From the "People" Archives:

by Jim Fouratt

(indieWIRE/ 10.31.01) -- "Trembling Before G-D" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2001 after a total of six years from birth to completion. The documentary tells the story of eight men and women, all Orthodox Jews, who have struggled both to find God in the Orthodox Jewish tradition and to accept their own homosexuality.

The last 9 months have seen the film and its 32-year-old, Harvard Magna Cum Laude director Sandi Simcha Dubowski travel the world to select festivals. He has been engaging audience members in a form of dialogue that started at Sundance with a Mormon/Jewish open discussion and a Shabat (Friday night religious dinner), which had people like Tilda Swinton and B. Ruby Rich breaking bread and drinking wine as out Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg led prayers and gave sagacious blessings (it's become the model of engagement for post-screening audience participation). His production team included NYU Professor and notable filmmaker ("One of Us") Susan Korda as editor, Mark Smolowitz as co-producer and John Zorn as composer.

Four days after the opening night at the Film Forum, indieWIRE finally caught up with the busy director the morning after he had hosted a Shabat for 70 gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, for a detailed discussion about getting his subjects to open up, editing 450 hours of footage and his own personal struggles.

indieWIRE: What led to your choosing to make a film with this subject matter?

"I was trying to understand what it means to come out and to come home. I wanted to see if there was gay life in this world I had grown up in."

Sandi Dubowski: After college, I went to work at MIX, the Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film and Video Festival. It was my coming out in more ways than one. I had grown up in a pretty insular Jewish, if somewhat secular/conservative, environment in Brooklyn. At MIX, I found myself immersed in a gay and lesbian world made up of Americans, Latinos, Brazilians, and Asians -- a whole mix of queer creativity. Tom Kalin, Marlon Riggs, Deborah Hoffman, Todd Haynes, Isaac Julien had all made their first feature and were very available to challenge all of us at MIX to be a part of Queer Cinema. I began to ask where I had come from before I came out as gay. It helped that I had moved back to Brooklyn to my parent's house, being the only child. I had always been the object of my parents' love and expectation.

I knew I was trying to understand what it means to come out and to come home. There was no gay anything nearby in my neighborhood. I wanted to see if there was gay life in this world I had grown up in. I wanted to wrestle with the patriarchal structures I had grown up with and were instilled in me. It was in the Orthodox community that I saw a world in which men hold much public power. Women's power is much more private. Judaism, unlike Christianity, does not negate the pleasure of sex and makes giving sexual pleasure to his wife the sacred duty of a husband.

iW: Why did you choose to be a director?

Dubowski: I didn't choose to be a film director. I didn't go to film school. I was inspired by MIX to make a personal video with my 88-year-old grandmother ("Tomboychik"). I saw it at first as an oral history for my family. Yes I had done my thesis in college on exposing outside the frame the history of the male body in Hollywood film. It was a very postmodern academic work with lots of hyphens and parenthesis in the title. College had been a time when I was exploring gay identity both personally and academically. It was a very important time for me. Than after graduation I had to go back to find who I was before I came out.

iW: A Jewish boy?

Dubowski: Yes. I wanted to go back and reclaim that identity too.

iW: But you also did hang with the MIX kids, which some would say in the early Œ90s was the center of the practice of queer cinema. You did learn the vocabulary of film and video making did you not? How did you pick up your first camera?

Dubowski: I stole my family's camcorder and ran over to my grandmother's house. It was a video 8 camera, no mics no lights, very garage, yet very intimate. It became "Tomboychik," a form of personal filmmaking. I had a chance to go to Israel for the first time and took a video camera again to make a personal video journal of my trip to find my Jewish roots. The first person I met in Israel was a former very right-wing militant Orthodox bisexual who had barricaded himself in the Sinai Peninsula while Peres was trying to withdraw. He was struggling to come out and was re-examining his politics; I interviewed him and began to seek other out Orthodox Jews. I met Mark who was very out and had been thrown out of an Orthodox Yeshiva at the International Convention of Lesbian and Gay Jews. I was very struck by his contradictions: Outrageous in your face drag queen and angry Orthodox Jew. I started interviewing him immediately. It was still just me and my camera talking one on one. There were no establishing shots, no long shots. Meaning I held the camera. Everything was one-on-one. I went through a world of people. Me and my camera. That is how "Trembling" started. My editor Susan Korda, who was such an essential creative collaborator, helped me to understand the way filmically I could achieve larger goals by widening my technique

iW: So it was your editor Susan Korda who was the one that sent you back to enlarge what and how you were shooting?

Dubowski: What happened was, we kept cutting fundraising trailers so there were long periods when we were in the editing room. We did two fundraising trailers together, a 30-minute and a 12-minute trailer. So we were squeezed into the editing room once for 8 weeks and another time for 6 weeks. There, we were able to work with the footage and work with the emerging character, doing some selecting. Susan was enormously patient and challenging to me at that time. Then with some new funds I was able to go back and work for another year shooting and researching, building a network. One person lead me to another. It was a slow process. The Orthodox lesbian couple, Malka and Lalya, only came into the film in the last year, and the decision to feature them was decided in the editing room after Susan and I saw how wonderfully they worked in the narrative. I went back to Miami and we shot their whole sequence over four-days. It took five years to find a couple who would let me film inside their Orthodox home viewing their religious life.

iW: Tell me more about how you wrestled with the structure.

Dubowski: It would have been so much simpler to have done this film cinema verite, but my problem was that so many people chose to be invisible and I could not film many things I wanted to show. What could not be filmed was a lot of material that was the soul of what "Trembling" was about; it was virtually impossible to film anyone living inside the Orthodox community. The challenge was to reveal an entire network and life of gay and lesbian Orthodox people to the camera.

iW: One of the mysteries about "Trembling" for me is how did this secular Jew gain access to and the trust of these gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews?

Dubowksi: We were not thinking about those kinds of things. I would meet someone and start shooting as soon as possible. So there was not any time to back out. Recognizing how much it was a risk for them, I didn't ask for release forms early in the film. What was important was to build a relationship. They knew that our relationship came first, before the film.

David (the principle character) tried to pull out a number of times. I worked very hard to keep him in the film, release or no release form because his story was so central to the film. With David there was always the unknown element to his story. To not have his story would leave me with no narrative. It was the challenge of shaping such a strange film.

iW: Was it when you looked at the footage that you realized what the film would be?

Dubowski: No, what I was doing was a form of curating. There was a range of voices I wanted. It became possible because of the equipment I used, a small Sony digital camera with wireless mics. Intimate material shot intimately.

iW: When you actually went to the Rabbis, how did you find the ones who would talk on camera?

Dubowski: At one point, I took a trip to Israel specifically to talk with Rabbis. It was a very difficult trip with about six weeks spent making as many phone calls as possible and following up on as many contacts as possible. I went to see the former chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel. You wake up at 4 AM and sign your name on a list and wait for seven hours until finally you are in the doorway. There are all these people pushing behind you. You get inside the chamber and you have two people on either side of you and he is sitting above you with a crown on his head. I went up to the Rabbi and said, "You know there are so many people I have met over the past 7 years who are in pain." I told him stories briefly of the people in my movie and asked him, "Is there anything you can say to help them?" He said to tell them two words: "animalistic and abomination." I pushed my way back and said to him: "You know these are Torah Jews. They know the prohibition. What can you say to them to ease their pain?" And he answered: "Say the first ten chapters of the Kabbal, aloud. It will be eradicated."

"We only spilt blood in the editing room twice."

I went outside furious and devastated. I felt like, 'What am I doing?' And than I remembered what someone had said to me 'Choose your rabbi.' Just before I went to him, I saw the Amshinover Hasidic Rebbe and I had an experience with him that was full of compassion. I looked at him and I wept. He sat in a room with me alone. No handlers, no crown. He closed the door, sat across from me and I just felt like he gave me the strength to do this film.

iW: How do you reconcile making a film about this subject matter and the personal journey of dealing internally with the same subjects that you're making a film about? How do you remove yourself, go into the editing room with your editor and talk movie?

Dubowski: We only spilt blood in the editing room twice. It is amazing to me that Susan and I fought in an editing room for 17 months and didn't kill each other. We actually emerged at the end with respect and awe for each other. But I was fortunate. I was dealing with a feature director and a veteran film editor who is a filmmaker herself and teaches film editing at NYU. So that kind of dynamic occurred a lot. For me the editing room was like my film school. For her, the editing room was like her yeshiva. Because she was a Viennese Jew.

iW: Meaning intellectual, secular, spiritual but not practicing?

Dubowski: Yeah, and highly intellectual. Occasionally tough.

iW: What happened when she got tough? Because for a soft guy you too are pretty tough.

Dubowski: Yeah, but my softness wasn't what echoed on the wall when we screamed at each other. I can be very single-minded and I can be like Godzilla with a laser bean coming from my brain.

iW: How did you tai-chi her?

Dubowksi: (laughs) First we had a dog in the editing room, which she named Rebbe. Being a cat person, I believe the world is divided into dog and cat people, I oddly found Rebbe was a calming influence.

iW: She taught you something, didn't she?

Dubowski: She taught me many things. I had 450 hours of footage.

iW: Yikes! A true editor's challenge. When did you decide to use the silhouette device?

Dubowski: When it became clear that there were stories we would not have because people were afraid of showing themselves. By in large, people were still practicing Orthodox and many were married. Without those stories, it would be an inauthentic film. What became clear was that we were not able to film religious life.

iW: How do you address those who might criticize you for having no distance from your subjects? That "Trembling" is not about your subjects, but about you, the filmmaker?

Dubowski: All documentary films are about the relationship between the director and the subjects. If anyone actually believes differently than they are fooling themselves.

Let me tell you a story that shows how it continues to be a conversation between me and the subjects. At the opening night at the Film Forum, I was on the street about to go to the benefit party, and I saw two Orthodox women walking away from the theater: wigs, long skirts. I ran after them and asked then how they heard about the film. One said "from the group." I said, "the group?" She answered "yes, the group." I than realized and asked "you mean the Orthodykes? And she said "yes, the group." I then learned that she was a lesbian who was married and had a number of children and the other women was her straight friend. I told them about the ongoing open dialogues we were having with the Orthodox community on Sunday nights and invited them. The next day I got an e-mail from the straight woman thanking me for making the film. She told me she never understood why her friend simply couldn't change and now she did. She also told me she was bringing her husband and members of her family to see the film the following day. And she did. I saw them standing on the street after the screening, discussing the movie with a very mixed group of people: gay, straight, Jewish, not Jewish, Asian, African-American, for about an hour an a half. How do you make a separation? She was an actual expression of my dream of what the possibility of "Trembling" is. I'm a director and I am also other things, including a matchmaker.

iW: Do you have another film you want to make now that "Trembling" is finished?

Dubowski: "Trembling" is finished, but not done. We will spend the next year bringing it to very different communities and creating dialogue, but I do have a new project under wraps.

Footnote: After the most successful weekend opening ever at Film Forum, I attended a post screening dialogue. I saw the director, and many of the subjects from the documentary engaged in a series of after-the-screening dialogues at Gilda's Club (the cancer patient's center named for Gilda Radner next door to the Film Forum). This post-screening dialogue was as fascinating to me as the film itself. As a non-Jew, I was able to both be engaged and to identify across cultural and religious differences with the participants and the discussion, which was both passionate and compassionate. Rarely, if ever, have I experienced a documentary that excited an audience to such a level of engagement -- and makes possible the reality of change.