Brother Anna (1963): A Jewish woman is a very queer woman

O Adelfos Anna / Brother Anna (Grigoriou, 1963) is a Greek film about Anna, a Jewish girl who cross-dresses as a monk in a Christian monastery in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The film’s negotiation of gender and religious identities is peculiarly subdued: unlike other cross-dressing films (such as Sylvia Scarlett or Yentl), both Anna’s disguise and her subsequent identity disclosure do not lead to paradoxical situations that can invite queer interpretations, and her Jewishness recedes into the background. Yet, the fact that Anna resides in an oppressive environment, which stipulates female sexuality as profane and punishes its manifestations, marks her own, queer trajectory of identity disclosure: being initially saddled with a non-gendered identity that helps her avoid female oppression, Anna experiments with religious, Christian pathos to sanctify her own sexuality. At the same time, she unknowingly but actively explores the negative stereotype of a Jewish temptress to seduce her male object of desire to Christian morality. Even though Anna will finally embrace a conventional heterosexual bonding, both her non-normative, religious expression of sexuality and her overturning of the negative connotations that female Jewishness entails leads to her acknowledgement of female sexuality as something inherently positive, which does not require validation from a conventional, Greek Orthodox marriage scheme.