Film Highlights the Gay Orthodox Experience
"Trembling Before G-d" is filmmaker Sandi DuBowski’s 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 tradition thousands of years old. Ultimately, they are forced to question how they can pursue truth and faith in their lives. Vividly shot with a courageous few people 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.
The film was received with acclaim at the recent Sundance Festival and has garnered positive reviews in newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post.
Further information about the film is available at www.tremblingbeforeg-d.com and info at tremblingbeforeg-d dot com. The World Congress extends its own Mazel Tov to Sandi Dubowski.
Lee Walzer