Berkeley filmmaker Yoav Potash has crammed his ruminations on American consumer culture, race relations and the disposable nature of love into an eight-minute short film. And the results are hilarious.
“Eight Minute Matrimony” will debut Sunday evening, Sept. 23 at Berkeley’s Chochmat HaLev. A Jewish meditation center would seem to be an odd choice for a film with such a hyperkinetic pace, but Potash appreciates a little irony.
Currently an instructor at San Francisco’s Academy of Art College, the 28-year-old filmmaker grew up in the suburbs of San Diego, where he said he received the “typical bar mitzvah and you’re done” brand of the American Jewish upbringing. “It was a great ceremony,” said Potash. “It was catered by take-out Chinese food.”
If Potash sounds as if he’s channeling Woody Allen, it isn’t accidental. Both Allen and Mel Brooks serve as cinematic inspirations for “Eight Minute Matrimony.”
The premise of the short is simple: Couples drive up to a McDonald’s-style restaurant, where they are served up an array of matrimonial choices. An attendant who doubles as a priest and a rabbi (with a yarmulke and clip-on payes) takes orders. During one of the most inspired comedic moments, a couple drives up to the window and orders a Jewish wedding.
In a film that doesn’t shy away from stereotypes, the couple orders a “Super-Jewed Value Pack” wedding ritual. Out come a dozen dancing rabbis, chanting and bobbing, and draping a flag of Israel over the blessed-out couple’s car. There’s only one hitch — the bride is African-American, and she insists on having more “black” in the ceremony.
As the two blind bubbes in the back seat kvetch about the delay in the ceremony (both are oblivious to the fact that the bride isn’t Jewish), the quizzical attendant stares blankly at the couple and repeats slowly, “You want me to add…black…to the wedding?” The couple is informed that the cost will be $250. The groom reluctantly coughs up the money, and the attendant slowly punches the buttons marked “add” and “black.”
Out comes a full gospel choir singing “Going to the Chapel.” Potash knows a good Hollywood ending, though, and so the choir and the rabbis eventually belt out a tune that even the blind bubbes can groove to.
Cross-cultural communication, if not tidy endings, formed the crux of Potash’s last work, a documentary of the burnings of black churches in the South, titled “From the Ground Up.” The documentary, which aired last year on KQED-TV, opened the filmmaker’s eyes to a number of realties. Traveling from the insulated, gauzy confines of the U.C. Berkeley campus to the Deep South, where racial divides are deeply entrenched, forced Potash to re-evaluate some of his beliefs.
“It’s one thing to try to cross racial barriers and remedy social ills, but I learned that you can be pretty naive about how you’re going to do that. All the beautiful ideals about living as one harmonious family get loftier and loftier — until you visit a place like Alabama where the races don’t mix, and many people have never even been near a college campus.”
Potash, who hopes to take the short to film fests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, wants to explore the issue of race relations in other feature films. He’s particularly interested in the sometimes-vexing relationship between the Jewish and African-American communities, seeing as many commonalities as differences.
There has already been a tangible result to “Eight Minute Matrimony,” Potash said, although none of it has anything to do with racial reconciliation. “My girlfriend has gotten more serious about getting married,” he said, laughing.
“Eight Minute Matrimony” will play at 8 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 23 at Chochmat HaLev Meditation Center, 225 Prince St., Berkeley. Information: (510) 704-9687, or e-mail [email protected]