Trembling Before G-d Los Angeles 15th Anniversary Screening at UCLA Film Archive, August 21st
Trembling before G-D is having a 15th anniversary screening in LA on Sunday evening August 21. This special screening will be at UCLA Film Archive and is part of the UCLA Outfest Legacy Project.
Q&A with director Sandi DuBowski and David Silverstein, featured in the film
UCLA Film Archive 15th Anniversary Screening of Trembling Before G-d
Sunday, August 21st, 7PM
Buy tickets at https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2016/08/21/trembling-before-gd
15th Anniversary Screening
Trembling Before G-d is an unprecedented feature documentary that shatters assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma – how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality. As the film unfolds, we meet a range of complex individuals – some hidden, some out – from the world’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to closeted, married Hasidic gays and lesbians to those abandoned by religious families to Orthodox lesbian high-school sweethearts.
Many have been tragically rejected and their pain is raw, yet with irony, humor, and resilience, they love, care, struggle, and debate with a thousand-year old tradition. Ultimately, they are forced to question how they can pursue truth and faith in their lives. Vividly shot with a courageous few over five years in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, London, Miami, and San Francisco, Trembling Before G-d is an international project with global implications that strikes at the meaning of religious identity and tradition in a modern world. For the first time, this issue has become a live, public debate in Orthodox circles, and the film is both witness and catalyst to this historic moment. What emerges is a loving and fearless testament to faith and survival and the universal struggle to belong.
Trembling Before G-d: Turning A Movie Into A Movement
by: Sandi DuBowski
We as filmmakers, more than ever, must become as creative and strategic in our distribution, outreach, funding, audience engagement, and evaluation as we are in our filmmaking. We are living in an incredible era of innovation with many exciting new possibilities, philanthropies, platforms and ideas for media and change campaigns — from the Million Kids campaign of Oscar-shortlisted Bully to the tough Middle East peacebuilding work of Budrus and Just Vision to the impact Invisible War has had in the past year to stop rape in the U.S. military — with an estimated 10% of the U.S. military having seen the film. These films have created a tipping point on an issue and are moving millions. They are the latest in a tradition and a history that is not often known.
As The Sundance Film Festival approaches, I look back on the world premiere of my film, Trembling Before G-d, at Sundance, and the decade-plus of change work we launched since.
Trembling Before G-d shatters assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma — how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality. As the film unfolds, we meet a range of complex individuals — some hidden, some out — from the world’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to closeted, married Hasidic gays and lesbians to those abandoned by religious families to Orthodox lesbian high-school sweethearts. Many have been tragically rejected and their pain is raw, yet with irony, humor, and resilience, they love, care, struggle, and debate with a thousands-year old tradition.
Continue reading in The Huffington Post
