Sandi DuBowski
New York, NY
DuBowski is the Director/Producer of Trembling Before G-d, Producer of A Jihad for Love, and Co-Producer of Budrus. His award-winning work has screened at Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca, Toronto and over 200 festivals, had theatrical release in over 150 cities, aired on BBC, The Sundance Channel, PBS, ZDF-Arte, and been funded by over 60 foundations including The Creative Capital Foundation, The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, The Steven Spielberg Righteous Persons Foundation, and Cinereach. He is Good Pitch U.S. Outreach Director, a partnership of The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and BRITDOC, which has leveraged over $9M for documentaries and campaigns. He was a media strategist with The Sundance Institute DFP at The Skoll World Forum, attended TEDIndia, and was a Mentor at BAVC Producer’s Institute. He speaks, consults, serves on panels, and leads workshops on turning movies into movements at Tribeca, True/False, Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, Sheffield, Silverdocs, IFP, and Docaviv, and launched Films That Change the World www.filmsthatchangetheworld.com to engage people through global events. He is in production on The Amichai Film Project, a new film about a 21st century spiritual innovator for our skeptical, secular digital generation funded by The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program.
Trembling Before G-d
Sandi DuBowski
Artist BioTrembling Before G-d is an unprecedented feature documentary that shatters assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma—how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality. As the film unfolds, we meet a range of complex individuals—some hidden, some out—from the world’s first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to closeted, married Hasidic gays and lesbians to those abandoned by religious families to Orthodox lesbian high-school sweethearts. Vividly shot with a courageous few over five years in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, London, Miami, and San Francisco, Trembling Before G-d is an international project with global implications that strikes at the meaning of religious identity and tradition in a modern world.