How ‘Shiva Baby’ captures the anxieties of being a young woman
By Sonia RaoThe Washington Post
Utopia
The premise of the new film “Shiva Baby” sells itself: While begrudgingly accompanying her parents to a shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, a college student encounters not only her ex-girlfriend, but also her sugar daddy. Filmmaker Emma Seligman ran with the classic advice to write what you know, combining the experiences of sugar babies she knew at New York University with her own memories of what it was like to grow up in a reformed Ashkenazi Jewish community in Toronto.
“It’s funny, there’s just the same amount of bragging and nosy questions,” she says of the shivas she has attended. “I initially thought of it as a bar joke – a girl runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva, and what happens after that? But as I was making it, I realized I was putting a lot of my insecurities into it, especially the way I felt when I was approaching graduation. All the pressure I felt.”