Bubbeh Lee & Me, an award-winning documentary by Andy Abrahams Wilson, is a funny yet serious glimpse into the relationship between an 87 (at the time the film was shot) year old Jewish widowed grandmother (Bubbeh Lee) and her grandson (who is also the filmmaker). Wilson, a gay man residing in San Francisco, brings his camera on a visit to his grandmother's Jewish retirement community in Florida, documenting conversations and happenings ranging from the comical to the serious to the uncomfortable to the touching.
As the Internet provides more and more Americans with the opportunity to find their roots, and as a more personal and intimate voice is being called for in ethnography and auto-biographical writing in and out of academia, Bubbeh Lee & Me is an important model for digging deeper than family trees to show one individual's relationship with his grandmother - the person he recognizes as the direct link to his Jewish roots. Their interactions, which come across as amazingly natural and genuine despite the presence of the camera, provide the storyline for this adventure as two similar, yet very different, people sit and chat, go grocery shopping, visit friends, and go grocery shopping again.
Several intercultural issues emerge from the interactions between Wilson and Bubbeh Lee, intersecting and interweaving to form a complicated relationship with a simple foundation: a loving and adoring connection between a grandmother and her grandson. In fact, one of the great lessons of this film is how intercultural issues do not stand alone - how they are all related and melt into each other resulting in complicated individual identities and even more complicated interpersonal relationships.
For example, Bubbeh Lee admits that she does not "like" her grandson's sexual orientation. Still, she understands that it is through being gay and the threat of AIDS that Wilson can relate to her age-related fear of death. It is the interweaving of their differences through which they find the strength of their union.
Bubbeh Lee & Me is a wonderful, touching film that will inspire and encourage viewers to think more deeply about their own roots and how these, along with their individual identities, inform the way they experience the world. But it is also a useful tool to initiate dialogue on issues ranging from age to sexual orientation to the intersection of various dimensions of identity. And, as is always valuable in such a tool, it addresses these issues in a fun, self-reflective way.
Kudos to Wilson for sharing his story in the hope that others will learn from it, as I did.
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