Trembling Playground: two young directors discuss film, faith, and the challenges of documenting religion.

Among the more critically acclaimed and commercially successful documentaries dealing with religion over the last several years, both Trembling Before G-d (New Yorker Films, 84 mins, 2001; www.trembingbeforeg-d.com) and Devil's Playground (Fox Lorber, 77 mins, 2002) traverse the complex terrain of religious orthodoxy at its border with modernity.

Trembling's title makes sly reference to the Hebrew term for the Ultra-Orthodox, haredi, literally, "one who trembles" in awe of God, similar in etymology to the term "Quaker." (Based on a passage in Deuteronomy 12:3, Orthodox Jews hold it a sin to utter or write the full name of God; hence "G-d").

In his directorial debut, Sandi Simcha DuBowski spent six years immersed in Orthodox and Hasidic communities from Los Angeles to Jerusalem in order to document the travails of their (largely closeted) gay and lesbian members. These strictly observant individuals struggle in the long shadow of Leviticus 20:13's capital injunction against homosexuality--"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them." [New Revised Standard Version, Oxford Press: 1989] Whereas the other branches of Judaism tolerate gay and lesbian membership to varying degrees, the Orthodox tradition regards halachic proscription as immutable. [Ed. note: halacha fr. Heb.--Talmudic literature that deals with law and the interpretation of the laws in the Hebrew Scriptures] Out of this seemingly intractable conflict, DuBowski fashioned a sympathetic, interrogative portrait that shook the film festival circuit, garnering numerous awards (including Official Selection at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival's coveted Teddy Award for Best Documentary) and generating a sensation among Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike.

DuBowski also received funding to take his film on the road, attending screenings and facilitating discussions with audiences at more than 35 universities and in 70 cities around the world. He was awarded a grant from the Steven Spielberg Righteous Persons Foundation to help launch a Trembling Before G-d Orthodox Community Education Project, a program designed to promote understanding and to explore the issues surrounding homosexuality in Orthodox school systems, mental health care networks, and within families and religious leadership in the US and Israel. But the extent of this film's influence is perhaps most dramatically reflected in the entry of the term "trembler" into the vernacular of Jewish communities around the world, designating the gay and lesbian Orthodox.

Devil's Playground examines the Amish tradition of rumspringa--literally "running around" in Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish German dialect--a rite of passage in which every young person tests the limits of his or her faith adherence by leaving the community expressly to experience contemporary life and its temptations. Old Order Amish doctrine famously dictates an exacting ethos of humility, family, community, and separation from the world. But as strict Anabaptists, the Old Order Amish maintain not only that individuals must be baptised as adults who freely profess their faith; they also must also join the Church consensually, as autonomous individuals, with full knowledge of the world they are to renounce.

At the age of 16, Amish youth are thus permitted to fraternize with the non-Amish and explore a lifestyle typical of teenagers in the "english" world (a term for the entirety of non-Amish culture). This extends to the most hedonistic trappings of contemporary adolescent experience, including substance use and abuse, consumerism, and sexual experimentation, to which community elders turn a blind eye.

Director Lucy Walker spent months cultivating relationships with Amish teenagers in communities ranging from Lagrange County, Indiana to Sarasota, Florida. The result is a compelling, bizarre, authoritative account of a youth culture uniquely situated at the juncture of family, community, modernity, and individuality, its future hanging in the balance of a perilous decision: those who decide to join the Church and then change their minds are "shunned"--permanently cut off by their families and the community. Released to universal acclaim, Devil's Playground was an Official Selection at Sundance, a nominee for Best Documentary at the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards, and the recipient of top honors at festivals in Europe and the US.

In an in-depth conversation with CrossCurrents editor Carey Monserrate, DuBowski and Walker reflect on their experiences within the enclosed universe of religious orthodoxy.

CrossCurrents: Let's start with a few observations about Trembling Before G-d and Devil's Playground, a sort of compare-and-contrast. There are actually a lot of similarities between these films. They're both about faith adherents belonging to an insular community who encounter the "forbidden" and are forced to confront it in some way--a difficult task, since their religious identities are bound up in conformity and adherence to the law. Both films grapple with the conflict between orthodoxy and modernity. In both films, a looming threat of rejection--or actual rejection--hangs over the subjects of the narratives, a form of rejection most of us can't imagine. And sexuality works into the mix as well.

Lucy Walker: I think that's right, and with good reason. Something as basic as relationships are just as important to the Amish as they are to us. For most of the Amish youth we encountered, the intimate relationships they formed were a big factor in determining whether or not they joined the Church. A lot of Devil's Playground was about how the main character's english girlfriend--and, later, his Amish girlfriend--play a big part in his thinking about whether or not to join. I think if you took a survey of Amish youth, who you fancy or who you're going out with would be considered a big part of what you wind up deciding. I think it's unusual to fall for someone outside the faith; but it's also almost the only reason why anyone chooses to leave, because they're in love with a partner who's not Amish. The opposite--someone from outside joining the Amish Church--hardly ever happens. It's very rare for anyone from outside to join, it would be considered too difficult. The Amish don't proselytize; an outsider would have to learn the language; and, most importantly, they wouldn't have developed the mental subservience characteristic of Amish culture. They have a process called "breaking the will of the child"--it occurs around two years of age--which is about developing a completely unquestioning mind, anathema to American notions of personal growth. So, if not sexuality per se, sexual partners actually do drive that process.

CC: I suppose it's the age-old theme: the only thing that could possibly sunder one's bond with family or community is the promise of an even deeper, more meaningful intimacy--Romeo and Juliet over Montague and Capulet.

Sandi Simcha DuBowski: I think this conversation really begins for me in Nashville, where I was approached by a man at the end of one of our Q & A's after a screening. He'd been hovering near the stage all evening and he finally came up and told me how he'd grown up Mennonite [a community similar to the Amish], the son of a Mennonite preacher, he'd just gotten divorced, and he had just come out as gay. And my response was, "Wow--our peoples look alike!" You know--black hat, beard, long black coat. [Laughs] And what was amazing was that he also said he could understand a lot of the Yiddish in Trembling Before G-d because he grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. And that really struck me.

CC: Is there an actual linguistic link between the two?

LW: Sure--they're both Germanic dialects. Actually, I had a funny experience connecting Jewish and Amish culture here in New York. I had two Amish kids staying with me and I was taking them around to sample all the different food options of New York. And the one thing that was familiar to them was the Second Avenue Deli--one of the most famous Jewish delis in the City. We had brunch there one day and they were all about the apple sauce and the tongue, because it was really traditional middle European farmhouse cooking. They were ordering all the things I wouldn't dream of because it reminded them of home. And that's when the connection really struck me.

SSD: And I'll bet everybody thought that they were Hasidic Jews!

[Laughs]

LW: No, really, they looked like any other Florida teens.

CC: What was your level of faith adherence or belief--you could call it spirituality or religion, I suppose--prior to making these films, and did they have any impact?

SSD: Well, for me it was milquetoast conservative Judaism. I always say that there was really no good reason for me to make this film, because I didn't grow up Orthodox, and I didn't know anyone who was Orthodox. And I certainly didn't know anyone who was Orthodox and gay. So I try to trace the creation story or the point of origin for Trembling, and I really can't figure it out. I know that I came out when Act Up was on the streets. Those were pretty heady days. I was at the first Queer Nation meeting. There was this feeling of street liberation; the Lesbian Avengers were eating fire all over the place. It was definitely a heady time. And I think all of a sudden, when the late eighties turned into early nineties, the liberation factor dropped out and the Subaru ad factor came up, and the movement turned into a market. That's when I felt this spiritual vacuum. And if I really look at it, that spiritual vacuum is what drew me towards making this film--that sense of loss.

CC: But how did that transformation actually occur? Was it by happenstance or ...

SSD: Well, I had the idea for this film, so I decided that I would just go to Israel for the first time. And of course within thirty-six hours I met someone who had been a right-wing settler in Egypt when the Israeli Army was trying to take the Sinai peninsula and give it to the Egyptians. He wrapped himself in barbed wire, took to the roof of the yeshiva, and tried to fight the Israeli Army, because he was a right-wing settler and didn't want to give up the land. And then he moved into Jerusalem, to the old City, and he started to transform, to become more left. And by the time I met him, he was a complete leftist, and I helped him to come out as gay. And he was Orthodox and grew up very Orthodox. I guess that was the first person I met in that world.

CC: And did this become a part of your spiritual journey? Was the film part of your spiritual development?

SSD: Yes, it was. I became more religious. Which I didn't expect, anticipate, or even necessarily want. [Laughs] But I'm really happy to be here at this point, and I think the film revolutionized my life.

CC: How did it exactly? What was that process of transformation?

SSD: Well, you know, I think we all have--[to Lucy Walker] you had this within the Amish world, too--there are certain people with whom you have this intense bonding. And for me the portal into observance came through all these Hasidic and Orthodox lesbian and gay people who I met. I just kind of leapt on board and they carried me away. I was doing Shabbats with people, having never participated in a real Shabbat growing up; I was learning Torah every week for two years from a Hasidic gay man; I was being taught songs; they taught me how to lay tefillin for the first time; one of the rabbis I met got me my first pair of tefillin. The ancient bone in my body was sort of touched and ignited. And I didn't know it was there. [Editor's note: tefillin fr. Aramaic--leather cubes containing scriptural texts inscribed on parchment; worn by Jewish males over thirteen years old on the head and arm during morning prayers]

CC: Lucy, where did your film fit in for you? Where were you at the point that you started the film in terms of your faith identity?

LW: My attraction to the material was so automatic that I hadn't stopped to analyze exactly what it was. I've always been drawn to any kind of utopia; the idea of the Amish cultural resistance, right in the middle of America, in the face of American influence, was even more striking to me in this regard, particularly as a lapsed Christian. I became very disillusioned with the institutional religion of England, my native country, at a very young age. You don't get very far in the Anglican faith before you realize that your Church was founded because your king wanted to get a divorce. So you're already questioning your own Church before you've got very far in life. My lapse from institutional Church of England practice reached a point where I refused even to go to services at Christmas because of the hypocrisy. And then I began searching through Buddhism and Taoism, a sort of spiritual journey, although I'd always been drawn to the teachings of Jesus and certain parts of the Gospels and the Bible growing up. So working with this community of powerful faith, one that survived in the midst of a secular culture, was quite attractive to me. It was an encounter that raised as many questions as it answered, actually.

CC: It's funny--it occurred to me that the Amish term for the "lapsed" or fallen world outside the Church is "english," and there you were, an "English" director, making a film right in the midst of their world.

LW: That's right. A joke lost on the Amish. When I told them I grew up in England they asked me what language they spoke there; to them, everything outside their Dutch world ("Dutch" coming not from the Netherlands but from the word "deutsch," or German) is english, but has nothing to do with being English.

CC: I also couldn't help noticing a profound longing for community in both of these films. Watching Devil's Playground, one sees this almost prelapsarian existence they've created for themselves--reflected most obviously by the fact that they're wearing anachronistic clothing and riding around in horse-and-buggy and living off of the land and so forth. But it also struck me that by forbidding so many things (and this applies to the Hasidic and Orthodox communities in a more complicated way) and by making the law so clear, in a way that many "modern" individuals couldn't possibly tolerate, a pretty nice bargain is struck. To the extent that the adherent can obey the laws comfortably, the meaning of life is completely clear, Heaven and Hell are real places and the path to Heaven is clear. There's this poignant sense in both films of really wanting to be true to one's self but also to belong and enjoy the enormous benefits of the community.

LW: Yes. I was always aware that there was this prelapsarian idyll to be had. And some of the most interesting moments I had shooting the film were just in experiencing the bliss these people had from this lifestyle. I remember sitting in a yard one beautiful summer evening, watching the hummingbirds at the feeder, sipping lemonade handed to me by this very beautiful old couple, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, all of whom live within a few miles, all of whom do exactly the same thing, all of whom take wonderful care of their elders. When you retire as an Amish, they put you in the house next door, the "grand-daadi" house or the Grandfather's house, an annex next to the main house, and you've got all that family around to take care of you, you're involved, you're shelling peas and picking strawberries, never having to question what you've done with your life. There's no such thing as divorce, but this makes marriages much happier, it seems.

You know, as a feminist, a modern working woman, to find myself envying this old Amish woman who'd never been allowed to even think about having a job, and who'd had fifteen kids and a husband who considered himself the head of the household--what was I doing envying and admiring and even enjoying this person? It was very confusing and alluring and interesting. I caught myself thinking at times, "I don't want to grow old without being Amish--it sucks out there! This is the way to do it."

On the other hand, there was another woman I met who was 42, balding, dreadfully thin, and perpetually sad. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. It was obvious that she had some kind of disease but I was too scared to ask her about it. Finally, I found out that she had anorexia. Now what was a 42-year-old woman doing with anorexia? She'd had seven kids, her husband suffered from a variety of health problems. She just didn't want any more. And the only method of birth control available to her was fasting.

Then I thought to myself, "This can't be allowed, this isn't right, something's got to be done." Or you find out that the kids aren't allowed to go to high school. The Amish believe that education fosters pride. Kids used to go and work the farms after finishing eighth grade, but the Amish have run out of farmland, so now they're put to work in factories--the government grants the Amish an exemption from child labor laws on religious grounds. So our main character was working in a metal factory at the age of thirteen--a smart, ambitious, marvelously curious kid. What's his brain going to turn into if he's stuck working in a metal factory and fantasizing about parties on the weekends when he turns sixteen? Where else has his brain got to go apart from stirring up trouble for the police? What else fun and engaging is he going to be able to do?

So I would always alternate between this idea of the Amish community as Heaven or Hell, thinking "This is a great way to live, this is better than we have it," and "This is a terrible way to live, this is cruel." Those within the Amish population that fit the cookie mold are really happy. But the second that you want to do something different, or that you are different, you're in Hell. Interestingly, there were a couple of gay Amish I knew that didn't wind up making it into the film, including the guy that gave me the title "Devil's Playground," who still can't come out to his family. He moved to Florida; his mother writes him asking when he's going to find a nice girl to marry. Meanwhile, the Amish don't even have a word for homosexuality. It's just termed "sinful thoughts." So there are these absolutely marvelous, admirable aspects to being Amish, and others that can really make one's life utter misery.

SSD: I'm curious about what you just said because what I find so interesting is the question, what do those who've left, the outsiders, bring to this hermetically sealed tradition? And I think what's been fascinating is how gay and lesbian people have been this incredible bridge of imperfection for other Hasidic and Orthodox Jews, who watch the film and confess that they, too, have felt like they don't fit the idyllic image that you were talking about, shelling peas with the family and so on.

Of course, for gay and lesbian people, a traditional life trajectory is always the hardest thing to imagine. That idyllic familial setting is out of reach if, for example, you're a man, and you're not going to be closeted to your wife, or you're not willing to enter into a contract with her acknowledging that you're gay but that you're going to try to make this marriage work--that's one option along a continuum available to gay Orthodox and Hasidic men. There's this pressure to be the perfect Jew, and here you have a community which deems itself imperfect, because the farther away they are in historical terms from the voice of Sinai, the farther away they are from the prophets. Hasidim--especially Hasidim--have this idea that the generations are declining as they move farther away from Moses and Abraham and Sarah. Add to that the double imperfection of having been decimated in Europe, and their existence here is a kind of carbon copy of a life lost to the past in what was already a sort of second home in Eastern Europe. So just their survival itself is a miracle. Many people after the end of World War II thought that Orthodoxy was dead, that it would disappear.

So I met people in the course of making the film, like David, who desperately tried to change his homosexuality for eleven years, snapping rubber bands on his wrists, literally dating hundreds of women, to the point where we're showing this film around the world and women would come up to me afterwards and say, "Hey! I dated him." [Laughs] They would say, "Yeah, we went out on a few dates, and then he disappeared, and I never knew why ..."

But [Hasidic and Orthodox] viewers would look at him and say, "Wow. I don't have such kavanah--such intention--in my prayers." There's a scene of David at the Wailing Wall, praying to God with such fervor. So all of these people confess their "outsider-ness" in all of these different ways as we show the movie. We can be that little valve that opens the door for people to stand in that imperfect "outsider-ness" that really is universal.

Which leads me to wonder about that seamlessness that you were describing before: how much does that seamlessness describe the cracks in these traditions?

CC: You both had to penetrate an enclosed universe that, as filmmakers, is highly problematic, since both traditions largely prohibit the filming of rituals, and their adherents are for the most part unwilling to be filmed.

SSD: It's actually interesting, because film was the most illogical medium for me to do this project. Here I was trying to make a film about these basically invisible people who didn't want to be seen. And I was trying to film Orthodox life. Orthodox life is defined by Shabbat. That's the core of an Orthodox Jew's week, and you cannot operate a camera on Shabbat. You can't turn a camera on. It's halachically forbidden. The Passover Seder that's coming up next week--can't film that. Can't film Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; can't film Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. So basically, the real crux of this movie was how to make invisibility illuminating.

CC: Getting to this question of invisibility: one of the things a documentarian has to do, of course, is to make themselves as invisible as possible while they're filming, to be as limited as possible in their intrusiveness, correct?

SSD: Well, every choice around filming for me was also a choice around community-building--just getting everyone together. Ultimately, I arrived at a strategy of gathering everyone together to perform these tableaux behind a screen. So we put up this thirteen-foot screen at the NYU soundstage and said, "Come form your image behind the screen as a community." The question I was trying to address with this device was why anyone would want to be Orthodox and also be gay. Why not just leave? The logical thing would be to just get out. So I had to show audiences why these people were attached to the tradition. In order to do that, I wanted to represent the faith in some concrete way.

So in those silhouette tableau shots we enacted Shabbat, we enacted the blessings over the wine, we did a wedding. We did this straight wedding except all the parts were played by queers. That was amazing, because for all of these people, the wedding is the one ritual that truly excludes them. I had a Hasidic woman who came to play the bride: she's married; her husband doesn't know that she's a lesbian, never mind that she's in a movie; she brought her little boy, who only spoke Yiddish, so everyone on the set is speaking Yiddish to him; and we're asking her to marry this gay guy. Even more amazing, in her community, women can't drive--she's in the most strict community--they don't have television, they don't go to movies. So it wasn't even about the shot, it was also about the medium. A lot of the people who are in the film won't ever be able to see it.

CC: How did you get access to these people? How do you get to someone who's deep inside a Lubavitcher community?

SSD: You spend six years crisscrossing the globe trying to find anyone who would come forward. And you use the Internet and you use word of mouth and you use fliers and you work the support groups ...

LW: It's funny. People can't believe that Devil's Playground was made at all; they try getting inside the Amish world and say it can't be done. Actually, it's just time, time, time. A lot of time spent off-camera, building those relationships. My experience of the closed community was that once you're inside, you can navigate, and the "closed" community becomes a "close" community in a very beneficial way. The amount of time required is not something any generally self-respecting professional would throw at it; so it was my nutty, stubborn persistence that brought me to a place where Amish people were willing to be filmed.

SSD: I don't know about you, but basically Orthodox gay people didn't want me to make this movie. Orthodox gay people--not just the Orthodox straight anti-gay people. They were used to being abominations. That's what it says in Leviticus. The idea that a film could give them a voice was completely alien; they felt that a film would undermine them even more in their communities.

LW: How did you work round that?

SSD: Only when I brought back filmed interviews with Orthodox rabbis and convened a community screening. I showed them excerpts from those interviews and they sat there, just floored. There were eighty people, and it was the first time they'd seen religious leaders take them seriously. And their issues, their lives, were on the table as legitimate. That was the first time I felt that switch, when I said to myself, "Okay, this film will get made. This film will give this issue a human face."

LW: I wasn't sure how to show the film to Amish people because officially they're not allowed to see it. Although unofficially, the Amish watch a lot more stuff than they'd like the bishops to think. It's sort of like boarding school, in terms of testing what you can get away with without the headmaster finding out. There was this one Amish guy riding on his buggy who told me all about the episode of last night's Survivor. All of them have seen Witness, which officially they detest, but actually they think is kind of interesting. There's this whole double standard going on.

By now, every Amish person's seen Devil's Playground. But the first screening I was terribly nervous about. I'd been terrified during the making of the film that I'd be responsible for bringing down the Amish and getting people in trouble. There were real consequences and real things at stake; anyone who wanted to be taken out of the film, I took out, because how could I risk them getting shunned or fearful that they were going to go to Hell. The stakes were so high for these people, I was constantly feeling on egg shells. I was terrified. I didn't know how to show it to people in the community because officially they couldn't come to watch it. But I really wanted to involve them with it and make it as constructive and pain-free an experience as I possibly could for their community.

There was a festival in Sarasota, Florida, so I took the film there thinking that the kids could come, because there's a funny Amish community there which a lot of the young kids go to in January or February if they've got seasonal construction labor. It's the most liberal community in the Amish world--kind of like the vacation resort for the Amish. It's an extraordinary place. And I thought since a lot of young people in the film were there, it would be a great place to show the film.

We had this extraordinary thing happen where Devil's Playground kept selling out and selling out. They couldn't figure out where all these tickets were going. Ten out of the multiplex's marquees were all Devil's Playground. Opening night--and this was at a giant, pink-neoned Florida Cineplex--coming down the aisle were your real Amish elders: black garments, long beards, grandmothers in bonnets and aprons. Each of them told the ticket takers they were there just to see if the film was accurate. Of course, the teenage ticket takers didn't care, but the rest of the Amish community sure did. My heart was palpitating.

In the Q & A afterwards, what I hadn't expected, and what proved to be the overwhelming note of the reaction, was how they saw their choice to be Amish validated. The film medium had given such weight to their existence, it was such a powerful mirror to hold up for them.

SSD: I had so many Orthodox Jews say to me, "This film is Orthodox bashing." They have been used to this stream of negative media images. [To Lucy Walker] You had Witness; we had A Price Above Rubies, A Stranger Among Us, and Kadosh. As soon as an image of a Hasid is on the screen they're irate. What's amazing is that we actually had Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians together, protesting the film in Baltimore. (I always joke that we're doing "interfaith work" with this film). But a year later, we had the First Orthodox Synagogue of Baltimore invite the film to screen inside the synagogue. And we had 400 people come. And that process started happening all over. We've now had seventeen orthodox synagogues invite the film to screen in the synagogues. We just convened the first ever Orthodox mental health conference on homosexuality. We trained eleven people in Jerusalem and they facilitated screenings of the film to 2000 high school principals, teachers, superintendents and counselors, mostly in the Orthodox school system in Israel.

CC: I read in another interview with you somewhere that you felt the real film began when the credits rolled and the lights went up. What did you mean by that?

SSD: Well, I guess it's good that I was born in this era and not in the era of fly-on-the-wall verite, because I can't help myself from being engaged. I'm ideologically opposed to the notion that it's possible to leave a room unchanged when you have the camera there.

CC: You don't believe that.

SSD: It's ridiculous.

CC: So the Heisenberg principle of filmmaking obtains, in your view. That's a platitude of documentary, isn't it, that you're trying to put a camera in there without disturbing the environment.

SSD: I think a platitude of "old-school" filmmaking, definitely.

CC: So you were there as ...

SSD: I was there as an interventionist. I was dealing with people whose lives were destroyed. They had been kicked out of their families; they were thrown out of yeshivas; they were involved in marriages between husbands and wives. The level of devastation was so serious that I felt like my job was to take that ton of suffering and hoist it onto the rabbis' chests and completely break their hearts, so that they would actually do something and really take this on, not just as a prohibition on paper and an abstract issue, but as a human struggle and a challenge to Judaism to be not just a club for a certain percentage of people, but some kind of vision for humanity. Otherwise, why claim that you're a religion? If you're just going to be a club, what value do you have? What's your ethical teaching?

So I was quite happy to play different roles; determining when to play different roles was always the challenge. When somebody's breaking down in front of you, do you drop the camera to comfort them? When are you really responsible as a director, and when are you responsible as an interventionist?