What inspired you to make One Of Us?
Rachel Grady: First and foremost curiosity, which is what informs everything for us initially. If you’re going to be living with the material for several years, it’s got to be something that’s meaty and has a lot of directions to go in. Also, Heidi and I are both New Yorkers, and I think I can say with confidence that New Yorkers are obsessed with the Hasidic community. And then we also learned about Footsteps [a support group for people leaving the Hasidic community] and the idea of people starting from scratch in a secular society has inherent interest because these people are essentially willing to give everything up in order to explore their own identity. There’s something so universal about that, something that surpassed even the idea of this being a religious community. The black sheep is something that I think a lot of people can identify with.
Heidi Ewing: We made a film called Jesus Camp ten years and we’ve continued to be intensely interested in questions of faith and what someone has to give up to stay in the fold of any religion and also the risks that someone is inviting into their life if they question tenets of the faith or the culture. We weren’t really finished with those questions. They’re very vexing, global questions that almost every human being runs up against at some point in their life. So One Of Us was a very interesting opportunity for us to revisit some of those themes in a totally new form.
What had your experience with the Hasidic community been before you started making One Of Us?
HE: We live as New Yorkers among the Hasidic community but we know nothing about them. You live here long enough and you start to wonder: How do they live? What are the rules? Where do they go home at night? How many kids do they have? Does anyone leave the fold? Rachel and I would look at each other often and wonder aloud about the lifestyle that these people in the middle of a major city had chosen.
RG: You see Hasidic people all the time and I started thinking, Do they notice us? What are they thinking about us? I wanted so deeply to understand. Do they think what we have is interesting? Horrible? They don’t make eye contact on the subway. Are we invisible to them? It’s an interesting idea to be secluded in the middle of NYC. I’m Jewish and I always wondered: If they knew I was Jewish, would they talk to me? Do they consider me like them, am I part of their reality?
One Of Us focuses on three subjects: Etty, Ari and Luzer. How did you meet them and decide on them as your subjects?
RG: Over the course of the two years of filming we met a wealth of interesting people. Everyone’s story was compelling and unique. It really comes down to stories that can play off of each other and build and don’t feel redundant. When we met Etty, she had just started her journey. She was leaving her husband, trying to get a divorce, and the community had just turned on her. She was a no-brainer. She’s smart and wonderful and she seemed very familiar to us. She could have been one of our friends.
HE: The fascination with Etty was first of all, the story of a woman leaving the community is completely different than the story of a man leaving the community. It was very important to us that we capture the story of a woman leaving—she has kids and the stakes were very high right there. It was long odds that we would find a story like Etty’s. We wanted to follow people who were undergoing a transformation while our camera was there. We wanted something that was going to unfold. It couldn’t be someone who’d been out for a couple of years, who’d made peace with their family and found a job. We wanted people who were confident and brave enough to allow us to be there on their journey, which was going to be full of stumbles and insecurities and vulnerability, and that was the case with both Etty and Ari. Also, we wanted to find people who would contrast with each other. And Ari, an 18-year-old boy obsessed with technology, is very different than Etty, a woman with seven children trying to preserve her relationship with those children while getting a divorce.
RG: Ari we felt was very relatable. When we started filming, he was struggling with all of the issues an 18-year-old is struggling with but through this very specific lens. And Luzer really fit the bill of someone who has some hindsight, someone who can look in the rearview mirror. And it’s not like he was all done—these are issues that go on for life—but he could give some perspective. He was perfect for us.
One Of Us is an observational film. Can you talk about the experience of shooting the film and what that was like?
HE: We really are thrilled by stories unfolding in front of our camera. They’re often very unpredictable so you have to be very nimble and light on your feet to make this type of film. Lots of different things happened to our characters as we filmed, and you have to not panic and follow the story and know that eventually you’ll make your way through the forest. We were dealing with people leaving the community but living within the community—a community that does not love to be filmed. So we were very careful to have a light footprint and a skeleton crew.
We wanted to capture the daily life of the community that was swirling around our characters and also to capture the individual stakes. It was a two-fold story: The A story was our characters leaving the community, and the B story was the tone, atmosphere, and ethos of the community that they were leaving. The film is not enormously talky—we tried to find images that could speak to the audience without us needing to put up a ton of data.
What insights into the Hasidic community did you gain as you made the film?
RG: Many, many. The more you uncover, the more you realize that you’ll never understand. This culture is so deep and detailed and nuanced that an outsider will never understand. Another thing is the incredible sense of warmth that the members of the community have with each other. We learned from out subjects that that warmth is very conditional and you have to do everything exactly as you’re told to get it but the rewards are incredible. Those of us in the secular, commercial, career-driven world of New York City will never have it. We can have a glimpse of it with our nuclear families but we can’t have what they have.
Why did you choose not to go into greater detail about the religious practices and history of the community?
HE: The specifics are so complex, myriad, and baroque on so many levels that they deserve their own film. We realized we could make a very satisfying film about three individuals or we could go into the minutiae of a Hasidic believer. Every time we would try to do a little of it, it would feel unsatisfying. We really did not want to make a film that was just about the lifestyle. We’re drawn to specific stories that have a universal message.
What surprised you in making the film?
RG: I was surprised how long the shadow of the community is, the reach even when someone’s been out for many years. Luzer’s story surprised me a great deal because he’s been out for eight years and he’s found some measure of success in the secular world as an actor, which is already difficult for anyone to do. And he’s so pithy and funny and irreverent, and he doesn’t seem like somebody who would be continuing to mull over this decision he made eight years ago. But when you spend real time with this man, he is torn up inside, he is wrestling every day with the community that he’s left behind. It surprised me how tormented someone like Luzer can be all of these years later. I was touched by it.
The other thing that really surprised me was learning that in most courts of the United States, when it comes to divorce cases, the status quo argument can basically force someone to continue religious practices that he or she no longer believes in or wants to practice. In the case of Etty, I had no idea that our legal system—in a secular court in King’s County in New York—could side so heavily with the religious party, even if that party is not best for the children. We’re not naïve enough to believe in a true separation of church and state—we made Jesus Camp! We know that the lines are very, very blurred. But to see this go down in the legal system, someone lose her children if she can’t prove that she too will continue practicing the religion, was mindboggling to us. We consulted many attorneys because we thought it must be a mistake, it must be corruption, and it turns out that this status quo argument is extremely broad and can be applied in a lot of circumstances. So I think audiences will be very surprised at that as well when they see the film.
In Jesus Camp you explored the intensity with which religions can control people’s lives. What is it that draws you to that theme?
RG: This gets into one of our favorite things to explore: nature versus nurture, which is at the very heart of what you try to explore as a documentarian. Why are you you? How did you end up being you? In a religion, especially a very strict religion that has a lot of rules and is all-enveloping, everybody has the same nurture. So nature is what you’re left with. Who are the people who rip themselves away?
HE: We are very interested in whether a human being is hardwired to question, to rebel, to push up against conventional wisdom, to buck tradition. Who’s hardwired to step out and say “No, I don’t believe that” or “That’s wrong”? Who’s going to say, “No, this doesn’t add up to me”? All three of our characters said no and now they’re paying the price but they’re also enjoying the benefits of the curiosity that led them to this moment. That’s heady stuff to explore, not just as filmmakers but as human beings on this planet right now.
What are you hoping for for One Of Us once it’s released?
RG: I think that the film is going to speak to a lot of people. Everyone’s had a time in their life when they felt like the black sheep—a liberal in a conservative family, a gay person, someone who wants to be a painter and they’re supposed to be a lawyer—there’s so many versions of feeling like an outsider in your community. I also am hoping that people will start thinking about the judicial system, because we have an example of it, in my opinion, going horribly wrong and I’m hoping that here’s some sort of movement there. Also, I hope that Ari and people like Ari get some attention and some relief from the abuse that they got. I hope people rally around him and kids like him.
HE: I always want to make a timeless piece of work that’s thought-provoking, that leads people to continue talking about the themes that have come to the fore: community and individuality and the price of freedom. A lot of the questions and assumptions are thrown up into the air in this movie.
Can you give us an update on what Etty and Ari and Luzer are doing now?
RG: Etty is still embroiled in her court case, she’s trying to get visitation or custody, and the case is not going well for her. She’s going to community college full-time and her plan is to transfer into a four-year college. She wants to focus on criminal justice issues and Heidi and I think she would be a fantastic lawyer. She also working full-time, after never having had a job in the secular world. She’s very smart and competent and driven. Ari is sober, which is a wonderful thing, and he is working and living with a foot in the community and a foot outside of it. He’s gotten himself healthy and he’s exercising. He’s still very much in an exploratory phase of his life and trying to figure out where he’s comfortable. Luzer continues to be bicoastal, he’s starring in a Yiddish play off-Broadway and he was featured in the HBO show High Maintenance. He continues to audition for television and film. He is still trying to make amends with his father and he has no desire to return to the Hasidic community any time soon.