Rivkah Beth Medow & Jen Rainin on Holding Moses and the Importance of Telling Stories Through an Experiential Lens

November was an intense month, heavy with emotion and steeped in contemplation. Just as I thought I was starting to shed some of its weight, I felt myself wading again one night, as if through quicksand, desperate to escape the fog and reach the shore. So, I scrolled, listlessly, mechanically, without really knowing why – a thing to do for the sake of doing something and for fear of doing nothing. Posts appeared and disappeared unabsorbed when – wait, back up, a double take. An image of a mother, cheek to cheek with her son, her face a picture of strength, love and compassion. Posted by Amanda Palmer with the words, “Motherhood, grief, disability, learning to love. (And theater, and Butoh)”, the New Yorker article, “An Intimate Portrait of Parenting and Disability”. The film in question, Holding Moses.

I was nervous when I clicked on the link – I didn’t know what to expect and I wasn’t at all sure whether this was the right moment to be watching this. But I couldn’t ignore it. Not just because past experience has taught me to trust Palmer in matters of honest conversations surrounding motherhood and grief. Not just because I wanted to see and understand motherhood from a different perspective. It was mainly because I wanted to get to know the woman and the boy in the photograph, even though I felt I already understood the love between the two in that particular moment, wordlessly.

Opening up to a serene morning moment with a house still draped in slumber, when all that can be heard is the meditative dripping of the kitchen faucet, the water hitting the basin in the quiet rhythms of brief solitude, dancer Randi Rader begins to tell her story. “A newborn should cry, and start breathing calmly,” she starts as the camera zooms in on all those little details that make up a warm family home. The whistling tea kettle. A jumble of shoes in all colours, styles and sizes. A poster and meaningful décor pieces on a mantlepiece.

“Moses was labouring too hard,” the audio continues as we see Randi’s hand and feet move, slowly, poetically on her porch. Enveloped by darkness, soft fairy lights shining down on her dance, moving as though in thanks giving. “His belly was pumping to try to get air, and he could barely cry, and he couldn't move, and he couldn't open his eyes. And I would just watch him, and I would just wait for him to snap out of it. And I was like, is this gonna be the day you open your eyes?”

Holding Moses, which launched on The New Yorker site on November 16th, may only be sixteen minutes in duration, but in that short time span we get to know and understand Randi and her story as a queer mother and caregiver at a depth that is seldomly shown. She is voicing the thoughts and experiences so many caregivers are confronted with yet few have an outlet for, let alone find community in. And it is exactly this community Rivkah Beth Medow and Jen Rainin, the producers behind this film, are looking to create with their work. By building enough of a relationship with Randi, Moses and their family, viewers are able to understand what Medow and Rainin refer to as the “hard words”, with a grounded nuance and the complexity needed to feel empathy instead of judgement.

I spoke to Jen and Rivkah the day after the award winning film was screened at another theatre in Oakland. “A good friend of mine asked if he could please host a screening – and it’s very rare, I think, to screen just one, short film in a theatre,” Jen laughed. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that before. And then to have a Q&A after was a really powerful experience and it’s been an incredible blessing having that happen several times now. The feedback has been profound. There are so many caregivers in the world – Rivkah and I are both caregivers and mothers – and to see those stories, our stories, validated through Randi’s is deeply moving. By now, we’ve heard from so many parents and caregivers, how seen they feel, and how understood, in a way that they hadn’t been before. That means everything, that’s really it for us, that’s why we did this.”

“It’s huge,” Rivkah continues. “We’re also doing an engagement campaign, community screenings we set up with rare disease foundations and disability orgs. Most of the people in those screenings are either parents of children with disabilities or adults with disabilities, parents of kids with rare diseases, atypical people, caregivers, queer families. They are just these incredible container screenings where we get to really dig in to everyone’s experience around grief. As they relate through this film, the conversation shifts and it becomes a much more collaborative community dialogue.”

Looking through Rivkah’s work portfolio, I felt the same kind of admiration and kinship I often feel when visiting Malwina Gudowska’s Meaning of Mama account – all these facets of motherhood in one place. There’s a still of a teenaged girl, her nose in a book, a scene from Rivkah’s 2017 short film, That is How Motherhood Works; a close up of children’s hands covered in mud, digging into a puddle of dirt so deliciously wet and inviting, I can literally feel the scent of the quenched earth fill up my nostrils – a shot from her 2020 feature doc, LET THEM EAT DIRT: The Hunt for Kids’ Missing Microbes.

But the one I simply cannot take my eyes off of is an image of a young girl, eyes narrowed, lips parted in contemplation – possibly a sulk – a scrape wound on the side of her face. And in her arms, a beautiful bird with vibrant feathers, its head peacefully leaning against her chest. This photo is followed by a series of other images so commanding in their simplicity, they leave a whole labyrinth of possible narratives to follow. Varicose veins on a female’s legs illuminated like lifelines in an authentic light; a woman, chin raised to the sky, cigarette holder perched between her lips, perfectly manicured fingers brushing back her silver hair; the artist herself, tandem breastfeeding her daughters in one image, sleeping with one child curled up against either side of her body in another, their little legs holding on to her, the anchor.

The title of this ongoing photography project, Alone Together, feels significant to me – the exact, flip reverse of my first Anouk album, Together Alone, featuring my former anthem Nobody’s Wife. Here I am, twenty-three years after having been gifted this album by my uncle – the very man who introduced me to the higher power that is Patti Smith’s work – and suddenly both titles, respectively, meld perfectly into something that makes profound sense. Alone in the togetherness of motherhood; together in the loneliness of humanhood. And this is something that truly struck me in Randi’s story – how long she’d held her grief on her own, because the village we all cite as a norm has become a luxury construction project, not necessarily something that forms naturally.

“We were not designed to raise children in a vacuum. We were, as a species, designed to be in community, and the way we’ve evolved over many, many years, we’ve become more isolated and so we have to actively seek out our community. The moment Randi began to find her community, helped her learn the lessons she needed to learn and it held her in her grief. It revealed potential paths forward,” Jen confirmed.

“I wonder if it’s different what you’re experiencing in Europe,” Rivkah continued the thought. “I find in the US there’s a lot of judgement and competition involved in mothering, parenting. It’s like, if your kids are behaving this way you must be responsible, so much of the blame often falls on the mother. The patriarchy is particularly interested in helping us keep each other down and not collaborating and being truly supportive. But, you know, in smaller places, that support is really happening. Like, last night, a few mothers from Randi’s support group came to the screening and they have been on this journey with her for so many years. It’s phenomenal to look at those connections, those relationships, those bonds that have been welded together from a common experience – whether it’s in celebration or in grief, those are doors that open and we can connect through that. It’s incredibly supportive.”

Jen and Rivkah had been working together in philanthropy for about ten years before embarking on their first film collaboration. Ahead of the Curve, which tells the story of Jen’s wife, Franco Stevens, the founder of world-renowned lesbian lifestyle magazine Curve, took four years to make and was publicly released in 2021. It was then they decided to launch Frankly Speaking Films, an independent production company that centers strong LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people to increase visibility, empathy, and connection.

Rivkah met Randi after opening her marriage to her husband some five years ago. “Truthfully, the plan was not to fall in love with her. I’d told her if it gets emotional, I’m putting on my running shoes, and she was like, “I plan to love you with a transformational love” – and I was like OK, good luck with that,” Rivkah laughed. “But then, as it turns out, she was right and I’m so grateful.” As she learned more about Randi’s journey navigating motherhood with Moses, she knew it was a story that needed to be shared.

“I wanted her to tell me the whole story, of how she came to be the person she needed to be to meet Moses and to be the parent she wanted to be for him. The pandemic was just happening, the shutdown was just happening, and Randi and I didn’t know how much we were going to see each other because we don’t live in the same house,” Rivkah remembers. She asked Randi whether she could interview her. Randi agreed and they ended up talking for about three hours. “I don’t think she really understood – I don’t know if I understood – what was happening, but I got the recording transcribed, I cut it down to just twenty minutes, and then I sent it to Jen, my favourite creative collaborator. And I was like, what do you think about this?”

“I listened to it, my eyes closed and I began to feel into my body and my body began to move and that’s not really a normal thing for me,” Jen admitted. “I burst into tears and I just knew there’s something really powerful here. Randi is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. And she’s also very secure in herself, in her journey, so my sense was that she did not really hesitate to share her words. We hesitated; we’re very protective of her. So then, the challenge for us, was to figure out how to turn it into a film, how to come up with the imagery, that would bring a viewer into the internal life of Randi’s experience, and that’s what we spent the last couple of years working on.”

“We wanted to make sure that we could reflect Randy’s experience back, and part of that was through the passage of time. We wanted to convey that through the imagery as well so, we had nature help us tell that story – we had the seasons changing, we had the fog, we had wind, we had hail, we had sunshine, we had filtered light. We used all these tools to signify the passage of time, to layer it in,” Rivkah explains. “We also wanted to highlight the idea that the care for Moses is ongoing, and to give a flavour of who he is.”

Rivkah, Jen and their cinematographer Clare Major captured Moses through the disability lens, showing him as a person who is whole and full and incredibly valuable. “Moses is not interested in watching films. He doesn’t engage with media – he’s more active, he likes to play soccer, he’s really motivated by social interaction and we wanted to capture that essence and show him interacting with people. It was really important for us to include the way he is experiencing the world, which is in a pretty joyous embrace. So, while this is Randi’s story, representing Moses with dignity was vital to us.”

Shooting this film through an experiential lens has made Holding Moses what it is – a love letter. Not just between Rivkah and Randi, who shared this intimate moment of sweet and raw truths together, but between Randi and Moses, and the craft that has kept her from keeping both feet firmly rooted, fiercely stomping the ground, even when she felt herself falling: dance. Particularly, the school of Butoh.

Randi studied with Min Tanaka at the Body Weather farm in Japan aged 22, and upon first arriving, was surprised to find herself doing farm work until 5PM every day, at which point the dance part of the training would begin. Rivkah believes certain points in Randi’s life prepared her for Moses, for this incredible, non-verbal human who communicates so much through his body, his hugs and through his heart.

“Body Weather – it’s such a perfect name, right? We have seasons of weather that come through us, and that’s what we withstand, that’s what we rejoice in…There’s this exhaustion, when you get to the point where you don’t have a “yes” or a “no” – you just are. It’s a place, which is so raw and so vulnerable, it’s a place that I think is exquisite in creativity as well. To get to that place, there’s an opening that has to happen and I felt that, to really tell Randi’s story, that was crucial: Min Tanaka saying, stretch farther.

“The dancers were at a point where they were stretched as far as they could and he’s like no, not good enough, more – open more, open more. And what he’s really saying is – that breaking open, is also a connecting.  It wasn’t just Randi as an individual, it was Randi connected with the earth and with the red woods and with the smell of decaying matter and the smell of gardenias and animals and all the other dancers. There’s a oneness available in letting go and that is where that capacity comes from. It’s bigger than us, and when I think about the best kind of work we can do, it’s that acceptance and it’s that opening.”

The concept behind the Body Weather farm was something I had never heard of before but immediately connected with – it seems to me that, in motherhood and caregiving, we never leave the farm. We just grow, adapt, sway with and withstand the seasons we move through. And Holding Moses depicts this cycle with both the playful light of spring and the pensive chills of the winter months in all their beauty and pain.