Sabbath Queen

One step after another, Sabbath Queen follows Amichai Lau-Lavie’s journey from radical drag queen to the synagogue, in the role of Rabbi and cultural agitator: a destiny of sorts, between tradition and counter-tradition, art and pacifism.

COMMENTARY
Amichai Lau-Lavie is a remarkable character: the scion to thirty-eight consecutive generations of orthodox rabbis, openly gay, inventor in the 1980s of the character Rebbetzin Hadassah, a drag queen, a scholar of the Torah, creator of the Storahtelling performance and of the Lab/Shulan, an inclusive Jewish congregation. After becoming a rabbi himself, he reinvented culture and religion through transgression, and above through art. In the finale, Amichai, referring to October 7th 2023, addresses Israel and Palestine asking. “How can we reimagine our sacred traditions to achieve peace?”

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
What struck me immediately about Amichai was his charisma and irreverent lightness, despite carrying the weight of descending from thirty-eight generations of rabbis; he is, after all, a shape-shifter, defying every definition. To the question: “Did you do the right thing?”, he answers: “I don’t know. Nor will we know for another hundred years”.