The glass pane almost ripples

[sovay]

Clara Kanter, Alastair White, and David Mazower's The Drowning Shore (2020) is a gorgeous act of ghosts and limits and liminal remembrance, a 14-minute cantata in Scots and Yiddish reaching through water and time to speak of marginalized languages and imperial borders and once again the love between two women that is the heart of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance, the playwright's great-great-granddaughter now the performer in her bird-of-paradise brilliance, in ancestral tartan, in frum-black silk that made me think, intended or not, of Hanna Rovina's Leye in The Dybbuk, crumbling earth between her fingers, writing holy letters on the air. I managed to watch it this afternoon for its streaming premiere, no less haunted for being digital. I will have to check out the rest of Compass Presents' Oracles in Sepia if they are anything like as good as this one. In the meantime, I commend it highly to your attention.

Comments

[sovay]

A) oh I totally think the Dybbuk callout was intentional

Good! Every now and then I worry that my pattern recognition has just turned into apophenia. Also that's just cool.

B) I don’t have art of that profundity in me (I sat in my work-couch-synagogue and yelled when that ending happened) but it helps renew my belief in the art I can make, or at least the dumb little books I can write about queers in love all over history.

You know I disagree with the first clause of this sentence, but the second makes me happy, because your art is going to make someone else sit on their couch and yell, but only if you write it.

*hugs*