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Building bridges in Brooklyn, with ‘All God’s Children’ director Ondi Timoner
This week, we sit down with director Ondi Timoner to talk about her documentary ‘All God’s Children,’ which follows the partnership between Congregation Beth Elohim and Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
Ondi walks us through how the project began with her sister’s activism and the challenges of filming within sacred spaces while balancing her roles as both filmmaker and family member. We explore the messy realities of the partnership - including moments that threatened to fracture the alliance - and how both communities learned to thrive together.
We also talk about her evolution as a documentary filmmaker and how she’s handling distribution through her production company Interloper Films.
Transcript
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Speaker A:And this is our conversation with Andy Timonar, director of the documentary All God's Children.
Speaker B:Here's these two groups, the oldest black Baptist church in Brooklyn and the largest Reform synagogue.
Speaker B:And they're trying to figure out the leaders of these two groups are like, how do we change the hearts and minds of our congregants to see that we're sharing the same land and we have this very different issues.
Speaker B:But if we stand together, we could be so much stronger.
Speaker B:You can't just be a fly on the wall like, I'm the rabbi's sister.
Speaker B:The crew is holding a camera.
Speaker B:I'm holding a camera.
Speaker B:So it's more about being part of it.
Speaker A:Thanks to the personal connection.
Speaker A:How did the idea of this project, OGOT's children, arise come up in the first place?
Speaker B:So the project actually started as a short film called Rebel Rabbi that was going to be about my sister because I've made a career, really, of telling stories of impossible visionaries, I call them.
Speaker B:They're people who kind of take on the impossible and act impossibly along the way, but they're an inspiration to all of us because they are, you know, drawing outside the lines, pushing the boundaries, breaking the rules.
Speaker B:And I realized I hadn't really told many stories about women and that I had an impossible visionary woman right next to me and my older sibling, Rachel.
Speaker B:And I realized this because I would come to New York for meetings and such, and she'd be in jail for, you know, standing up for the dreamers or trying to hold open an Amazon store because they were providing cloud services to ICE or, you know, leading one of the largest protests of rabbis in front of Trump Tower.
Speaker B:So it was just constantly.
Speaker B:She was in jail like, one year.
Speaker B:She was in jail like eight times.
Speaker B:And this is a person who runs the largest, you know, leads, I should say, the largest synagogue for Reform Jewish Judaism in Brooklyn and in New York overall.
Speaker B:So she's got thousands of families that, you know, that she's dealing with their birth, death, marriage, everything, the bar mitzvahs, the bat mitzvahs.
Speaker B:And on top of that, she's out there throwing her body into nonviolent protest for equal rights and justice, you know.
Speaker B:So anyway, I started filming her.
Speaker B:This is many years before last flight home.
Speaker B:And basically, you know, she sat down with the reverend sometime in there, and they had a meeting, Reverend Dr. Robert Waterman of Antioch Baptist Church.
Speaker B:And they had a meeting about how do they solve racism and anti semitism in Brooklyn because there's been a lot of violence between blacks and Jews of late.
Speaker B:But it also had been going on for a century, you know, since the Crown Heights riots even.
Speaker B:They flared up in the 70s, but also like long before that.
Speaker B:So really since the settling of New York by European immigrants, as you see in the film.
Speaker B:And we kind of go into why that happened and how that happened.
Speaker B:But here's these two groups, the oldest black Baptist church in Brooklyn and the largest Reformed synagogue.
Speaker B:And they're trying to figure out the leaders of these two groups are like, how do we change the hearts and minds of our congregants to see that we're sharing the same land and we have this very different issues.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But if we stand together, we could be so much stronger.
Speaker B:And they decide to try to become family because you can't really hate people that, you know.
Speaker B:And I think it's a really important lesson and film for these days that we're in right now, you know, where there's so much xenophobia, there's so much hatred, there's so much white nationalism and anger and polarization.
Speaker B:Even within our bodies of government, no one is listening to each other at all.
Speaker B:And these two groups go on this five year journey.
Speaker B:And so we kind of pivoted around Covid.
Speaker B:We started going in the direction of following this for five years.
Speaker B:And there were many times they didn't think I had a movie.
Speaker B:Many times that they almost fell apart.
Speaker B:But they made one really important promise, which was not to walk away.
Speaker B:No matter what, they would refuse to walk away.
Speaker B:And that was the key thing.
Speaker B:Because no matter how upset they got, how offended they got, they just would not walk away.
Speaker A:And with this personal layer, when embarking on this journey, did you.
Speaker A:It's probably not the best way to put it, but did you have to, to an extent, unknow your own sister so that you have a shot at objectivity?
Speaker A:Like with your experience in the medium, what does that documentary Distance look like when it's family?
Speaker B:So my sister is not a fan of cameras.
Speaker B:She's a person who works every minute that she's awake, though she does meditation and things like that.
Speaker B:But she's busy, very busy.
Speaker B:So she most of the time saw the documentary as an unwanted distraction.
Speaker B:So verite, very much observational.
Speaker B:Don't bother her, you know, don't.
Speaker B:Don't try to get her to do too many things.
Speaker B:Specifically for the documentary was the key to just follow her in action.
Speaker B:But then when Last Flight Home happened, she saw the power of documentary to, to help people because that's what Rachel's all about.
Speaker B:So when she saw people being healed and helped by that film, like en masse, you know, she started getting really behind that film and she saw it as one of the most important pieces of work that she's done in her life.
Speaker B:And so that changed her attitude about this film and that really helped.
Speaker B:So thank you dad for that one.
Speaker B:She, she started asking, where do I want the microphone?
Speaker B:How's the sound?
Speaker B:How can she help?
Speaker B:She even did a couple of interviews with Reverend or sit downs with Reverend that I wasn't there where she kind of led the process.
Speaker B:So that was a real transformation that happened.
Speaker B:And even now with the rollout of the film, she's very much participating, she's very passionate about the film.
Speaker B:The film, you know, was the centerpiece at DOC nyc.
Speaker B:It was a huge sold out premiere and then it sold out the next show and it's been playing tens of tens of thousands, not tens of thousands, but tens of tens of festivals and.
Speaker B:But you know, given the state of things, it's really hard for a film of this subject matter with Gaza happening as it is to find a distribution that is reasonable.
Speaker B:So it was really hard.
Speaker B:Like you know, we talked to many buyers, but many, we couldn't even actually get them to watch the film because October 7th happened and it's covered in the film though that's not what the film is about.
Speaker B:So we decided rather than take one of these distribution offers that wasn't great to go ahead and put it out ourselves but do it in a way where we continue the model of the film.
Speaker B:So Rachel started contacting temples.
Speaker B:It was an idea I had that what if the film plays in all these different cities and in theaters.
Speaker B:But the post conversation is actually with a rabbi and Reverend from that city.
Speaker B:Like a local partnership or the formation of a local partnership.
Speaker B:And so then they could see this film together, see all of the like ups and downs that these two groups have, how they ultimately do come together.
Speaker B:And then what we did was we did a discussion guide that's very in depth from the core group that you see on screen and from Rabbi and rev and for me of all the best practices.
Speaker B:And so it's a discussion guide that empowers those local organizations to continue the conversation.
Speaker B:So that's what we're doing like minimum of 20 cities and, and we're kicking it all off with IFC center, like a theatrical run where the original groups are going to be in conversation after.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So yeah, so Rachel's really involved now, but when we get on family stuff, like family text chain, like yesterday was Rosh Hashanah.
Speaker B:We were talking about Rachel sermon, which was fantastic.
Speaker B:We weren't talking about the film.
Speaker B:You know, we were talking about other things.
Speaker B:And that's what we do in our.
Speaker B:In our text chain between my brother, my mom, my sister and myself.
Speaker A:I mean, that's good, right?
Speaker A:Keeping the two separate.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:At the end of the day, I mean, my sister and I do very similar work we came to realize in very different arenas.
Speaker B:So I make these films that I hope will cause people to question, will empower people to think outside the box, to try different, try their ideas, to get up and take action, you know, all of these things.
Speaker B:And I try to put them out there and see if they can reach thousands and thousands of people and effect change.
Speaker B:She does that on a very direct, individual level most of the time.
Speaker B:And then, you know, on a day like yesterday, she's in front of Senator Schumer and the entire congregation and thousands of people and an overflow downstairs.
Speaker B: use apparently there was like: Speaker B:So she's an extremely relevant religious leader right now.
Speaker B:Spirit, spiritual leader right now.
Speaker B:She's somebody who preaches non violence.
Speaker B:Both of them do, both Robert and Rachel do.
Speaker B:And she's somebody who is.
Speaker B:She's really making Judaism relevant to people who care about justice.
Speaker B:Her sermon yesterday was about how the Torah has all of these passages that speak to the various atrocities happening right now in our government and around the world.
Speaker B:And she quoted each one.
Speaker B:So, yeah, she be.
Speaker B:So people tune in from all over to hear her speak.
Speaker B:It's pretty awesome.
Speaker B:And I think this film, you know, I've never made a film where both sides of the film like.
Speaker B:Or all participants are really fans of the film like this, but every single person on both sides and even being the biggest challenge is being the rabbi's sister and a white person telling the story of both communities and really getting it right with the black community and telling the story of slavery and telling the story of all of the inequality and racism that's in our country ever since then, that was challenging.
Speaker B:I felt like I was walking a tightrope.
Speaker B:And to have every single member of that church that everybody who's on camera that you see in that movie think that the movie is fantastic and speaks for them, that's probably the greatest accomplishment for me personally of the film.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Because just in general, in bringing the black Christian and the white Jewish communities together.
Speaker A:Congregation Beth Elohim and Antioch Baptist Church, no matter how a great noble idea it is, as we see, there is of course, a great amount of tension, friction between the two, thanks to primarily the differences in belief.
Speaker A:At what point did you realize that this wasn't exactly going to be that straightforward road towards unity?
Speaker B:It was something that I felt like sometimes I was part of.
Speaker B:I was almost in between, you know, when Easter happened and when the Jesus flag happened and these incidences happened where the partnership was threatening to fall apart.
Speaker B:I felt like I was kind of in between reverend and rabbi and really hearing both sides, trying to represent both sides.
Speaker B:Not a particularly religious person myself.
Speaker B:So for me, it was not as offensive, it wasn't as dangerous.
Speaker B:Like, it didn't feel like, as my sister felt really, really threatened and all of this.
Speaker B:I didn't feel that way.
Speaker B:I just was like filming.
Speaker B:And so I think that neutral stance was really important to the film.
Speaker B:But I think, like, you know, it was really around October 7th, and when the temple got vandalized and the church showed up for the temple, that kind of went against the overall feeling of, like, the stance of blacks and Jews maybe across the country at that time.
Speaker B:You know, like their partnership was so strong at this point.
Speaker B:They had become family after all these years.
Speaker B:Even though they trudged through the mud and maybe especially because they trudged through the mud, like because they did the hard work, they were stronger than ever.
Speaker B:And so a moment like this happens, they stuck together.
Speaker B:And that was when I knew it was going to be a happy ending.
Speaker B:But what I didn't know was that they would succeed in passing this incredibly important legislation together.
Speaker B:And they've gone on to have this incredible partnership where they're doing these internships and taking on matters together, having monthly dinners.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's a real thing and it's a model for maybe how doesn't matter whether it's a religious group or a economically different group or racially different group.
Speaker B:Could be a YMCA on one side of town and one in another side of town coming together and maybe actually just deciding, you know what?
Speaker B:No matter what happens here, we're going to talk about these issues, racism and anti Semitism, or we're going to talk about what it is to grow up with nothing versus growing up with, you know, all of the opportunities.
Speaker B:And we're going to get to know each other's experience through conversation and sharing.
Speaker B:And no matter how offended we get, we promise not to walk away.
Speaker B:We are going to stay in this.
Speaker B:We are committed to this.
Speaker B:And it's that commitment, I think, that's really the key.
Speaker A:Going into these communities from the outside.
Speaker A:And even though your aim isn't becoming one of them or one with them, you're going in with a camera.
Speaker A:And you need a level of trust and acceptance in order to do the work you set out to do, especially into these welcoming yet sacred places like a synagogue or a church.
Speaker A:What's the process of negotiating, filming in spaces that are holy to people?
Speaker B:Yeah, making sure that we didn't interfere.
Speaker B:You know, it's more about being a fly on the wall, literally trying to just.
Speaker B:But you can't just be a fly on the wall.
Speaker B:Like, I'm the rabbi's sister, you know, the crew is holding a camera, I'm holding a camera.
Speaker B:So it's more about being part of it.
Speaker B:My company's called Interloper Films.
Speaker B:It's like, in the group but taking notes.
Speaker B:You know, we're there, we're saying, shana Tova.
Speaker B:We're saying, you know, happy Easter or whatever it is.
Speaker B:You know, we're greeting people as people and then smiling and filming and just trying to be there as.
Speaker B:As respectful as possible.
Speaker B:You know, that's really the key.
Speaker B:And making sure that people know that you're listening, that they're not.
Speaker B:You're not there with an agenda.
Speaker B:You are there to be led.
Speaker B:You know, like, they are the Sherpa.
Speaker B:They're the ones who are living their lives.
Speaker B:We are there as respectful observers and participants as much as needs to be, you know, and that's kind of how I do.
Speaker B:Was more about getting good sound in those basements.
Speaker B:That was the problem.
Speaker B:That was the challenge.
Speaker B:But, yeah, I'm.
Speaker B:I. I think it's the most.
Speaker B:It's such an incredible, incredibly brave film in terms of the people, the participants in this film, who let us be there during their most vulnerable moments, during all of these arguments, when they were discovering unconscious prejudice.
Speaker B:For my sister to say, I have white privilege on camera, to realize that in the room, to admit to that, you know, it's like, that's brave.
Speaker B:That's courage.
Speaker B:That's trust.
Speaker B:And so I'm very honored to have that.
Speaker A:And thanks to these communities trying to find common ground, despite the fact that, as you've already said, you are doing your best not to interfere, to be a fly on the wall between these communities, there is this sense of tiptoeing around what might come off as white privilege, what might be anti Semitic, what's racist, and with all this turbulence while trying to do something genuinely good and productive.
Speaker A:Where was your place in the middle of it all?
Speaker B:Right there in the middle of it all.
Speaker B:You know, sadly, being the person who's saying, hey, can we film one more time?
Speaker B:We really think this is important.
Speaker B:You know, Rachel told this part of the story, but it's really your part of the story.
Speaker B:So would you tell this part of the story and making sure that each group told the part of the story that really has to do with them.
Speaker B:And that took a lot of filming, a lot of sitting down again and again and again, writing and working with both groups to really get a lot of the history into the film, because a lot of context and a lot of history needed to be in that film for everybody to understand it.
Speaker B:But you want the narrative to propel forward.
Speaker B:So you've got to show up and you've got to know when to show up, because I don't live in New York.
Speaker B:So it was always about staying in really close contact and saying, okay, this.
Speaker B:This is going to be an important moment.
Speaker B:Obviously, Passover and Easter was something that I filmed right off the bat, and that became like a very important moment in the film.
Speaker B:But, yeah, filming with Senator Myre and around deed theft and filming the trip to Albany, just kind of realizing, what are the.
Speaker B:What are the building blocks?
Speaker B:And how do we navigate those and negotiate those and join in, but without changing it as much as possible?
Speaker B:That's really a delicate dance.
Speaker A:I can only imagine.
Speaker A:And it's one thing that once it's underway, you are in the middle of it all as far as the story is concerned.
Speaker A:You're not just being dropped into the middle of it, but rather following along as it unfolds.
Speaker A:Which, if I did my research correctly, isn't new to your process in any ways, as I believe Dig was shot over seven years with thousand 500 hours of footage, and you shot this over five years, which is a significant amount of time commitment.
Speaker A:And that's still just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker A:And this isn't fiction.
Speaker A:You don't know where you'll end up and whether that will be a positive note or not.
Speaker A:At what point and how did you know when and where to conclude?
Speaker B:It was when they managed to pass deed theft and they made that announcement at Passover, then I knew I had an ending.
Speaker B:I knew that the vote was coming down that we needed to hang in there to wait for that.
Speaker B:And the results of that.
Speaker B:It was really nice to see not just the partnership stay strong through in the wake of.
Speaker B:Of October 7th and with all the challenges and the many, many months since then, and we needed to update the film, like, eight months later after October 7, to kind of check back in with both of them.
Speaker B:So that felt like an important thing to do.
Speaker B:And Jewish Story partners who contributed to the film and really helped with notes along the way, they.
Speaker B:They were like, yeah, we really need to.
Speaker B:We feel like you need to update October 7th.
Speaker B:So that was something we did, but we were really hanging on for the results of the D theft legislation.
Speaker B:And could they pass that?
Speaker B:Because that's, like, next level, not just staying in the partnership, but actually accomplishing something that's going to affect lots of people's lives that never would have happened without that partnership.
Speaker B:So that just proves that they're stronger together.
Speaker B:And being divided, you know, like a house divided against itself cannot stand, as Reverend says in the film.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And thank you for your time for this conversation and for the film itself as well.
Speaker A:It was a pleasure talking to you.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
Speaker B:Really appreciate your time.
Speaker B:Thanks, Aaron.
