MARTIN MORROW

At the best of times, the story of a Jewish man who thinks he's the Messiah and ends up converting to Islam would be a sensitive topic. In light of current events, it's downright provocative.

Beautiful Jew, One Yellow Rabbit theatre company's first feature film, was shot before the latest Palestinian intifada and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but now its contents seem highly charged. In fact, even the title has proved prickly.

"People seem to take offence to it," says Blake Brooker, co-artistic director of the Calgary theatre company, who also co-wrote and co-stars in the film. "I'm sure we wouldn't get the same reaction if we'd called it, say, Comely Baptist."

However, the movie, screening tonight through Saturday at OYR's High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, isn't about religious fanaticism but religious ecstasy. It's a loose recounting of the life of 17th-century Jewish mystic Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the Messiah and gathered a large following before abruptly becoming a Muslim, possibly to avoid execution by the Turks.

The Rabbits and director Oliver Hockenhull have moved the story into the present day, turning Zevi into Barry, a used-car salesman from suburban Calgary, who dabbles in drug dealing and assisted suicide en route to divine enlightenment and a job slinging falafel in the West Bank.

"It's about a spiritual quest," says Hockenhull, a Vancouver-based filmmaker and long-time friend of One Yellow Rabbit, who adds that the joint project grew out of his personal fascination with Zevi. "He was this ecstatic character whose beliefs were more in line with Sufism than any other formal religious practice. I wanted to place him in a context that I was familiar with, and in relationship to what the Rabbits could give me, which is the kind of 'Prairie baroque' that they're so well known for."

The Rabbits, in turn, had been looking for an entry into movies. While individual members of the company have done occasional screen work, and a live taping of their hit play Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp, has been shown on cable TV, this is the first time they've created a group work specifically for film.

The troupe wrote the script collectively, played the principal roles and even used their own homes as locations.

Brooker and Hockenhull say they took their cue from the prolific German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose first films were shot fast and on the cheap with members of his Munich theatre company. Beautiful Jew was written in three weeks and shot in two, using digital video rather than traditional film stock. Hockenhull pegs the entire budget at "a low five figures. It cost less than most one-minute car commercials."

For the Middle East sequence, Hockenhull and the film's star, Michael Green, spent an additional 10 days shooting without a permit in Jerusalem, Nablus and Ramallah. Their guerrilla filmmaking went without incident, although it included a scene in which Green's shifty-looking Barry had to abandon a briefcase (stuffed with money) in a busy area near Jerusalem's Damascus gate. Hockenhull says the experience felt pretty intense. "We weren't following any of the rules that are laid out for film crews in Jerusalem, and it's a hot spot no matter when you're there. For Canadians, just seeing guys running around with machine guns is always a little bit unnerving."

Although the picture was made in 2000, Hockenhull -- whose credits include five other independent features, including a documentary on Aldous Huxley -- has had a hard time selling it. "It's been difficult to get it out there," he says. "I really love the work. I've had other films that have been more successful in terms of [playing]festivals and getting recognition. This piece is more difficult because of the complexity of the dramatic presentation -- it goes back and forth from comedy to drama -- and at the same time there's a lot of political content that is unnerving for people nowadays."

However, its first public screening, as part of a retrospective of Hockenhull's work at Vancouver's Blinding Light Cinema last March, was well received and prompted the Rabbits to include it in their annual experimental-theatre festival.

While Hockenhull doesn't hold out any hopes for a theatrical release, he is pushing to get Beautiful Jew on television. For now, it's available on DVD through a Vancouver distributor, Video Out.

The Rabbits, meanwhile, are keen to do more movies using the Fassbinder quick-and-dirty method and have acquired digital video technology of their own. "We have a couple of ideas for films and as soon as we can we want to make another," says Brooker. "I anticipate doing one within a year."

Beautiful Jew screens Thursday through Saturday at the Engineered Air Theatre in the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts in Calgary. Tickets: 403-299-8888. It is also available on DVD from Video Out Vancouver at videoout@telus.net Martin Morrow is the author of Wild Theatre: The History of One Yellow Rabbit, to be published this spring by the Banff Centre Press.

"He grasps both sides, binding one extreme to another until the last extreme of all." 

The extraordinary biography of one Shabbetai Zevi - the Jewish Messiah whose doctrine was one of the disallowing of laws and the abolition of morality. Those who wished to find God and liberate themselves from the evil powers had to follow their leader step by step into the abyss, violating all the laws that they held most sacred.

"...for he grasps both sides, binding one extreme to another, until the last extreme of all..."

Sabbatai Zevi from Smyrna lived from 1626 to 1676 and who, under especially dramatic consequences in the year 1665 ignited a Messianic movement which began in Palestine and from this centre reached out to the entire Diaspora. In the history of post-Christian Judaism it represents by far the most significant extensive Messianic movement. In the apocalyptic year 1666, a Jewish Messiah declared that redemption was at hand and was accepted ecstatically by Jews all over the world.

Shabbetai Zevi had been born on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in 1626 to a family of wealthy Sephardic Jews in Smyrna in Asia Minor. As he grew up he developed strange tendencies which we would perhaps diagnose today as manic depressive. He had periods of deep depression when he used to withdraw from his family and live in seclusion. These periods would be followed by days of ecstasy and intense engagements. Eventually he came to believe that he was the long awaited Messiah...The Rabbis would have none of it and in 1656 expelled him from the city. He became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire. During a manic spell in Istanbul he announce that the Torah had been abrogated, crying aloud: "Blessed art Thou lord our God, Who permits the forbidden!"

In Cairo he caused scandal by marrying a woman who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland in 1648 and now lived as a prostitute. In 1662 Shabbetai set off for Jerusalem: at this point he was in a depressive phase and believed he was possessed not by God but by Satan...In Palestine he heard about a young, learned Rabbi called Nathan who was a skilled exorcist, so he set out to find him in his home in Gaza.

However the exorcist told him that he was not in fact possessed, that he was truly the One, the Messiah. He added that when he descended to these depths of despair and corruption he was fighting against the evil powers of the Other Side, releasing the divine sparks in the realm of the kelipoth which could only be redeemed by the Messiah himself. Nathan told Zevi that he had a mission to descend into hell before he could achieve the final redemption of Israel.

On May 31, 1665 he was seized with manic joy, and with Nathan's encouragement, he announced his Messianic mission. Leading Rabbis dismissed all this as dangerous nonsense, but many of the Jews of Palestine flocked to Shabbetai, who chose twelve disciples to be the judges of the tribes of Israel, which would soon reassemble...Nathan announced the good news to the Jewish communities in letters to Italy, Holland, Germany and Poland, as well as to the cities of the Ottoman Empire, and Messianic excitement spread like wildfire though the Jewish world.

Throughout Jewish history, there had been many Messianic claimants, but none had ever attracted such massive support. It became dangerous for Jews who had their reservations about Shabbetai to speak out. His supporters came from all classes of Jewish society. Pamphlets and broadsheets spread the glad tidings in English, Dutch, German, and Italian.

After centuries of persecution, exile and humiliation, there was hope. All over the world, Jews felt that their lives had value, redemption was no longer a vague hope for the future was real and full of meaning ...Salvation had come...

When Shebbetai arrived in Istanbul in January 1666 he was arrested as a rebel and imprisoned in Gallipoli.

This sudden reversal made and indelible impression the eyes of the whole Jewish world were fixed on Gallipoli, where Shabbetai had even made an impression on his captors. The Turkish vizier housed him in considerable comfort. Shabbetai began to sign his letters: " I am the Lord your God, Shabbetai Zevi" But when he was brought back to Istanbul for his trial, he had fallen again into depression...The Sultan gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death.

Naturally the appalling news devastated his followers, many who instantly lost their faith. The Rabbis attempted to erase his memory from the earth: they destroyed all the letters, pamphlets and tracts they could find. To this day, many Jews are embarrassed by this Messianic debacle and find it hard to discuss or examine...Rabbis and rationalist alike have downplayed its significance. Recently, however, scholars have followed the late Gersholm Scholem in trying to understand the meaning of this strange episode and even stranger aftermath. - Many Jews remained loyal to their Messiah, despite the scandal of his apostasy. The experience of redemption had been so profound that they could not believe that God had allowed them to be deluded....Nathan of Gaza devoted the rest of his life to preaching the mystery of Shabbetai; by converting to Islam, he had continued his lifelong battle with the forces of evil. Yet again, he had been impelled to violate the deepest sanctities of his people in order to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate the kelipoth...He had accepted the tragic burden of his mission and descended to the lowest depths to conquer the world of Godlessness from within. Zevi, himself continued to practice both religions, the Islamic and the Judaic, as well as engaging in dialogue with Sufi's and Christians. In Turkey and Greece about two hundred families remained loyal to Shabbetai; after his death they decided to follow his example and converted to Islam on masse in 1683. There is still as small group of Donmeh (apostates) in Turkey, who live outwardly impeccable Islamic lives but cling passionately to their Judaism in secret.