When Ilil Alexander embarked on a documentary about fervently religious Jews who are also lesbians, attacking the religious establishment was the last thing on her mind.
In fact, the Tel Aviv filmmaker was more interested in overturning the prejudices of Israelis like herself.
“The secular society is conservative and hypocritical at the same time, because we just pretend to be very open-minded,” Alexander asserts. “But we can be very, very narrow-minded and we can push aside everything we don’t know too much about, any kind of minority group.”
Alexander’s beautifully shot and exquisitely assembled “Keep Not Silent” won the Israeli Academy Award for best documentary. The one-hour film has aired about 40 times on Israeli TV so far this year, and plays twice in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Alexander is expected to attend both screenings, which are sponsored in part by LGBT Alliance: Jewish Community Federation.
“Keep Not Silent” had its genesis in a 1995 Jerusalem bus explosion that left many killed and injured and one body unclaimed. After a few days, a religious man came to identify his sister. It turned out that her husband and her community had ostracized her when they learned she was a lesbian.
“She was living totally alone, outside the family. She was just coming to see her kids from time to time, so no one really noticed that she wasn’t there,” Alexander remembers. “For me, it was a tragic story because I always thought about the religious society as a very warm one for the people who choose to be part of it. How can a woman be so lonely in such a warm community?”
Alexander found three women who would speak with her, including one via the Internet, on a Web cam. They eloquently describe the pain and challenge of being true to themselves while keeping the families they cherish.
As such, Alexander said over breakfast in early May, when “Keep Not Silent” was presented here at an international conference of public television executives, “I think in a way the film is not really about being ultra-Orthodox and not really about being lesbian. It’s much more about people who want to be part of their own community and that want to belong.”
Alexander is an earnest young woman, and she confides that so far she’s found it impossible to maintain an emotional distance from her subjects.
“Let’s put it this way,” she says. “Making films is a nightmare to me because I’m totally involved. I can get devastated from the pieces of information I find, from the things that people go through.”
Alexander isn’t overly sensitive so much as resolutely committed. The thorny issues that the three women grapple with in “Keep Not Silent” were not abstract concepts but variations on her dilemma regarding her own relationship.
“Through asking the women in the film questions about family, I could ask myself a lot of questions about my own marriage,” she reveals. “At the end, I got to the conclusion that I should divorce. It’s funny because it’s like I went to the farthest ends of the world, to the ultra-Orthodox society and the lesbian world that I know nothing about, to ask myself the most personal question in the world.”
As for the women who took the risk to be in “Keep Not Silent,” Alexander says: “They just want that people in the religious community will be aware that lesbians are not mentally sick, that it doesn’t mean they are not good people. This is what they are really struggling for.”
One of the three subjects, Miriam-Esther, explained to Alexander, “It’s just a matter of ignorance. People are not prepared, from the inside.”
“Maybe it’s very naïve, but I’m totally with her,” Alexander says. “She told me, ‘Whoever knows enough Torah knows that there’s room for every person on this earth.'”
“Keep Not Silent” screens 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 27 at the Castro Theatre in S.F. and 4 p.m. Sunday, July 31 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley. Tickets: $9-$11. (925) 275-9490 or www.sfjff.org.