Dec_14_2005


	"Divan" - Special Film Screening Introduction and discussion by filmmaker, Pearl Gluck Wednesday, December 14, 2005, 700 PM

"Divan" is a both a humorous and touching documentary that breaks the mold of Hasidic storytelling and takes an unorthodox approach to a religious icon, an ancestral divan in Hungary that illuminates both the conflict and necessity of repairing the fractured trajectory of personal history and identity.

To reclaim an ancestral couch upon which esteemed rabbis slept, Pearl Gluck travels from her Hasidic community in Brooklyn to her roots in Hungary. Along the way, a colorful cast of characters gets involved - the couch exporter, her ex-communist cousin in Budapest, a pair of matchmakers, and a renegade group of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews. Divan is a visual parable that offers the possibility of personal reinvention and cultural re-upholstery. At the age of 15, Gluck left her Orthodox Jewish clan in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn for secular life in Manhattan, but continued to be influenced by her background.

As the first Yiddish Fulbright scholar, she set off to Hungary in 1998 to collect oral histories and Yiddish tales. As she did, her past began to haunt her. While grappling with this legacy, Gluck met other people who had also left the Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox world. Their voices take the film out of the realm of the strictly biographical and into a larger communal narrative.

Divan was screened at multiple film festivals, including the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, as a work in progress. The film was supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's Fund for Documentary Film, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Institute for International Education, and others. Learn more at www.divan-the couch.com

LOCATION: Jewish Federation Building Board Room, 6505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90048.

Co-sponsored by the JGSLA, Jewish Community Library Los Angeles, Yiddishkayt L.A., UCLA's Center for Jewish Studies, and The Workman's Circle.

This program is free of charge for members and guests, but there is limited seating. Reservations are necessary. Please phone 323.761.8648 or email resource@jclla.org. Please provide the names of every person that will be attending with you and a phone contact. You will not receive a confirmation of this reservation, however.