Emma Seligman makes stress delicious

The screenwriter-director’s bisexual Jewish comedy, ‘Shiva Baby’, comes just in time for Pride Month

Humid. Anxiety-inducing. Intense. In the last two months, film reviewers around the world have been explicit about the discomfort that creeps in while watching Shiva Baby, Emma Seligman’s feature film debut. Yet not one of them wanted to cut short the experience. In fact, ‘claustrophobia’ joins sharp comedy and a breakout performance as some of the winning features of this tightly choreographed film about a floundering college student at a funeral service. “Danielle [Rachel Sennott] was taken from my time in university in New York. I was very stressed about what I wanted to do. And a lot of my friends were seeking an arrangement where they had sugar daddies,” says Canadian director and screenwriter, Seligman, over Zoom with The Hindu Weekend. Based on Seligman’s short of the same name, her thesis project at NYU, the film has Danielle attending a shiva, which is a Jewish mourning ritual, with her parents. She runs into her sugar daddy there as well as her ex-girlfriend. It is stressful and chaotic.