Storyline

Divan follows the filmmaker's effort to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heir loom - a couch. The filmmaker journeys from her birthplace, Brooklyn's Hasidic community, to its origins in Hungary and back. The couch - considered holy because certain Hasidic rabbis had slept on it - survived WWII and is in the filmmaker's great grandfather's house in Rohod, a northeast Hungarian town. In the tradition of storytelling, the filmmaker creates a visual parable about the Hasidic community that she left as a teenager. She trails the couch through a quirky landscape populated by Hasidim in Brooklyn, Holocaust survivors and ex-communists in Hungary, and, finally, the next generation of formerly-Hasidic Jews on the margins of their communities in New York and Israel.

2 nominations