Marry Me However
חתונה הפוכה | Mordechai Vardi | Israel, 2020 | Hebrew (English subtitles) | Documentary | 63m | DCP | IMDB | Distributor/Sales: Go2Film | Festival marketing sample: DocAviv 2020 | Trailer | DocuShuk
Description: Yarden, Zvi and Naama are gay men and a lesbian from orthodox and ultra orthodox backgrounds who, bowing to societal pressures, married heterosexual partners. Now divorced, they are raising their children with new same sex partners. They, together with other gay men and lesbians from the orthodox and ultra orthodox community, are involved in outreach efforts to promote acceptance in the orthodox community and to discourage rabbis from counseling people like them to repress their identity, undergo conversion therapy or marry heterosexual partners. At the outreach meetings, community members listen politely, some perhaps empathetically. The rabbi who counselled Naama 14 years ago to abandon her girlfriend and marry a man now claims to accept homosexual identity as intrinsic to certain individuals. As the religious prohibitions are clear, this for him represents a dichotomy that has no easy answers.
Merits: Vardi’s exceptionally moving documentary highlights not only the obvious suffering of its gay victims, some driven to suicide, but also the plight of women trapped in marriages to gay men. Rotem, Yarden’s ex wife who married him at 18, tells of a loveless marriage where her sexual needs were ignored and of being left, at 24, to start over. She rails against the rabbis who see the happiness of women like her as expendable in an effort to ’fix’ their husbands.
Rating: LGBTQ theme.