In Select South Florida Theaters February 4-10 | Featuring Director Q & A

Sandi DuBowski’s epic documentary SABBATH QUEEN—shot over the span of 21 years—follows Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israeli descended from an unbroken line of 38 rabbis stretching back a thousand years. Yet as SABBATH QUEEN opens, Lau-Lavie has newly arrived in New York in the late 1990s, a young gay man declaring “Artists are the new rabbis” and appearing around the city in drag as Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the widow of six Hasidic rabbis, all from the same extended family. He is torn between rejecting and embracing his destiny and becomes a drag-queen rebel, a queer bio-dad and the founder of Lab/Shul—an everybody-friendly, God-optional, artist-driven, pop-up experimental congregation.

As the years pass, Lau-Lavie embraces a range of creative spiritual endeavors, including Storah-telling and Lab/Shul—until he shocks everyone with his decision to become a rabbi himself, studying in the Conservative tradition of Judaism. SABBATH QUEEN is witness to Lau-Lavie’s unfailing courage and grace, as he grapples with key questions of who we are and who we will be. Stimulating and moving, DuBowski’s film ends with Lau-Lavie’s words on Israel and Palestine post-October 7 as he evokes the challenge of our lifetime: “How do we reimagine our sacred traditions to achieve peace?”

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE SABBATH QUEEN TRAILER

In an interview, DuBowski said he has shown the film in several places throughout the world, and that it has been invited to more than 55 film festivals, including its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival. He said the reactions to the film have been extraordinary.

"People are really connecting deeply to the film," said DuBowski. "It's holding all the questions of what it means right now to deal with gender, with queerness, with Jewish survival, with justice, and art and living in this very complicated world that we live in. It came to be a film that speaks very deeply to a post-Oct. 7 world, to a post-election world. Amichai has such an incredible vision on how to deal with all these big paradigm shifts in our world."

Schedule to Date

February 9 | 1:15pm only, Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables - Q&A with director Sandi DuBowski follows screening

February 4-6, Savor Cinema, 503 SE 6th Street, Fort Lauderdale: **Tuesday, February 4 | 7:30 PM, Wednesday, February | 5:30 PM, Thursday, February 6 | 7:30 PM - Q&A with director Sandi DuBowski follows screening

February 7-10, Cinema Paradiso, 2008 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood: Friday, February 7 | 7 PM - Q&A with director Sandi DuBowski follows screening, Saturday, February 8 | 4:30 PM, Sunday, February 9 | 2:30 PM. & 7 PM, Monday, February 10 | 4:30 PM,

About Director/ Producer Sandi DuBowski

Sandi DuBowski is the Director/Producer of SABBATH QUEEN, 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 and Toronto, theatrically released in 150 cities, and broadcast on ZDF/Arte, BBC, Channel 4, PBS. In 2020, he was invited to become a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. DuBowski spearheaded a groundbreaking impact campaign with the award-winning TREMBLING BEFORE G-D, personally conducting 850 live events, for over 250,000 people, which changed the lives of countless individuals, their families, religious leaders, and communities around the world.

Feature stories on the project appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NPR, *The Globe and Mail, and BBC News. From 2009-2016, DuBowski worked with over 125 of the world’s best social justice documentaries as the Outreach Director of Doc Society’s Good Pitch. He is Co-Founder of The Creative Resistance, a collective of media makers who create award-winning political ads and design. In the mid-1990’s he began his media and activism work at Planned Parenthood Federation of America focused on the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement. Three generations of DuBowski’s family made chocolate syrup in Deep Coastal Brooklyn.