Team behind Jewish LGBT+ ‘coming out’ film launches crowdfunder

The team behind a short film about coming out in the Jewish community is seeking to crowdfund just over £500 to cover post-production costs and enter film festivals.

Writer Josh Rose and director Emma Fine said their eight-minute piece, called ‘Sinnerman’, has been filmed and edited, with music composed, but it still needs grading and marketing.

A semi-autobiographical film, the title taken from the name of a Nina Simone song, it features two young Jewish men upstairs in a private home while their parents talk downstairs about which girls they will marry.

With neither man ‘out’, it soon emerges that the pair have previously engaged in under-the-radar sexual activity over the past two years, but rather than have that happen again here, as one man would like, the other challenges him as to the true nature of their relationship, and of their own honesty in facing up to it.

“It’s a film about being gay within a religious environment and deciding whether to leave the community to accept themselves or stay and hide their true feelings,” said Rose, 30, a first-time filmmaker who was one of two winners of the 2021 Other Brother Studios Film Fund.

The action takes place all in one room, interrupted only by a briefly enquiring mother. “It’s an intense conversation between two young men who have reached an impasse in their relationship. It is also a coming-of-age story as the men are at a point in their lives when they are figuring out who they are.”

Speaking to Jewish News this week, Rose said the Jewish pair’s dialogue was based on his own experience with someone “who still isn’t out and is never likely to be”. Rose finally came out as gay aged 23, after university, and following a trip to New Zealand, during which he met a man.

“It’s always scary [coming out], you never know what’s going to happen, but my family were very normal and understanding about it, very supportive,” he said.

“My dad and I went to Manchester Pride together last year. The bigger shock for them was that I was moving back to New Zealand because I’d met this guy!”

Rose’s family is modern Orthodox and he said several elements from the film – conducting sexual relations in secret, hiding his identity from parents, seeing men who didn’t take it as seriously – were all part of his own experience.

“All of the above,” he said. “I put it all together to heighten the drama but yes, that all happened. The religious pressure wasn’t there, but a lot of the dialogue is exact dialogue from what was said.”

Fine described ‘Sinnerman’ as “brilliantly written” and said they hoped to spread awareness, reach others “who may have experienced a similar situation, and generate conversation around the difficulties of being religious and gay”.

She added that Rose “wants this film to become a talking point in religious households so that families of all religious levels can become more aware of diversity within their own religion and ultimately more accepting of those different to themselves, silently struggling in the back rows of their temple”.

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For further details, their crowdfunder is being hosted on the Kickstarter website here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sinnerman/sinnerman-0?ref=creator-nav