Sabbath Queen

In the courtyard of a Manhattan house, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie gets ready to marry two men, one Jewish and one not, a wedding the Conservative movement that ordained him doesn't allow. That's how 'Sabbath Queen' opens. Sandi DuBowski shot it over 21 years, nearly twice as long as Richard Linklater spent on 'Boyhood'. The two met in the late nineties, while DuBowski was making 'Trembling Before G-d', about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews. Amichai said no to that one because, as the director tells it, he wanted a film of his own.

He comes from a line of Orthodox rabbis that, by the film's count, runs to 38 generations. His father saved his own younger brother, Yisrael Meir Lau, at Buchenwald, and the boy grew up to be Chief Rabbi of Israel. In 1997 the press outed Amichai without asking, and he left for New York. There he joined the Radical Faeries and created Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, a Holocaust survivor with a thick Hungarian accent and huge hair who slips sermons in between the jokes.

He founded Lab/Shul, a roving, experimental congregation where believing in God is optional, and had three children with a lesbian couple he's friends with. Then he did what nobody saw coming and enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary to become a Conservative rabbi, which some of his progressive friends took as a betrayal. The counterweight is his brother Benny, an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem, who loves him and argues with him in equal measure.

DuBowski ended up with 1,800 hours of his own footage and 1,100 more of archive, and the edit took six years. He tried narrating it himself until a test screening talked him out of it, and Benny's voice took over. The seven cinematographers include Kirsten Johnson, who made 'Cameraperson', and Nadia Hallgren. Francisco Bello leads the four editors, and Darren Aronofsky, a childhood friend of the director's, came on late as executive producer.

It premiered at Tribeca in June 2024. In Zurich, Kevin Macdonald's jury gave it a special mention, and it won awards at Hamptons and Woodstock too. American cinemas got it that November, starting at New York's IFC Center, and the reviews were warm, though one or two critics felt the man behind the rabbi stays out of reach. Can a tradition be changed from inside without breaking it? The film doesn't claim to know.

• Documentary
• Animation
• Biography