EXCLUSIVE: A trailer dropped today for the award-winning short documentary Holding Moses ahead of its release November 16 on the New Yorker’s digital channels.
The film takes viewers on an intimate journey with Broadway dancer Randi Rader as she reveals the emotional challenges of raising her young son Moses, who was born with a profound disability. The 16-minute documentary, directed by Rivkah Beth Medow and co-directed by Jen Rainin, features stunning visuals and Rader’s remarkably candid account of her experience.
“A newborn should cry and start breathing calmly. Moses was laboring too hard,” Rader recalls in voice-over in the trailer. “His belly was pumping to try to get air. I had no idea what I was in for.”
Doctors discovered Moses had a rare genetic disorder of the 22nd chromosome and faced a “tenuous future,” according to a description of the film. Unlike his mother, who moved with a dancer’s power, for Moses, mastering any kind of motion would be difficult. “Randi fell into a well of grief before unearthing a new language to learn and love her son—one born and honed in the body.”
Courtesy of Barak Shrama
Holding Moses won the Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at the Provincetown International Film Festival, qualifying it for Oscar consideration. It also won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at Frameline, the Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and Honorable Mention for Best Short Documentary at Riverrun Film Festival. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, where Holding Moses held its world premiere, it won a Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Short Film.
“Holding Moses is especially intimate for me,” Medow said in a statement. “Our main character, Randi, is my romantic partner, and Moses is her son. In the throes of my own grief experience, Randi and I recorded the story of how she reckoned with her grief around birthing Moses. She shared her story with a fierce honesty that became our audio track. Then we began filming. Time and the changing seasons shaped the vérité and visuals to bring us into Randi’s emotional experience. What you’re seeing and hearing in this film is a mother revealing her rawest self to her partner.”
Courtesy of Rebecca Pierce
Medow added, “By naming and owning our truths fully—in this case, a parent’s momentary, heart-wrenching wish for her child—we help dispel the shame narrative and deepen our capacity to love authentically.”
The New Yorker’s short films have enjoyed significant success with Oscar voters. The 2021 animated short film Affairs of the Art and the 2021 live-action short film On My Mind both earned Academy Award nominations, and six of the New Yorker’s films last year made Oscar shortlists, including Águilas, A Broken House, Step Into the River, Les Grandes Claques, and Under the Heavens.
Soo-Jeong Kang serves as the New Yorker’s executive director of video. “Holding Moses is a raw and honest testimony of a parent confronting complicated feelings for her severely disabled child,” she said in a statement. “It is an inspirational vision of parenting at its most challenging and a pure example of how love, like water, always finds a way to flow.”
“Randi’s story laces together family, queerness, and disability with vulnerability,” a release about the film noted. “It is a parenting journey we rarely discuss openly in our culture. The film team partnered with the Phelan-McDermid, AGENDA, and Moebius Syndrome Foundations, along with several other disability groups. The film also resonates broadly with parents of non-disabled children, because in truth, no parent actually gets the child they imagined.”
Watch the trailer above.