Director: Nathan Silver
A cantor who has lost his voice mid-service finds an unlikely path back to music when his former grade-school teacher asks him to prepare her for a Bat Mitzvah she never had.
What is Between the Temples about?
Ben Gottlieb has stopped singing. Since his wife's death, the cantor at his suburban synagogue can barely get through a service, let alone lead one. Then Carla Kessler, the piano teacher who shaped his childhood ears, resurfaces asking for something unusual: she wants the Bat Mitzvah her family never gave her, decades late. Ben agrees to tutor her, and the sessions turn into something neither of them expected, a friendship built on grief, memory, and an odd, tender chemistry that unsettles everyone around them, from Ben's anxious mother to the synagogue's watchful rabbi.
Cast & crew
Jason Schwartzman plays Ben with a jittery, wounded stillness, while Carol Kane brings warmth and mischief to Carla that keeps the film from tipping into melodrama. Dolly de Leon, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein, Matthew Shear and Lindsay Burdge round out a small-town ensemble of relatives, rabbis and suitors who each get a moment to complicate Ben's already tangled life.
Context & significance
Director Nathan Silver shot Between the Temples on grainy 16mm film, giving the comedy an unpolished, handheld intimacy that matches its off-kilter sense of humor. The 2024 release earned attention on the festival circuit for balancing Jewish ritual, midlife despair, and screwball comedy without flattening any of them, and its awkward dinner-table set pieces have become a talking point among fans of American independent cinema.
Where & how to watch
Between the Temples is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, and the platform's Persian dub and Persian subtitles make the film's dense, overlapping dialogue easy to follow for Farsi-speaking viewers. The full experience, browsing, searching, and reading pages like this one, is built around a Farsi-friendly interface for the Iranian diaspora, with no separate purchase needed to explore the catalog.