UPDATE: Chicago screening of Hatboxes

Mark your calendar!

We can now share the place and time of the screening of Hatboxes at the Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival

"Romance: Good, Bad and Ugly"
11:30 a.m., Sunday, 15 September 2013

Film Row Cinema, 1104 South Wabash, 8th floor
 Won't Go Quietly
Today I Will Tell Her
Rose, Mary and Time
Hatboxes
Finding Melody!

Hatboxes glossary: keeping kosher 1

What Jews may and may not eat is covered under the laws of kashrut (Hebrew:  כַּשְׁרוּת).  

A vegetarian diet may be considered de facto kosher (fit for eating) unless non-kosher insects happen to infiltrate the food (crickets and locusts are considered kosher).  

An animal must be disease-free and not only have a cloven hoof and chew its cud to be kosher (cow, deer, sheep = kosher; pig (cloven hoof but no cud chewing), horse (cud chewing but no cloven hoof), bobcat (no cud chewing, no cloven hoof) = non-kosher ("treyf")), it has to be slaughtered in a ritually acceptable way, which includes efforts to reduce the animal's suffering.  

The fact that Deuteronomy explicitly prohibits eating a limb torn from a live animal makes you wonder what people were doing to prompt the prohibition.

Meat and milk may not be consumed together, so don't ask for butter and sour cream with your steakhouse baked potato side, and if there are milk solids in your bread mix, forget about serving that loaf with your roast.

Nadine inquires about whether bread mix is kosher in Hatboxes

Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher; shellfish and bottom feeders like catfish are prohibited.

Chickens, domesticated geese, turkeys, and ducks, and pigeons may be kosher. Raptors and carrion eaters are not kosher.

Some foods are parve, which means they are neutral in relation to meat or dairy products.  These include vegetables, fruit, nuts, water, salt, and eggs.

What prohibitions do your eating habits include, and where do they come from?

Meet the Hatboxes Cast: Kat O'Connor

Kat O’Connor plays Nadine, a secular Jewish lesbian lawyer, who runs into Miriam in a grocery store.

Nadine and Lena out for a run in Hatboxes

In real life, Kat divides her time between theatre and film, and working as a marketing and social media professional.  

She has been featured in a number of independent films, including The Dog (Featurepoint Cinema), Schizo Cool (Schizcago Pictures), and 16th Street (Studio 22).

She’s a company member of Terra Mysterium, a Chicago-based collective of musicians, actors, dancers, poets, magicians, and fire performers; creating, producing, and performing experiential works of music, theatre, and performance art that are rooted in the Earth mysteries. Kat has performed with them both musically and theatrically at the Chicago Fringe Festival, LaCosta Theatre, and a variety of community festivals. She'll be appearing at Terra Mysterium this September.

But, truth be told, she doesn’t always have her feet on the ground. In her spare time, she practices aerial circus arts at the Actors Gymnasium.

A graduate of Drew University, she is a natural storyteller, with words or, just as often, without. Her personal mission is to tell the story, and thus change the world, one heart at a time.

Her website is here. 
Follow her on Twitter.

Meet the Hatboxes Cast: Robyn Okrant

Robyn Okrant plays the role of Miriam, the 30-something Orthodox Jewish milliner whose husband has recently abandoned her.

You may have seen Robyn before. Like in an Onion short, or a Luna Carpet commercial on television.  She confesses to being more than an actress. She’s also an author, a freelance writer, a story-teller, a director, and a yoga teacher. 

Maybe you caught her blog, www.livingoprah.com. All about following Oprah's advice for one year. It was read by an international audience and has been visited by over a half a million people. Her book, LIVING OPRAH: My One Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk, was published by Center Street in 2010.  

Oh, and she appeared on the Today Show, CNBC’s The Oprah Effect (which, to her mother's delight was seen internationally...even on American Airlines' in-flight entertainment), The Bonnie Hunt Show, Fox and Friends, The Joy Behar Show, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She’s also been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago SunTimes and has been seen in Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, USAToday.com, Salon.com, and The Huffington Post.

Miriam in her millinery in Hatboxes

She calls Chicago home, along with her husband and two cats.  She has an MFA in performance art from the Art Institute of Chicago, which followed her undergraduate degree from Bennington College.

And if you want to see a little more of her, click on this short video, a part of Ready, Set, Wife.

Here’s her website.  http://www.robynokrant.com/

And you can follow her on Twitter.

Coming to a screen near you

Attention Chicagoans!  HATBOXES is slated for a Chicago-area premiere!

We've just received word that our film will screen at the Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival. This festival takes places September 13-15.

And, good news! The screening of HATBOXES will avoid Yom Kippur.  The film will be screened on September 15th, so save the date!

What time! Well, have to confess, we can't tell you yet about that because we just found out that we have been invited to screen at the festival.

As filmmakers, it is extremely gratifying to know that the project we have brought to life and nurtured, will be reaching audiences.

Before this premiere, we'd like to introduce you to people you will be seeing on screen, as well as some of the key creative people behind the scenes.

Not only would we like you to circle the date of September 15 on your calendar, and plan to come.  We'd also like you to subscribe to the blog and.or like us on Facebook so you can find about some of the important people who made this film.

And since we often like to end a blog post with the a question, here's the one for today: can you come on September 15th?

Tikkun Olam in "The Painting"

Jean Laguionie's animated film Le tableau is a thinly veiled philosophical treatise.  

still from Le Tableau, from a profile in L'Express

In the self-contained world of the painting, the Toupins (the completely painted figures, rendered in groanably punning English as "the Alldunns") lord it over the Pasfinis (the unfinished "Halfies") and the Reufs ("Sketchies").  The Alldunns live it up in a sumptuous chateau and espouse not just snobbery but nihilism:  they conclude the painter is never coming back and may not even exist.  And surely there is nothing outside of the painting ("il n'y a pas de hors texte," n'est-ce pas, M. Derrida?)—!

The Halfies and Sketchies live in fear of Alldunn bullying, but the Alldunn youth Ramo—très French with his auk's nose and cyclist's body—is in love with the Modigliani-esque Halfie Claire and challenges the smug Alldunn elitism.  An adventure with Halfie Lola and Sketchie Plume ensues, during which the travelers emerge into a dusty live-action studio and discover other paintings.  They have a chat with an odalique and a permanently grumpy self-portrait of the painter before moving on to Venice in permanent Carnival mode.

The idea that the painted characters don't even need the painter—why couldn't the Halfies and Sketchies just paint themselves and their world?—seems consistent with the classic Jewish concept Tikkun Olam (repairing or healing the world).  It's up to us, not the Almighty, to build a perfect society in an effort to bring the world to perfection.

The cosmogonic question, Who painted the painter? crosses physics, religion, philosophy—and film.

Hatboxes glossary: hats/head-coverings/tzniut

Tzni'ut is an encompassing Jewish conception of modesty and humility that emanates from the Torah  (Micah 6:8, Numbers 5:18) and Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 97b; Tractate Sukkah 45b) as a bedrock value.  

Tzni'ut can be observed in mystical tales of the Tzadikim Nistarim, 36 righteous individuals whose very existence is said to secure the world against destruction.  Exemplars of humility, the Tzadikim themselves may not know they are among the 36, and if they do, they would never call attention to their special status.

Observant Jewish men cover their heads as a sign of their reverence for and obedience to a higher power, a practice which dates to biblical times. A man may wear a yarmulke (Hebrew: כִּפָּה‎ "kipa"), a cap, or one of many different broad-brimmed hats, depending on his sect or community.  Sometimes, men wear both a yarmulke and a hat.

Observant married Jewish women keep their hair covered as a mark of modesty, though variations from hats through scarves to wigs exist across different communities.   Modest clothing—skirts reaching at least to the knee, blouses covering the elbows, and no trousers—are strongly encouraged, as well.

Miriam with two of her customers at her millinery in Hatboxes

In Hatboxes, Miriam is a milliner—a hatmaker—but she wears vibrant scarves instead of hats throughout Hatboxes.  Maybe she's a bit at arms-length from her community, or maybe she's coloring inside the lines, but with the colors that suit her personality.

How do you color outside the lines?

Hatboxes to screen in Palm Springs

Hatboxes has been selected for inclusion in the 2013 Cinema Diverse—The Palm Springs Gay and Lesbian Film Festival!

Palm Springs is home to a GLBT community as vibrant as its magnificent midcentury modern architecture and arresting natural surroundings.

Let us know if you plan to attend—you can see Hatboxes at 1:30 on Friday, 20 September, and festival promoters have planned after parties on all four evenings. The full festival schedule is to be released by 20 August or so.