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.

Starring:

Pearl Gluck, Amichai Lau Lavie, Basya Schechter, Giti Koenig, Isaac Stein, Jeanette Friedman, Louis Farkowitz, Mark Joseph Altman, Michelle Miller, Pessy Sloan, Bruriah Sloan, Rosalie Osian, Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Malke Feldman

Genre:

Documentary