To many secular Jews, be they American or Israeli, the fervently religious are as different and unfathomable as Martians.
Can a movie — especially a comedy — melt a little of that suspicion and antipathy?
“It’s a much better starting point for a dialogue than we are doing today,” says Gidi Dar, the Israeli director of “Ushpizin.” “You can’t love someone, you can’t accept someone, if you don’t see them as human. That’s the problem — they’re alien from you.”
By letting nonobservant viewers see the world through the eyes of fervently religious Jews for 90 minutes — and, hopefully, recognize the characters’ worries and desires as not unlike their own — “Ushpizin” aims to shrink the gulf.
“If you cross the border and get a look at them from within, not from outside, then you realize how similar they are to you,” Dar explains. “The difference lies in some of the beliefs. Their life revolves around the worship of God. Our life revolves around, I don’t know what.”
The warm and witty “Ushpizin,” which screens twice in the San Jose Jewish Film Festival before opening in San Francisco later this month, centers on a Chassidic couple in financial straits as Sukkot approaches.
When fate, or God, provides both bounty and unexpected guests, Moshe and Malli are overjoyed. But complications ensue, testing the couple’s commitment to each other.
Shuli Rand, who plays Moshe, had worked with Dar years ago, before he became fervently religious and stopped acting. The two had remained friends, and Rand wrote the screenplay for “Ushpizin” with Dar’s encouragement. Ultimately it came down to the director persuading Rand’s rabbi that his intentions were good.
“What they’re used to is the camera as their main enemy, as a serious enemy, always attacking, always ignorant,” the fast-talking Dar explains. “They suffer from serious demonization. I promised that I’m not going to demonize them, I’m going to show them as human beings.”
In order to shoot this film with a religious cast, Dar signed off on a number of conditions, the least of which was keeping a kosher set. Speaking fluent English on a cell phone from a cab in Manhattan, he is quick to challenge any intimation that he was forced to compromise.
“If I tell you that I go to make a movie with a rare tribe in the Amazon, and I dress like them and I go along with their behavior, would you say I was compromising? I did the same here. If I want to show the inside, I have to respect the rules. They were limitations, not compromises.”
The 41-year-old director, whose current project is an acclaimed children’s TV series, is understandably proud of the reception that “Ushpizin” got in Israel. Rand received the Israeli Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film enjoyed excellent reviews and a successful run at the box office.
“It had a very big political effect in Israel,” he reports. “Not in the sense of parties and government, just between people. Israel is very polarized, and this is very much reflected in Israeli politics. I see it as something primitive: ‘I belong to the secular camp.'”
“Ushpizin” may have softened the attitudes of some Israelis toward the fervently religious, but Dar is well aware that the secular-religious divide is an issue everywhere.
“We can safely say that the number-one conflict of the 21st century is between fundamentalism and liberalism,” he says. “We tend to demonize the other: ‘They are bad, they want to kill us all.’ I know that billions of people couldn’t be bad. Some are misrepresented.”
And the secularists? “We are also misrepresented,” Dar declares.
“Ushpizin” screens at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9 at the Camera 12, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. Tickets: $8 in advance, $10 at the door. Information: (925) 866-9599 or www.sjjff.org. “Ushpizin” opens Nov. 23 in San Francisco.