I’ve been to every one of the Denver Film Festivals, and I think this year’s is a good one. There are films of great courage, exceptional visual beauty and subjects that range from the Iranian protests over women’s headscarves to Mongolian nationalists, to Ukrainian artist-soldiers to rabbis in drag to the marvelous Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein, with a lovely performance by Teri Garr, who died just a few days ago.
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Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s Seed of the Sacred Fig is a work of immense bravery and humanity. It’s about a family in Iran during the headscarf protests. A man who works for the government in the crackdown overrides his conscience and covers up his guilt with brutality – and when his daughters agree with the protesting women, he becomes a monster. Rasoulof, with his cast and crew had to flee Iran for Europe because imprisonment and torture were a certainty for them.
Not many films confront an audience with the terrible ambivalence of the documentary Porcelain War. On the one hand, it shows artists of great delicacy; on the other, gruesome images of the war on Ukraine.
Andrey is a painter of landscapes. Anya makes intricate line drawings and complex, colorful images on porcelain figures made by her husband, Slava. The art of these three is full of humanity and beauty, as are images in the film of natural scenes and the intricacy of dried flowers. But this is Ukraine and the three are also fighters in the war against the Russian invaders. They also did much of the filming, and it’s hard to imagine the internal struggles of people like these who make beautiful art and also show scenes of combat, drones blowing up tanks and bodies lying in the streets. It adds up to a profound vision of what war does to people.
At first glance, the documentary Sabbath Queen looks like an old, familiar story. An American-Israeli man comes from 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis – but he is gay and doesn’t fit. American director Sandi Simcha Dubowski even made a similar film called Trembling before G-D in 2001. But it doesn’t take long before you see that Sabbath Queen has stunning reach and depth.
The man, Amichai Lau-Lavie, has an alter ego – he puts on an exaggerated middle-aged woman’s wardrobe and wig, and goes out as Hadassah Gross, a Hungarian woman with words of advice for just about anyone she meets. She makes provocative pronouncements like “Redemption will only come through transgression.” And there’s more.
Director Dubowski filmed Lau-Lavie over a period of 21 years, from when Lau-Lavie was a young man, into the present when he’s middle-aged and has gone through all those years of self-examination. Dubowski also interviews Lau-Lavie’s brother over these years. Benjamin Lau is a prominent conservative rabbi in Israel, and the debate that the film sets up between the two brothers is about the importance of observing definitions and boundaries, or violating them deliberately in order to create new ways for human beings to live their lives honorably.
Sabbath Queen ventures way beyond the story of one person, and way beyond Judaism. It’s a dilemma that’s being fought out in all sorts of ways all over the world. It’s fundamental to the American election, and this is an important movie –Sabbath Queen is an example of the ways film festivals can make serious contributions to human life.
And there are many films I look forward to seeing. Sean Baker’s Anora, Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson, Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Ramell Ross’s Nickel Boys, and, for me, most of all, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.
