Hatboxes gets a frum audience

A is an Orthodox Jewish lesbian who lives in a sprawling house in Chicago with many children and animals and occasional others. She has the longest dining room table I’ve ever seen in a real person’s house.  A and I met several years ago through a mutual friend.  I follow her blog posts with interest.

Hatboxes features a frum woman (“frum,” Yiddish: פֿרום, related to the German fromm, meaning "pious" or "devout") coming to grips with major changes in her life, including – maybe – her sexuality.   It's a film I'd like Orthodox women to see, whether they are lesbian or bi or questioning or just interested in seeing Orthodox women on film.  But really, if it can make one lesbian feel a little less alone, then maybe it's done its job.  However, the likelihood of Orthodox lesbians availing themselves of a public screening of Hatboxes seems dim in the extreme.  Fear of exposure is a powerful deterrent.

Miriam (Robyn Okrant) in her millinery, Hatboxes

A had invited me to come to her house so we could talk about Hatboxes for her blog.  We talked for about 20 minutes, and then I told her that I'd brought a screener copy of Hatboxes to watch if she wanted to.  Good Chassidish woman that A is, she doesn't have a TV, so she ran it on her laptop.  She seemed to like it very much and said she appreciated its restraint and the depth of its respect for frumkeit and the research that went into the making of the film. She spotted only one small mistake, but shrugged it off as minor (and no, we’re not saying what it is!). Otherwise..."It was great!"

I underestimated how anxious I was about A seeing it, both as another artist and as an Orthodox Jew.  I worried that we’d gotten things wrong—big things, like its tone or ethos other bedrock elements.  I was relieved that A responded positively with emotions ranging from delight to curiosity to wanting to know what happens next.

We'll keep you posted on when the interview runs. 

Susana Darwin

Personal Best: going from "period piece" to dated

Robert Towne's movie Personal Best came out in 1982.  Set between 1976 and 1979, it follows the efforts of two pentathletes as they pursue berths in the 1980 Olympics.  We know what happened there...the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Games:  "All dressed up and no place to go."

The two athletes are lovers...until they are not.

from Personal Best (all the best first dates include arm wrestling)

At the time of the film's release, Coach Terry Tingloff's relationships with the women under his guidance just seemed complicated...sort of unusual, but pretty much shrug-worthy.  And his "I could've been a man's coach!" rant was just funny and true. Or at least truthy.

But then time passes and works its alchemy.  Now, Coach Tingloff taking a bowl of strawberry ice cream out of his charge's hands so he can lay down in her arms isn't compassionate, it's creepy.  Tingloff sneering, "Do you actually think that Chuck Knoll has to worry that Franco Harris is gonna cry 'cause Terry Bradshaw won't talk to him?" sounds whiny and bigoted 31 years later.

This can't be all in the ear that hears.  Taste changes, but these changes seem like something larger and more broadly cultural.

Moreover, the break-up of the women's romance has grown more inexplicable over time as their relationship moved from "necessarily" shadowy and ephemeral to something conceivably permanent.  The closetedness and evasions ring true from the era—trust me—but as a plot element, the relationship flimsiness their break-up depends on is sliding towards nonsense.

The Third-Way message that you can compete and try your best and yet be smart and strategic enough to be generous even as your killer instinct carries you to medal contention continues to resonate, but the sexism and homophobia and blithe predation seem to be going the way of the striped tube sock. A welcome extinction the day it actually happens.

Susana Darwin

Hatboxes goes international!

Hot on the heels of the hometown screening at Reeling 31 in Chicago, Hatboxes has been accepted into the 24th Melbourne Queer Film Festival!

 

...as in Melbourne, Victoria, in Australia, not Arkansas or Florida or any of the other Melbournes in the world. 

Melbourne of exceptional Italian cafés and the Queen Victoria Market and arresting graffiti...

harborside tunnel graffiti

© 2007

...and a royal botanic garden that has a catalpa tree that blossoms in November. That Melbourne.

The festival will take place 13 – 24 March 2014, so if you find yourself Down Under in March, the movies await you!

Reeling 31 screening

What a blast it was to see Hatboxes on the big screen at Chicago's beautiful Logan Theatre as part of Reeling 31:  The Chicago LGBT International Film Festival.

Hatboxes Associate Producer Amy Walsh and Writer/Director Susana Darwin

A gorgeous, auspicious snowstorm earlier in the day, black car service to—and from, if we're just just counting color—Logan Square, and a hopping party afterwards at El Cid 2 made it one fine day.

We look forward to squiring Hatboxes to more festivals...keep you posted!

if I had directed "Blue is the Warmest Color"

We've seen the criticism of Blue is the Warmest Color: 
—it's a guy directing two straight actresses portraying lesbians
—it's pornographic
—it exploits its actors
—it mystifies female sexuality/orgasm/bodies
—it runs too long
—it's too French

And we've seen the criticism of the criticism...but that's not why we're here.

If I had directed Blue is the Warmest Color, I'd have:
—shortened the first hour to 15 minutes because the sequence with Thomas doesn't need all that time to get the point across
—given Adèle and her family some modicum of table manners, though watching someone chew with her mouth open does make you focus on her eyes
—eased back on the high school classroom sequences because kids more thoughtful and erudite than most PhD students are just annoying
—lit the sex scenes less like operating theaters
—added a few dozen more positions to round out the lesbian sex catalogue (if you're gonna do it...)
—found a credible reason for Emma to decline sex
—explored Adèle's closetedness and Emma-the-artist's relationship to it, especially given the Pride sequences
—extended the break-up beyond one cataclysmic moment to balance the apparently epic sex with a parting of ways equal in dramatic power
—dropped all the talk about the weather
—made the narrative less dependent on Adèle's face (who said, "All film happens on the human face"?)
—dropped some of the voyeuristic shots
—broadened Adèle's menus beyond spaghetti bolognese, even though it's become the pan-EU dish

Some of the scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color resonate deeply, and it telegraphs passion compellingly.  Adèle and Emma each have a distinct presence, and you come to care about what's going to happen to them.  I appreciate the depiction of teen girls' bullying, predation by women, the vertigo of falling in love, the hope and the despair of seeing the lost lover again.  It's made me think some more about the meaning of hair and how intensely emotions can manifest physiologically.  The discussions of art surely cater mostly to art house audiences, and given the 20 minutes of sex, I'm still figuring out how to interpret the only onscreen shot of a vulva appearing while Emma is painting Adèle from life.  The subjectivity of Adèle's desire seemed more remotely conceived than Emma's, which is not to say that they have to match or even balance, but the intensity could go even deeper by bringing it more consciousness.

Go see it – see what you think.  What would you change?

—Susana Darwin (10 November 2013)

11 November 2013 addendum 
The movie's kind of a mess behind all the offscreen drama.  One thing the film seems to be trying to be about is how becoming someone's muse when you're young can create problems for your identity and your relationship, but ironically, the director's worshipful posture towards Adèle the actress/Adèle the character obscures the point.  A film can be complex without being messy (but maybe this is some sort of postmodern cinematic Escher interlock...?)  Anyway, in addition, I'd have:

—depicted more viscerally the chases and idealizations among Adèle the muse, Emma the artist, and Emma's art dealer

—not named the character "Adèle," the same name as the actress portraying her

reporting from Route 66

Almost 50 films in 27 hours—they sure can pack them in in Springfield, Illinois.  Hatboxes screened as part of the Saturday evening program of nine films at the Route 66 International Film Festival the first weekend of November.  

Films from as far away as Adelaide, Australia, and Bilbao, Spain, joined works from closer to home, ranging in length from just a couple of minutes to a couple of hours.

A versatile screening/performance space at the Capital City Bar and Grill was home to works about military/veteran themes, controversial topics, and family-friendly stories before Saturday evening's eclectic set of films.

Wind Up, Only Thunder, Retrovisor (Rear View), and Ella y el espejo (She and the Mirror) featured anxious themes and spooky atmospherics.  Ella edged back and forth between a black-and-white palette and muted colors where Wind Up made the most of Seattle's light to capture saturated colors.

Worth packed an entire thriller, twists and all, into 17 minutes. Comedy got its due in Broken, El lado frio de la almohada (The Cold Side of the Pillow), and You Don't Say! Besides Hatboxes (what did you expect?), the stylishness and polished timing of The Cold Side of the Pillow made it my favorite.

Many thanks to the Route 66 curators for including Hatboxes in this fine festival and for being such gracious hosts.

Susana Darwin

Meet the cast: Maya Boudreau

Maya Boudreau plays Hannah, Miriam and Aaron’s older daughter in Hatboxes. She graduated with a BFA in Theatre with honors from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in just three years.

Maya grew up in a small town in Illinois. It was here that Maya developed a strong sense of who she was. From a young age, Maya was involved in community and school theatrical productions.  At age fourteen, Maya and her parents moved to Chicago where she went to Walter Payton College Prep High School. 

While living in Chicago, Maya took advantage of every cultural experience that she could. Chicago became her home. Maya had the honor of studying and performing with such prestigious and innovative companies as Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Lookingglass Theatre, The Second City, American Theatre Company and Piven Theatre Workshop, among others. 

Hatboxes glossary: Havdalah

Once the Saturday evening sky becomes dark enough to see three stars, the Havdalah ceremony may begin, marking the end of the Sabbath.


Celebrants recite the blessing over a cup of wine, symbolic of joy.  They pass around a container of sweet spices, like cinnamon and cloves, which symbolizes the pleasure of the Sabbath. A braided candle calls to mind the multiple but unified strands of Judaism in the world, and its extinction in the remainder of the wine evokes the sadness of the end of the Sabbath.

Miriam and Nadine observe Havdalah in Hatboxes

How do you mark the difference between workaday life and a more special time?

Hatboxes Will Screen at Reeling 2013: The 31st LGBT International Film Festival

Yahoo!

Hatboxes will screen at Reeling 2013: The 31st LGBT International Film Festival in November.

Running from Thursday, November 7, through Thursday, November 14 at venues all over the city, Reeling will feature films from Chicago-based filmmakers and from as far away as Brazil and Austria.

Reeling is sponsored by Chicago Filmmakers, which Hatboxes has a special relationship to:  not only did its script take shape with the help of a Screenwriting II session at Chicago Filmmakers, all its scenes save one were filmed within steps of the Filmmakers’ office on Clark Street in Andersonville.

Stay tuned for screening details...

Hatboxes glossary: gossip

In a tense scene in Hatboxes between Miriam and her estranged husband, Aaron expresses concern about people in their community bearing tales about Miriam.

Aaron collects the last of his things in Hatboxes

Gossiping is considered one of the gravest sins in Judaism, reflecting an understanding of the power of speech:  the world was brought into being by the spoken Word; of the 43 sins enumerated in the main confessional prayer on Yom Kippur, at least a dozen are sins of speech. Tale-bearing is considered a sin on the level of murder, idol worship, and incest/adultery, and even sharing a piece of information that is true, that is not negative, and that would not hurt the subject is considered a violation of two commandments articulated in Leviticus:  "Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people," and "ye shall not wrong one another [with speech]" (Lev. 19:16 and Lev. 25:17, respectively).

The harm that speech can do cannot be repaired in the same way that a stolen bracelet can be returned or damage to a car repaired.  In Hatboxes, Aaron worries about Miriam's well-being even if true information were to circulate among her neighbors ("Miriam and Aaron are getting a divorce" or "Miriam has made friends with a woman who wears trousers").

In The Big Chill, the Jeff Goldblum charater asserts that no one can go a week without making a rationalization.  Who can go a day without gossiping?

ANOTHER FESTIVAL

Yes. There's more good news for HATBOXES.

We've been accepted at the 12^th Annual Route 66 International Film Festival.

 

The festival will be held on November 1-2, 2013, at the screening room adjacent to The Capitol City Bar and Grill, Springfield, Illinois. 

We're not sure exact timing yet for the screening, but details will be available soon at their website.

Is anybody up for a trip to Springfield?

Hatboxes glossary: keeping kosher 2

A kosher kitchen requires separate utensils, tableware, and cookware for dairy and meat products, and some folks even use separate appliances and linens.

Rendering a kitchen kosher, called kashering, can seem intimidating:  everything must be deep-cleaned, pots and pans have to get submerged in boiling water (or hot coals get dropped into them as they boil water so the water surges over the lip), and silverware has to get boiled, too.  Things with porous surfaces may have to be disposed of altogether.

Miriam and Nadine kasher Nadine's kitchen in Hatboxes

Keeping kosher is a way of paying attention to what goes into your mouth in addition to what comes out of it and serves as a constant reminder of of a Jew's place on the spectrum of Jewish life and observance.

What food customs root you to your culture?

Hatboxes glossary: clip-on earrings

Miriam and Nadine shop together in Hatboxes

In Hatboxes, Miriam exclaims, "You never see such nice clip-ons," as she peruses a whole tree of earrings in Lena's boutique.  "I think I'll get two."

Some observant Jews do not pierce their ears because it may be considered immodest. Tzni'ut (Hebrew: צניעות) is a body of Jewish law concerned with comportment, including dress, and relations between the sexes.  Tzni'ut is rooted in concepts of of humility and modesty, articulated repeatedly across the Bible as ideal traits, and it forms the basis of an enormous body of jurisprudence.

Ear-piercing sometimes gets included among the prohibitions against mutilating the body:  "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor imprint any marks upon you: I am the LORD." (Leviticus 19:28; the Talmud identifies tattooing as an idolatrous practice, but the rabbis disagreed about whether including the name of a deity was what was prohibited or the entire act itself.  800 years ago, Maimonides concluded that tattoos are entirely prohibited.)  In Exodus 32, Aaron collecting the earrings from women, sons, and daughters, but maybe melting them down to use as the Golden Calf casts a taint on piercings still, thousands of years later.

Is modesty a part of how you choose to dress yourself?

Hatboxes glossary: driving on the sabbath

Lighting a fire is among the 39 labors forbidden on the Sabbath, according to the Talmud (Tractate Shabbat 7:2), and since automobile engines burn fuel (among other reasons), one of the activities prohibited on the Sabbath is driving a car.

Orthodox Jews cleave closely to this prohibition (with exceptions; saving a human life trumps all other considerations), but non-Orthodox Jews rarely do.  For example, Reform Jews may consider driving to synagogue on the Sabbath to participate in the religious life of their community more important that adhering to a rule that may seem to isolate them.

In Hatboxes, Miriam tries to dissuade Nadine from driving home after their sabbath dinner, but Nadine is untroubled about being non-Orthodox.

Nadine and Miriam chat after Shabbos dinner

What religious precepts govern your day-to-day life?

not dying of embarrassment

A consistent theme in writer/director Lisa Cholodenko's films is the comedy and mortification bound up in sex.  I was relieved to hear her talk frankly about her own embarrassment directing sex scenes in the director's commentary to The Kids Are All Right. Jules' sporting with Paul features the wacky directiveness of porn, of which we know Jules and her wife are consumers.

Greta falls asleep right there in her pleather pants during sex with Lucy in High Art.

And in Laurel Canyon, Jane's grip on her son becomes excruciatingly clear when Sam picks up the phone in the middle of making love with his fiancée.

We filmed the most emotionally intense scenes in Hatboxes on the last day of our shoot, and we scheduled them out of chronological sequence.  I was probably more twitchy about it than either of the actors, and it wasn't even like they were going to be getting all naked and getting it on.  The three of us sat down together to talk things through before we started shooting. I attributed the actors' relative serenity to their professionalism and resolved to emulate them.

Nadine and Miriam in Hatboxes

I had the set cleared of all but essential crew at about 10:30 that Wednesday evening, right about the time someone started reading aloud the ingredients in Cheetos (a word to the wise:  don't).

Balancing the sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping values of directorial precision, humanity, and manners, we captured essential and good footage, and no one died of embarrassment.

What embarrasses you?

Susana Darwin

Hatboxes glossary: wine

Wine figures in Jewish rituals ranging from the Passover seder to weekly blessings at the beginning and end of the Sabbath.

Kiddush cup with wine

Kiddush is the blessing over the wine.  Traditionally, it goes, "Blessed are you, our Gd,* creator of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine."  Wine is marked just like humans with wide capacities, ranging from dignity to dissolution.

Islam specifically forbids the consumption of alcohol, and many Protestants eschew alcohol, as well.  What traditions does your culture associate with wine?


*To show respect to the Divine, Jews traditional do not write out this word.

Recognition

It's been a big couple of weeks for Hatboxes – it played at the We Like 'Em Short Festival in Baker City, Oregon, it will show at the Palm Springs Gay & Lesbian Film Festival on Friday, and...

Hatboxes won an audience choice award and the award for best director at the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival a few days ago!

Seeing Hatboxes on a big screen in a darkened theater with stadium seating with other impressive short films was a huge thrill, of course, and it's a delight to know audiences around the country are getting to see Hatboxes.

As the blog post Festive! described, getting into festivals means navigating a bewildering array of variables, and we've seen a few rejections come through in past few days. So...perfect timing on the awards.  What a lift!

Etta Worthington

But here's the thing:  none of this would have happened without the vision and energy of the intrepid Etta Worthington.  Etta saw things she liked in the script when she saw it two years ago, and I apparently inspired enough confidence in her for her to give Hatboxes the green light!  The film would not be what it is without her organizing and negotiating skills, her ability to inspire cast and crew, and all the countless other things that a producer does. So hats off to Etta – thank you!

Now, let's get back to work, sit our fannies down and get to writing, shall we?

Susana Darwin

Hatboxes glossary: "get"

Deuteronomy 24:1 forms the legal precedent for Jewish divorce, and a rabbinic debate in the first century CE established an expansive basis for divorce:  only mutual consent is required.

© Jen Taylor Friedman, http://www.hasoferet.com/ritual/myget.shtml

While Jewish law was unique in the ancient world for enacting the option of divorce and creating the ketuba, a prenuptial contract protecting a woman's economic interests in case of divorce, women are not empowered to initiate the process of a religious divorce.  "The bill of divorcement"—the document effecting divorced, called a get—may only be issued by the husband or his representative, not the wife.  Thus, a married Orthodox Jewish woman is at the mercy of her estranged husband to issue the get; "agunah"—a "chained woman"—is the term for a woman whose husband has her confined in legal limbo.

How have you experienced institutionalized sexism in your life?

Hatboxes glossary: samovar + candles

Jews from the Pale—the area of Eastern Europe stretching from Poland  through Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine and into Russia—absorbed some of the cultural practices of the gentiles around them, including the use of samovars to brew tea.  Often made of brass, samovars might feature elaborate metalwork.

Russian samovar and Sabbath candles

Traditionally, two candles get lit just before sunset on the Sabbath, though more than just two may be lit. Usually women light the candles and recite the prayer, but men are required to do so if no woman is present.  The candles mark the beginning of the Sabbath, a joyous moment.

What practices travelled with your family when they left their ancestral homelands?

Meet the Hatboxes Cast: Fawzia Mirza

Fawzia Mirza plays Lena, Nadine's pal. 

You may have seen her around on stage or on screen.  She appeared recently at the Goodman Theater in Happiest Song. 

Her film work includes roles in features Jamie and Jessie Are Not Together, Promise Land, The Queen of My Dreams, and Silhouettes.

She’s produced documentaries (Fish out of Water, A Message from the East), and has done stand-up comedy.

She also admits to a past as a lawyer. But now you can see her regularly in web series like Easy Abby. She’s writer and producer as well as star of a satirical web series that follows Kameron, the fictional long-lost lesbian Kardashian sister who was cut off, kicked out, and left to fend for herself. And here’s a sample of Kam Kardashian.