Director Sandi DuBowski discusses his feature doc Sabbath Queen with documentary film editor, writer, story consultant, director and friend Yael Bitton. The pair first worked together on Sandi DuBowski’s Trembling Before God (2001), on which Bitton took an assistant editor credit.
Shot over twenty-one years Sabbath Queen follows Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israeli descended from an unbroken line of thirty-eight rabbis stretching back a thousand years. Yet as Sabbath Queen opens, Lau-Lavie is newly arrived in New York in the late 1990s, a young gay man declaring “artists are the new rabbis” and appearing around the city in drag as Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the widow of six Hasidic rabbis (all from the same extended family). As the years pass, Lau-Lavie embraces a range of creative spiritual endeavours, including Storahtelling and Lab/Shul—until he shocks everyone with his decision to become a Conservative rabbi himself…
At the beginning of their chat, Bitton asked DuBowski about how Sabbath Queen’s reception since its Tribeca 2024 world-premiere, about how it has been “opening and launching conversations and epiphanies in the film world and in the world at large.”
“It’s really almost like a six-month old baby, and it’s been really fascinating because the audience response has been very intense,” the director responds. “People are coming to see the film actually multiple times. People are coming back with parents, with kids, with family members, with friends. There’s something about the film right now that is just touching a nerve – and I’m trying to glean what it is.”
“The film is so non-binary in so many ways, in a 360-way,” he continues. “It’s non-binary around gender and sexuality. It’s non-binary around Jew/not-Jew. It’s non-binary around Israel-Palestine. There’s something about it that is really reaching a very wide world. And I think some of what I’m gleaning…I was in DOK Leipzig and Rome and IDFA, certainly in the US but also now Europe and New Zealand where we brought the film, there’s something about the film that is about hybridity, a kind of sacred hybridity, the mixing that all of us are doing around our traditions, our ancestries in the 21st century. And the film is really speaking to that.”
“I keep meeting couples who are multi-faith/multiracial, who are really connecting with the film. It’s like a reflection of who they are,” DuBowski adds. “In fact, I had these friends who are a Muslim/Jewish couple, and they came to the film and they just wept through the whole movie because they said they’ve never met another Muslim/Jewish couple…So for them it was so revelatory and they’re already have come back and seen it a second time. So there’s something really profound that’s happening.”
“I opened Trembling Before God, my feature doc back in New York at Film Forum right after 9/11. And we could feel what was happening in the city and people really needed to be together. So they were coming to the theater to be in community, and to be holding each other and questioning and crying and grappling. I feel the same energy post-election now with Sabbath Queen.”
Click above to watch the whole conversation between Sandi DuBowski and Yael Bitton.
