Yentl

Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Disclosure: A Trans Re-reading of American Cinema. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.

In-person: director Sam Feder (Disclosure), producer Amy Scholder (Disclosure).

An opportunity to costume design on their home island of Guam for an elementary school play forces Marc to choose: stay on Guam or return to his established life in Iowa City sewing custom dog collars? Wouldn’t Make It Any Other Way is proof that vérité doesn’t always have to take itself so seriously and can delight just as much as it probes. As director, cinematographer and editor of the short, Hao Zhou propels the film with a steady rhythm of quick cuts that create an upbeat, snappy tone and leave little room to fall into the kind of longing and ennui we are primed to expect from a queer subject wrestling with identity and familial belonging. Yet Zhou doesn’t depict a static Guam stuck in some outdated past either; rather, the film presents us with a Pacific island where a banquet table full of Marc’s mostly queer-presenting friends give no hint of being boxed in by living out loud.

DCP, color, 20 min. Director: Hao Zhou.

This musical epic tells the story of the titular protagonist Yentl, an only daughter of a rabbi in a small Ashkenazi Jewish village in 1904 Poland who yearns to enter yeshiva and complete religious studies like the young men her age. Barbra Streisand stars and is said to be “the first woman in the history of motion pictures to produce, direct, write and perform a film's title role,” according to the film’s backers. When her father dies, Yentl cuts her hair and assumes a masculine outer presentation and enrolls in a yeshiva where a bright student Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin) befriends her. In Disclosure, Laverne Cox says Yentl was a film that deeply resonated with her. “Here was Yentl, a woman, a girl, who had to pretend to be a boy or a man to become a Rabbi, and falls in love with this guy and wants him to see the woman that she is, but he only sees the man that she is presenting,” said Cox in a June 2020 interview in IndieWire. “And that just felt like me, I was like — ‘that’s me.’ I didn’t have words for it and I didn’t fully understand why, but that’s what it was.”

35mm, color, 134 min. Director: Barbra Streisand. Screenwriter: Jack Rosenthal, Barbra Streisand. With: Barbra Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, Amy Irving, Nehemiah Persoff, Steven Hill.