Divan

A charming memoir documentary, DIVAN uses humor to diffuse the filmmaker's take on the serious topics of alienation from one's family and culture, the legacy of the Holocaust as well as the celebrity cult of Hasidic rabbis. As a teenager, director Pearl Gluck left her Orthodox Jewish clan in Brooklyn for a secular life in Manhattan. Many years later, Pearl’s father has one wish: that she marry and return to the community. Pearl, however, takes a more creative approach to mend the breach. She travels to Hungary to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heirloom: a couch upon which esteemed rabbis once slept. En route for the ancestral divan, Pearl encounters a colorful cast of characters who provide guidance and inspiration, including a couch exporter, her ex-communist cousin in Budapest, a pair of Hungarian-American matchmakers and a renegade group of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews. Nimbly clever and intensely illuminating, DIVAN is a visual parable that offers the possibility of personal reinvention and cultural re-upholstery.

"Adventurous! Absolutely charming!" -The New York Post

"Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute . . . precocious autobiography, vivid travelogue, and sly wonder-tale." ~ J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

"She's looking for far more than furniture. And she finds it, in her own ingenious way." ~ Palm Beach Post

"A witty and playful journey both deeply committed and slyly ironic, DIVAN offers a glimpse into the richness of Yiddish folklore." ~ Variety

"A fresh, touching, surprising, and thoroughly wonderful film. At once witty and profound, DIVAN documents a series of quests for a special sofa, for remnants of a Jewish life in post-Holocaust Hungary, for a way to reconcile one's life choices with parental expectations; the longest journey of all turns out to be the one from Brooklyn to Manhattan." -Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, NYU