By Matthew Carey for DEADLINE
A documentary over two decades in the making is about to reach theaters – Sandi DuBowski’s Sabbath Queen, winner of awards at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival.
The film about “Amichai Lau-Lavie’s journey from radical drag queen to influential Rabbi of a God-optional, artist-driven New York synagogue” opens in New York City on November 22 (IFC Center) and in Los Angeles on December 5 (Laemmle Royal), with a national rollout to follow.
In the trailer for Sabbath Queen – watch it above – Lau-Lavie describes family lore that maintains he is descended “from 38 consecutive generations of rabbis” stretching back a thousand years. He left his native Israel in the late 1990s, arriving in New York as a young gay man declaring “artists are the new rabbis” and became known for his appearances as drag persona “Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the widow of six Hasidic rabbis (all from the same extended family).”
