By Susan Gerhard

GOD IS IN the details for director Sandi Simcha DuBowski – and the details are overwhelming as I speak to him on a busy Thursday, the day after the Los Angeles premiere of his feature documentary Trembling before G-d. The film, a dark and earnest search for a meeting ground between gay Orthodox and Hasidic Jews and the families who've rejected them, plays two weeks at the Castro Theatre, and Dubowski is preparing himself for an epic slate of extracurricular activities: a panel discussion at a Christian church Thursday, a Shabbat service-buffet dinner Friday, a habdalah ceremony on Saturday, and more communing/crash landings in various locations throughout San Francisco as the week rolls on.

"I'm the director, the organizer, the Shabbat planner, the marketing department," DuBowski tells me over our shaky phone connection, before breaking off for a moment to pack a few things and continue the conversation en route to another meeting. "This is not just a movie; this is a movement."

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Sandi Simcha DuBowski. I saw the phenomenon firsthand, when DuBowski staged a takeover of the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Unlike the present times, that year did not see eyes cast upward, as a general rule. There was no reason Sundance should not have been all buzz and business as usual. But the first title on nearly everyone's lips was DuBowski's. With Working Films, which uses unconventional methods to bring films and the people who might care about them to the same table, he'd arranged not just the usual screenings and meetings but also a Shabbat dinner with openly gay Rabbi Steve Greenberg and a Mormon-Jewish gay dialogue. It was surreal: Tilda Swinton cried, and a man came up to him after a screening and said, "I am from Pakistan. I'm Muslim. I'm straight. Give me a hug. This film is about my life."

The last comment puzzles me as much as it puzzles you, but in a sense, DuBowski's film is so specific, its heartache so true, that it's easy to read your story – anyone's story – into it. One of its subjects, a man named Israel, who leads "Big Knish Tours" through his childhood haunts of Boro Park and Williamsburg and looks to be 70 years old, is trying his hardest to connect with his 98-year-old father, who can't accept that his son is gay. When Israel finally gets his father on the phone, the man makes excuses for not seeing him; he's been "too busy" for 20 years. Another story line follows David, who revisits the kindly-looking rabbi who, 20 years ago, told him to seek out special therapy to cure him of his gay desires. Needless to say, snapping himself with rubber bands every time he had a "bad" thought didn't work, and neither, really, does this meeting so many years later; the rabbi still has no real answer for him.

In real time, the rabbi, Yosef Langer, faced the angriest of audiences after the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival screening here last year, and he unexpectedly apologized to David onstage. Confrontation doesn't deter DuBowski – the film travels back and forth between New York, Israel, San Francisco, and Miami, seeking out its opponents. DuBowski even features the best of his negative press on the film's Web site. He just returned from New York, where the film played to record-breaking audiences at Film Forum and closed the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

I've known his work since the first short he sent out to the world eight years ago, "Tomboychik," showed a meeting of the minds between him and his 88-year-old grandmother; her wig went onto his head, but the topic of gender proved just a little too complicated. He was what he calls a "mascot" for Frameline when he was 19 years old and had "gay fantasia summers" away from school in San Francisco – by day, selling toy airplanes that come back every time you fly them at FAO Schwartz; by night, hitting the Queer Nation and ACT UP meetings and making his way through the Castro, until he left, "crying in a heap of tears." Then, in 1995, he came out again – as a Jew. He went to Jerusalem with a new friend, Mark, a drag queen in London who went by the name of Sister Moses of the Parting Cheeks, and who was about to reengage with the Orthodox world he'd been forced to leave. They studied their environments, and the film grew from their collaboration. Mark – who the film leaves building a sukkah – has, since the film ended, left his nun's habit behind, regrown his beard, and returned to the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva world of his youth.

DuBowski, who's taken Trembling on the road, is no longer a spiritual itinerant like the rest of us, even though, as he says, "I'm not living anywhere but my cell phone."