Production
Sandi Simcha DuBowski was making videos about the Christian religious right when he began to examine his own upbringing as a gay Conservative Jew, and began making a personal video diary of his search for homosexuality among the Orthodox Jewish community. On the making of the film, DuBowski said, "I don't think it was until I met people who were kicked out of their families and their Yeshivas, in marriages betraying their spouses, that it became clear why I was doing this film. But then, for me it assumed an enormous level of responsibility to the people I met, to the issue, to the community." He met thousands of people, but only a few agreed to appear in the film, as most were too frightened of being expelled from their community. Even when interviewing those who did agree to appear, DuBowski had to hide his film equipment so their neighbors would not know that they had agreed to take part. As a result, the documentary took six years to complete.
There is no narration, and the film may be considered to be an example of cinéma vérité. The film is also interspersed with silhouetted tableaus of Jewish religious practices, for example Shabbat. The language is predominantly English, with passages in Yiddish and Hebrew that are subtitled. Also subtitled are passages with significant amounts of "Yeshivish", Yiddish-influenced technical terms in Judaism; for example, posek is translated as "judge on Jewish law", and daven is translated as "pray".
The title is an allusion to the word Haredi (Hebrew: חֲרֵדִי), which can be interpreted as "one who trembles" in awe of God. The spelling of the word G-d in the film's title reflects the Jewish practice of avoiding writing a name of God. By omitting the middle letter, the word is not written in full, thus eliminating the possibility of accidentally destroying the written name of God, which would violate one of the 613 Mitzvot of Judaism (number 8 on Maimonides' list).
Read more about this topic: Trembling Before G-d
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)