After you’ve booked your ticket you will get an email confirmation with a “Watch Now” button. Use that button for when you’re ready to watch. The link will expire August 13 at 11:59pm
*** VTIFF All Access and Patron Members – how to watch for free: Click on Reserve Tickets button below; In the new window that opens, select “add ticket”. You will then be asked if you’re a member. Log in, and make sure to select the Streaming, $0.00 value ticket” option.
Watch the Q&A with the filmmakers
There’s an evangelical strand of Hasidic Judaism – Chabad-Lubavitch – spreading across the world. The Rabbi Goes West focuses on one Chabad rabbi, 34-year-old Chaim Bruk, who moved from Brooklyn to unlikely Bozeman, Montana, to bring his brand of Judaism to the American West. Part of his Chabad mission is to place a mezuzah, an encased prayer offering, on the doorpost of every Montana Jew. That’s less than 2,000 families spread across a state fourteen times larger than Israel.
As he travels across this “big sky” landscape, Chaim confronts a terrifying neo-Nazi threat. He also faces objections to his proselytizing from some skeptical Jews and the state’s rabbis, both Reform and Conservative. While they acknowledge that he is beloved by his congregants, they fear his larger goal to put up Chabad centers everywhere in Montana. Will Chaim succeed in his Chabad expansion? And is there a cost?
A PDF statement from the filmmakers about the making of the film can be read HERE
About the filmmakers
Co-Director/Writer – Gerald Peary
Peary is the director-writer of two acclaimed feature documentaries, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009) and Archie’s Betty (2015). He was a film studies professor at Suffolk University, a veteran film critic for The Boston Phoenix, and acted in the 2013 feature film, Computer Chess which premiered at Sundance FF. Currently, he writes reviews for the website, The Arts Fuse, and is the programmer of the Boston University Cinematheque.
Co-Director/Producer – Amy Geller
Amy Geller is a long-time producer whose credits include: the PBS/BBC broadcast docudrama
Murder at Harvard (2003), Stay Until Tomorrow (2005) and the four-hour PBS mini-series, The War That Made America (2006), and the documentary feature, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009). From 2012-2014, Geller served as the Artistic Director of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, where she received a young Jewish leadership award. Her feature-length directorial debut The Guys Next Door (2016) co-directed by Allie Humenuk, has won jury prizes and audience awards at film festivals across the country. She currently teaches
production classes at Boston University.