Yehuda
1994 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Beverly Shaffer
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Ten-year-old Yehuda, one of eleven siblings in a Hasidic family in West Jerusalem, prepares for the Sukkot festival through prayer and long-held customs.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 26-minute observational doc about a Hasidic kid preparing for Sukkot sounds like the most conventional thing ever — but Shaffer's refusal to exoticize or sentimentalize this world is genuinely radical, treating ritual not as spectacle but as the grammar of a complete inner life.
Shaffer's formal restraint—letting the liturgical calendar and domestic rhythms unfold without editorializing—places this squarely in the ethnographic documentary tradition while achieving something rarer: a portrait of spiritual practice that respects both its particularity and its universality, the kind of film that justifies the form itself.
The decision to shoot almost entirely at Yehuda's eye level, never condescending into the observational distance other documentaries would default to, transforms a potentially anthropological exercise into something intimate—you're inside his devotion, not studying it from the side.