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PRAYING WITH LIOR
Directed & Produced by Ilana Trachtman
Director of Photography, Slawomir Grunberg & Ari Haberberg
Edited by Zelda Greenstein
Music by Andy Statman
Released by First Run Features
USA. 88 min. Not Rated

While sitting in synagogue and attempting to pray with a waning amount of spiritual steam, director Ilana Trachtman heard an unusually engrossed voice “davening” (praying) behind her. She turned around to find Lior Liebling, a 12-year-old boy with Down syndrome. If that were all she found – a devastating disability that wasn’t able to impede religious zeal – Lior’s story would have been a passing novelty, a Lady of Guadalupe-shaped corn flake in the cereal box, curious but not important. But tethered to this “spiritual savant” are a truly extraordinary family and community – in many ways the real heroes of the documentary.

Growing up the son of two rabbis, beloved stepson, brother of four siblings, and linchpin of a tight-knit congregation of Philadelphia Jews, Lior quickly learned that his spirited conversations with God triggered the radiant disbelief of his many loved ones. Obviously, his evolution into a “little rebbe (leader)” was by no means a manipulative gambit for affection, but their reactions certainly watered a spiritual seed inherent in the darling boy.

Whatever its roots, Lior’s love of prayer becomes a counterweight to his condition and to a heartbreaking family tragedy – the death of his mother to cancer. It is her absence from her son’s life, and not his disability, that strikes the only truly plaintive note in this otherwise uplifting and inspirational film. Though Lior occasionally verbalizes how much he misses her and cries profusely at his mother’s grave – the only scene which left an aftertaste of invasive reality TV – the situation is far more poignant to his observers. As his father or doting brother Yoni watch Lior lost in a heartfelt, atonal prayer, the thought “if only his mother could see this” seems inevitable.

This is especially true at his bar mitzvah, the anticipation of which forms the narrative framework. Reading from the Torah as part of this sacred rite of passage is awkward for any pubescent boy with trembling vocal chords, but for Lior, it seems just short of heroism. The culmination of the film, and perhaps of Lior’s past 13 years, is the tidal wave of emotions drowning his onlookers as he recites the biblical verse. Yoni crying as he watches his brother – because of everything he’s accomplished, because of his mother, because he loves him – is an exceptional scene which, like the entire documentary, earns every single bittersweet tear its audience sheds. Yana Litovsky
February 1, 2008