 marks the first creative collaboration between Toronto-based artist Chase Joynt (Everyday to Stay) and NYC-based filmmaker Brooke Sebold (Red Without Blue). 

With haunting suburban visuals backed by the rich sounds of Toronto based-band Ohbijou, 

 powerfully engages in a relationship between an Orthodox Jewish mother and her transgender son as they navigate silent secrets of a shared past.

"Hauntingly beautiful. Rarely have I watched a film that is such a perfect union of parsimony and punch. It left me breathless." - Michelle Stone 

"Perfectly timed and sequenced, 

 is so resolutely personal in it's detailing. Joynt points to a place, draws a circle around it, and then refuses to fill it in, restraint that leaves a powerful silence in which the viewer can inhabit." - Mike Hoolboom, Winner of the EP Canada/Canada Film Capital Award for Emerging Canadian Artist, Inside Out LGBT Film & Video Festival (2012)

Akin

—"unkosher" in Yiddish— is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover "seder". With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives. Incisive cultural critics, astute, poignant, and poetic—never cynical—they weave their way from New York to Jerusalem in pursuit of a progressive, secular Jewish identity that draws from their childhood reminiscences as much as from their contemporary queer lives.

TREYF

 is a practice of gratitude depicting the intimate Shabbat prep in our Queer Jewish home. 

When my partner came out as trans (a task which repeats itself daily), it became all the more important to seek comfort in daily rituals and meditations, so I began looking for queer interpretations of our faith.

I became inspired by Biblical angels as they are non-binary figures in Judaism, acting as the messengers of God or the future. From where I stand, gender expansive people such as my partner, are too, messengers of the future.

Tiptoes

The filmmaker collects notes on the Jewish water ritual mikvah, which slip into immersive, recollections of memories. 

Mikvah, directly translated as a ‘collection [of water]’, a ritual immersion in water revolving around the body’s innate holiness and purposed towards marking transition – physical and transcendent, minute, and tectonic – becomes the visual language and essayistic frame for exploring the filmmaker’s own marking and ideas. As information and images are collected, and details and meanings of the ritual of the mikvah understood, so too are the feelings and thoughts which have brought the filmmaker to make the film. As they collect themselves, and the memories they recall underwater come closer to the present day, the truths they (re)claim become an offering on the way we evolve and love.

Categories

Jewish