when the camera’s on it changes the situation and a filmmaker’s presence alters the reality that the documentarians are reflecting. I believe in the collapsible wall between the subject and filmmaker, between camera and reality.”

If the making of Trembling Before G-d had an effect on the people in front of the camera, that impact was matched by the effect it had on the filmmaker himself. “I really didn’t know how much I’d end up caring about everybody in the film,” says DuBowski. “I didn’t know how much more religious I’d become as a result of it. People were going through such tremendous pain. You couldn’t help but get pulled in. When I was growing up I wasn’t really exposed to the kind of teachers that I met in this process. I met the most incredible, engaged, learned Orthodox and Hasidic people—most of them gay. They were my portal to this religious world. I did shabbat, something I’d never done growing up. I started learning Torah from this gay Hasidic guy. I think in some ways I’ve adopted the same struggle as the people in the film: how do you reconcile your sexuality with other traditional aspects of your life?

“Some of the most inspiring people I’ve met have been the ultra-Orthodox lesbians I know in Jerusalem. Some were married, some weren’t; their insights, their power, their sensitivity, their faith—they blew me away. Some of my favourite moments have been spent with them.”

Family matters

Getting further into his faith also meant, like his subjects, feeling the sting of homophobia within families. Though his own parents (conservative Jews who live in Brooklyn) have embraced him, DuBowski says he was shocked by some of the responses to the people in his film, from their own family members. “I believed in the myth of the Jewish family, that they don’t disown,” says DuBowski, still clearly shaken by some of the rejection he witnessed. “The rug was pulled out from under me. Many of the people I interviewed, their families had slammed the door on them. None of the family members who had rejected their gay family members would agree to be interviewed.”

While asking for a reconfiguration of how ultra-traditional and fundamentalist faiths deal with gays within their folds, with Trembling Before G-d, DuBowski has also asked for a radical departure from established traditions of film distribution. “Basically, filmmakers often finish the creation of the film and then walk away from it,” says DuBowski. “I think that’s a terrible mistake.”

Understanding his film’s ability to change attitudes and with them, lives, DuBowski has insisted the film be followed by group discussions. At Sundance, the film was followed by the state of Utah’s first-ever Jewish-Mormon gay interfaith discussion. “A young couple who appeared to be straight attended,” DuBowski recalls. “Then, after the screening, the husband stood up and told us that he’d had a boyfriend before getting married. He said that the Mormon Church had told him that with time [his homosexuality] would go away. ‘It’s five years later,’ he said, ‘and it’s not going away.’ This was a pivotal moment for this couple and they were facing it with such integrity and courage. Later, I learned that they did divorce and that she’s marrying someone else. This made me realize that the film is not just for Jews.”

The film also had a memorable premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, where Holocaust survivors attended a shabbat after the screening.

The cinema as town hall

And at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival last April, DuBowski was disappointed to learn that he was allotted a mere 15 minutes of time for the post-screening’s question-and-answer session—something that’s become sacred to the filmmaker. “We saw this great coffee shop around the corner, and we asked the guy who worked there, will you stay past the 11 p.m. closing time if we pay you for your time? He agreed, and we turned that coffee shop into our own town hall, packed with people who were eager to discuss the film and the questions it raises. That’s the principle upon which the film is moving forward.”

Certainly, while praise has run far and wide, the film has had its detractors. Some traditional rabbis and religious pundits have taken issue with what they see as the film’s one-sidedness. In Baltimore, the film was met with sizable protests upon its opening, with Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians banding together under placards. “Call it part of our interfaith work,” says DuBowski, noting that the controversy helped bolster the film. “We became incredibly renowned in Baltimore, a Jewish Orthodox capital of sorts. We outgrossed Amélie, Gosford Park and In the Bedroom in our first week there.”

Part of DuBowski’s Canadian distribution deal—with Toronto-based Mongrel Media—includes the hiring of outreach workers within the Jewish community, to get people into the film who might not otherwise venture to cinemas. Joanne Cohen, the first openly gay appointee to the Canadian Jewish Congress, was brought on board as Toronto’s outreach person. (The film opened in Toronto in June to several weeks of sold-out houses.) Cohen, who grew up in an Orthodox environment in small-town Ontario and whose father is a kosher butcher, says that Trembling Before G-d has a “kind of love-in effect on audiences. The film has engendered this huge grass-roots response. It has become a rallying point, a much-needed opening to a very important dialogue that needs to take place not only in Orthodox and traditional Jewish environments, but also in liberal ones. Often gay and lesbian Jews are treated as a failure of Jewish continuity rather than as a facet of it. Dialogue, healing and inclusion are more easily negotiated as a result of this film.”

Rabbi Yossi Sapirman, of Toronto’s Beth Torah conservative congregation, attended the Hot Docs screening of Trembling Before G-d, and says the experience was “deeply moving. It’s a torturous position to be in, to be rejected because of something you cannot control. I felt the room contorting because of the pain oozing out of that film. By taking on the highest form of religious observance, Orthodox, that forces all levels of religious observance to deal with the issue.”

DuBowski is as proud of the debates the film has fuelled as he is the film itself. “I feel like what we’re doing is recreating the cinema as a roving town hall, with heavily dialogue-driven distribution. Most people just throw their films in theatres, whereas I feel like once the final credits have rolled, that’s when the film actually begins.” :

Trembling Before G-d opens Friday, Nov. 8 at the Cinéma du Parc

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