Religion and politics collide in new documentary, 'City of Joel'

BY ERIKA NORTON
MONROE — When Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Jesse Sweet set out to explore the growth of Hasidic Jewish communities in the 21st century, he had no idea about all of the recent controversy surrounding the village he chose - Kiryas Joel.
“I am a Jewish filmmaker myself,” Sweet said during a telephone conversation this week. “I kind of felt some sort of fidelity to the growing Hasidic communities, but also I didn't really understand them.”
What inspired Sweet to initially make a documentary, he said, was an interest in the movement of Hasidic families out of Brooklyn, why they were moving, what these communities were they like and what was driving their growth.
But when he got to Orange County, he quickly realized the different conflicts surrounding the village and the area, the biggest being the proposed annexation of hundreds of acres from the unincorporated section of the Town of Monroe land into the Village of Kiryas Joel.
As Sweet and his team set out to capture life in the insular village of more than 22,000 residents, among the different challenges was gaining the trust of those in Kiryas Joel to allow them to come into their homes or their places of work.
“There's a real emphasis on modesty in the community and not a lot of excitement for some reason for some dude from Massachusetts coming down there with a camera,” Sweet joked.

'My voice is not in it'

Sweet said they filmed not only Kiryas Joel residents and officials, such as a village trustee, but also United Monroe members and others in the Monroe community.
When someone would agree to participate in the film, another challenge was that often times they would try to lobby Sweet to take a side.
His intention was not to make an opinion piece, but to take a different approach because he's interested in the people, the psychology and in doing character-driven documentaries with every perspective presented.
“I kind of want to make a film that lays out the best case that each one makes,” he said. “I don't want to short change one or the other. It's a complicated thing but I'm really trying to - my voice is not in it - just kind of like let the motivations of the people, what their worlds are like, what's driving them, what they're cases are as much as possible.”
Sweet and his team have filmed for over two and a half years and the independent project's crowdfunding Kickstarter campaign has raised more than $30,000. He said filming is pretty much done; they are waiting news about the annexation decision.
Sweet hopes to be done by the end of the year and begin submitting the film to festivals for early 2017. There will likely be a screening at a local theater, possibly in Monroe.
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Witness to growth

He said this project is similar to others he has worked on in that it's character-driven, where the viewer meets someone who is at the center of an interesting issue and then see the events through their eyes.
What's different about this film is that a lot of his work has been for television, including episodes for PBS, Showtime, HBO and CNN, which moves at a faster pace, Sweet said.
Being able to spend two and a half years on this project allowed him to see the issues unfold and develop over the course of filming. He also said he got to witness foundations being dug when he filmed them that are now completely inhabited houses with kids and mini-vans lining the streets.
Sweet said he learned that a lot of people in Kiryas Joel don't want high-density housing, and that part of the appeal of moving up from Brooklyn is the quiet community where they can afford to raise their families. The tension is that they also need to be near the Satmar infrastructure - yeshivas (schools), shul (synagogue), places to buy kosher food - and there aren't many options where they can be in the community and have their own house with a lawn.
Sweet said his time in Kiryas Joel allowed him to make something that's on a richer and deeper level than most of the other projects he's done.
“To me,” he said, “a great film at the end of this would be one where people walk out of it and ... they argue with each other and see things differently and come to an understanding of the other side a little bit better.”