Shawn Snyder is a graduate of NSU at University School who received his B.A. in religion from Harvard University. In recent years, he has developed his filmmaking repertoire with short films, like “FESTUS” and “LULU,” and on March 15, his first feature film “TO DUST” will premiere in theaters.
The film takes an eccentric yet genuine approach to grief and its relationship between religious and secular worlds through examining Hasidic cantor Shmuel’s grieving process. Shmuel questions his religion grieving process and seeks out biology professor Albert, and the duo embark on a series of experiments in attempt to answer Shmuel’s blasphemous questions about the decay of his wife’s body. Even while exploring serious, dark topics, Snyder’s film is a comedy. In an interview with The Current, he mentioned making this choice because “humor helps us shine a light into these darker places but laugh while we’re doing it. The human condition itself absurd: We live knowing we’re going to die, and we love knowing that we’re going to lose.”
As shocking or grotesque as the description may sound, Snyder aims to provoke reflection in viewers about their conceptions of life and to “come to interesting questions through juxtapositions: the sacred and the profane, the religious and the scientific, the highbrow and the lowbrow, the absurdity and the gravitas, the biologically honest and the poetic.” Because everyone has different thresholds for these concepts, he believes these explorations will provoke a range of reactions in an audience — essentially, “TO DUST” will stimulate questions in almost everyone who watches, even if those questions are different from the person they are sitting next to.
Bringing something as complex as grief into the spotlight, Snyder explores the roles that religion and expectation play in grief and, ultimately, expresses the idea that “grief is intensely idiosyncratic.” Through following Shmuel, the film explores self-ritual both in spite of and paired with religious tradition, ultimately suggesting that grief is its own entity that each person processes in ways that are radically different — at least on the surface.
As Snyder also said, “Grief is a process that demands we keep going without the people we love. At the end of the day, the movie is about permission and healing.” That said, “TO DUST” is about more than just feeling grief; it’s about coming to terms that life must go on beyond grief, regardless of your spiritual beliefs.
Being inspired by his own grief from his mother’s passing 10 years ago, Snyder mentioned that writing “TO DUST” was a cathartic process for him. The film’s honest quality reflects Snyder own humanity to the point where an audience will see beyond the Jewish Gallows humor to the always potent and sometimes painful mystery found within the “humility at the outer reaches of religion, at the outer reaches of science and at the inner reaches of an individual human heart.” When the movie depicts Shmuel and Albert stealing and burying a dead pig as part of Shmuel’s obsessive coping, a viewer might think of similarly irrational and far-reaching acts they have done in the name of love and of loss. It’s this kind of reflection that makes “TO DUST” so compelling: it does more than tell a story; instead, it also asks you to reconsider your own.
If you’re interesting in watching “TO DUST,” it will be screened at AMC Aventura 24 and AMC Sunset Place in Miami; The Classic Gateway Theatre in Ft. Lauderdale; Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth, Cobb Theatres Downtown 16, Regal Shadowood/Boca in Palm Beach County; and AMC Merchants Cross and Regal Belltower in Ft. Myers.
