Q: What originally inspired you to focus your filmmaking on the intersection of LGBT issues and religion?

After Harvard, I moved back to my parents’ house in Deep Coastal Brooklyn and all of a sudden I was back in my all-Jewish neighborhood. I think a lot of my early filmmaking was about this exploration of who I was after coming out as gay at Harvard and I mined, almost like an archaeological dig, my family, my religion, my ethnicity, my community. I made my first film, a short ("Tomboychik"), with my 88 year-old grandmother who lived five blocks away. I stole my father's toupee, and I ran it over her house and brought out her wigs that she hadn't worn in like five years and we played dress-up and filmed each other. And then she started telling me how she thought she was like a man and how she thought my father wasn't quite a man. She was a character. It was a gender-blending tale across three generations in my family. And we played with my father's tallis, the prayer shawl, and a yarmulke and and I started to explore this conversation across generations, me being 22, her being 88. And what it was like to be queer and Jewish when I hadn't really come out to her. She would say things like “you'd be beautiful as a girl” and in the video I pretended to ask for her hand in marriage. I started wondering about whether there was homosexuality in the Orthodox Jewish world, because I grew up Conservative, and that began my exploration around TREMBLING BEFORE G-D.

Q: How did your time at Harvard shape your approach to the creative arts? Were there particular classes, mentors, or peers who were influential in your journey? 

I never studied filmmaking at Harvard. During my time at Harvard, I had no interest in being a filmmaker. My concentration was Social Studies and I studied film, cultural history and sexuality from an academic angle. D.A. Miller was a very important professor for me and my thesis advisor in terms of doing critical reading of queer culture. I wrote a 120-page thesis (I still remember the tears!) whose title was - I mean, it was so 1990’s - (Ex)posing the Frame: Homosexuality in Hollywood and Gay Independent Film, 1980-1991. I received a Ford Program for Undergraduate Research grant and I spent a summer interning and researching at Frameline in San Francisco, which is the longest-running and largest LGBTQ+ film exhibition event in the world with a big Vito Russo archive. That experience was formative. I was at the first Queer

Nation activist meeting, went to an ACT UP protest. I met legendary LGBTQ filmmakers from across the world, the founders of New Queer Cinema. I also met and interviewed founders of the MIX Festival: The New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival and wound up working there after college. I brought all this radical activism back to Harvard and became Chair of the BGLSA. There were so many filmmakers who shaped me then - Marlon Riggs, Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Su Friedrich, Thomas Allen Harris, Isaac Julien, Gregg Bordowitz, Jennie Livingston, John Greyson, Karim Ainouz, Sundance programmer Shari Frilot AB ’87, RDI ’19. It was this link between the academic and an activist-artist world and a thriving daring real-world film community that launched me to make "Tomboychik". I remember when I moved from verb to noun - when I said “I make films” to “I am a filmmaker.” That was a big step.

Q: Before you started working on full-length films, you worked as a research associate at Planned Parenthood and created videos on the Christian Right and anti-abortion movement. How did the time spent with those issues in short-form content shape or influence your approach to filmmaking?

The videos at Planned Parenthood were investigative and exposés about some people who were doing non-violent protest but also people who were violent who were threatening or killing abortion providers, setting fire to clinics, or doing other illegal activities. They were dangerous extremists. These were videos to expose, for example, an anti-abortion militia. And how people were using religion towards harmful ends. It was so different than the spirit of my film TREMBLING BEFORE G-D.  TREMBLING shattered assumptions about faith, sexuality and religious fundamentalism. It was built around intimately told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, and 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 clear-cut Biblical prohibition that forbids homosexuality. TREMBLING was really about trying to move hearts and minds. Its aim was to humanize what for many was a clear-cut abstract Biblical verse that was not connected to suffering people in pain. I did 850 live events personally with TREMBLING BEFORE G-D around the world for three years. I was holding queer audiences and Hasidic and Orthodox straight audiences in the same cinema - many of those queer people scarred by religion and many of those Hasidic and Orthodox straight people contending with the Biblical prohibition that says “a man who lies with another man, in the way of lying with a woman should be put to death.” The film’s movement became an act of transformation. We had religious families who disowned their children start speaking to them again. We had rabbis do a 180 from condemning homosexuality from the pulpit to saying, “I don't know.” We had dozens of Orthodox synagogues actually show the film in the synagogue. We held a secret underground first-ever Orthodox Mental Health Conference on Homosexuality and flew in Orthodox therapists, psychiatrists, school counselors from 16 states to train them in LGBTQ-affirmative therapy. We trained a group of facilitators and held private screenings for 2000 principals, teachers and school counselors at secular and religious schools in Israel who had never dealt with homosexuality to prepare for an Israeli TV broadcast. I had many Orthodox and Christian Evangelical people who challenged me and said “Homosexuality is a sin, it is a choice.” I asked “Do you have a daughter?” They usually did with so many children. I said “Would you marry your daughter to a man who claimed he changed from gay to straight?” Most of them would not know how to answer. As soon as I moved it from this abstract theology to the possibility that they might harm the future of their child and their family, we were having a very different conversation. TREMBLING became a tipping point in the Jewish world. 

Q: In what ways do you feel your work may have contributed to increasing visibility and dialogue around LGBT issues in religious communities globally?

I was screening TREMBLING BEFORE G-D in DC and a man approached me and said, I would like to do a film on Islam and homosexuality. Can you give me some advice? Fast forward six years, and I became the producer of A JIHAD FOR LOVE with director Parvez Sharma which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and went to Berlin Film Festival, theaters, TV and beyond. While screening TREMBLING and doing an interfaith panel in South Africa with Christians, Catholics, Muslims and traditional African sangomas/healers, I met a man on the panel who was the first openly gay imam. I said, you have to be in A JIHAD FOR LOVE. And so we began filming with him. With TREMBLING, we held the first-ever Shabbat at Sundance with Tilda Swinton, Sundance programmers, local Jewish Utah community and we also held a Mormon-Jewish Gay Dialogue at the festival. And I had someone who was working on TREMBLING who showed the film to her fiancée. After seeing it,  he turned to her and said, “You know what. I'm gay, I can't marry you.” So whether it was on a very personal level or a big communal level, so much of my work has been about transformation in religious worlds around gender, LGBTQ issues, spirituality.

Q: Congratulations on the completion of SABBATH QUEEN! What initially drew you to Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie’s story, and how did your vision for the documentary evolve over the 21 years of production?

I met Amichai in Jerusalem. I was looking for people to be in TREMBLING BEFORE G-D and everybody kept saying that the Chief Rabbi of Israel’s nephew is gay, you should meet him. I asked him to be in the film and he refused because well, he's too much of a diva and he wanted his own movie. He said, “I don't do collage.” In all fairness, he was right. He didn't quite fit into TREMBLING. TREMBLING was so much about belonging within the bounds of Orthodoxy, and he was already smashing the box and was post-denominational. He described himself as not Orthodox but Flexidox, Paradox. So we became dear friends and 5 years later in 2003, we began filming. We had built a deep trust. At first I was entranced by his drag queen persona, Rebbetzin Hadassah and the counter-culture performance art that he was doing. Over time, he took off the wig and the mask to try and better serve people’s needs off-stage and he decided to become a rabbi and entered seminary. So there was a lot of twist and turns in the process. And I just had patience and listened and documented the unfolding of his life and the story. And that patience extended to his family as well. I waited 13 years to ask Amichai’s brother, Rabbi Benny Lau, who is an Orthodox straight rabbi in Jerusalem to be in the film. He decided to go to Amichai’s rabbinic ordination at a liberal seminary which is a big deal for someone so Orthodox. I felt an opening and asked him to be in SABBATH QUEEN, he agreed, and I flew to Jerusalem to film. He became a real spine of the film. It was a very Biblical narrative of two brothers - one straight, one gay; one Orthodox, one progressive. Rabbi Amichai and Rabbi Benny do not always agree politically and ideologically, but they disagree with love and respect. In this toxic polarized time when we can barely speak to one another, they are role models for difficult dialogue. And witnessing that evolved over the course of editing of the film.

Q: Can you talk about the emotional and personal growth you experienced while following Amichai’s spiritual journey over two decades? Did the process alter your view of self or your view of the world in any significant ways?  

When I began the film in our early 30’s, we were friends. But over the course of 21 years, the layers of our relationship grew. Amichai’s Dad died and I supported him. Amichai buried my father and comforted my Mom and I in our year of Kaddish, of mourning. I fell in love with Eric and Amichai officiated our interfaith queer wedding. There were so many dimensions of our relationship - director and protagonist, rabbi and congregant, dear friends. And some of why I made this film was to express and share what I experienced at Lab/Shul - Amichai’s God-optional, artist-driven, everybody-friendly experimental pop-up spiritual community. Amichai really helped me reimagine rituals and traditions for being a Jew and a human in the 21st century - to not have to negate any of who I am and to embrace radical innovation, playfulness, imagination, progressive politics, criticism and protest of Israel, queerness, doubt, deep learning, the Female Divine, singing, and performance in my religion.

Q: How did the extensive 1,800 hours of footage and archival material shape the storytelling process

during editing? What were some of the key challenges in condensing such a rich and detailed narrative?

At one point, my editors turned to me and said “Sandi, this is so sprawling and it encompasses so many worlds - the Radical Faeries, Rebbetzin Hadassah, Amichai’s love life, his kids, Lab/Shul, his Orthodox family, the Holocaust. We need a narrator and we need it to be you.” I said no. Please no. I did not set out to make a personal film called "My Rabbi and Me." But they said you are in the footage speaking and appearing. We even had a moment where Amichai says, “Stop being behind the camera. Come here next to me. You are my sidekick.” So we brought in all the work I did with TREMBLING on the road, my father, my wedding. Test audiences kept wanting more. I recorded tons of voiceover and developed “my character.” Finally after nine months at another test screening, a group of great filmmakers and editors said, “Sandi we love you. Get out of the movie.” So we took nine months of work and threw it to the ground. And what filled that space was Benny, Amichai’s brother. I was just scaffolding and once we built the building, the film did not need me. 

Q: SABBATH QUEEN navigates many different cultural, religious, and political landscapes. How did you balance these complex, sometimes conflicting narratives while maintaining a cohesive storyline?

I truly had the best creative collaborators - writer/editors Francisco Bello and Jeremy Stelberg. The edit took six years and it was an enormous mountain of material and every image and every word was a minefield. It was a constant delicate, deft weaving of many complicated worlds that don't ever see each other and are often in opposition. The principle of looping time became foundational to our process. It's very Jewish. We celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and then we return again to the holiday the following year. How are we the same and how are we different? And what does this new beginning mean? Amichai holds past, present and future in a way that so few other people I know do. He's simultaneously in the ancient and in the contemporary and he's imagining a better future for the world all at the same moment. So there are phrases and images in the film that return and they accumulate deeper significance as viewers. And bringing in animation to evoke mystical and spiritual worlds, the Female Divine, ancient Roman-Jewish history also was critical. So once we were freed from the linear and were in non-linear storytelling, while at the same time holding the audience and anchoring them so that they felt guided, and threading animation and not just literal verite and interview, it opened worlds of filmic possibility to navigate so many terrains. 

Q: After spending 21 years on this project, what are you looking forward to in terms of your next filmmaking or social activism ventures?

SABBATH QUEEN had the highest box office opening weekend of any documentary at IFC this year. People are coming to see it multiple times. Boomer and GenX parents are bringing their teens and 20somethings to see it - sometimes grandparents are coming too - and it is opening up intergenerational dialogue on so many issues especially the challenges in Jewish families around Israel/Palestine since October 7th. I am raising funds for a Sabbath Queen Education and Impact Campaign and just received our first major grant that I need to match. My goal is to turn this movie into a movement like what we did with TREMBLING. To convene the critical intergenerational dialogues across the US and the world with Rabbi Amichai. To launch a college campus and high school screening tour. To infuse ritual and community-building with the film - SoulSpas and Sabbath Queen Friday Night Feasts. The potential is enormous. And I feel in this next chapter of America, we will need inner tools of spiritual resistance and resilience ever more so.