If you left the Uncut Gems party feeling pretty stressed, Sammi Cohen is here for you. The Jewish filmmaker found a spiritual partner in Adam Sandler, for whom they direct his latest Happy Madison venture, in which the star’s movie family is actually composed of the exact same people as his biological family: that’s his wife Jackie, and his daughters Sadie and Sunny, now in the spotlight and all over your Letterboxd reviews about the t credit block. The result is You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, a movie that welcomes us with open arms.

“No one understands the value of tweenage girldom like Adam Sandler,” Letterboxd member Calseyyy writes. Sandler has been casting his daughters in his films for well over a decade (and allegedly, hilariously having them write his awards speeches), but in Bat Mitvah, they finally take the lead. Sadie plays older sister Ronnie Friedman to Sunny’s Stacy Friedman, who is a soon-to-be thirteen-year-old planning her bat mitzvah, like every good Jewish girl must.

It is the moment she becomes a woman, the party everyone will have eyes on, so everything has to be perfect. It’s what she and her best friend Lydia (Samantha Lorraine) have been planning since the day they were born. Of course, drama ensues (Sandler in this movie is, once more, married to Idina Menzel—Cohen is ready for the Uncut Gems fancams) because nothing more perfectly represents the world-shattering anxiety of adolescence than a bat mitzvah.

But also a bar mitzvah, or a b’nai mitzvah or b’mitzvah, celebrations in the Jewish faith that welcome you into adulthood whatever your gender expression—a testament to Cohen’s beautifully progressive worldview and filmmaking, a beacon of light to young Jewish people who might really need to see this right now. Plus: Olivia Rodrigo vibes, Eighth Grade anxiety, sweaty running girls, ‘Sweet Caroline’ and all the greatest things of the most stressful soirees of your life. Sammi Cohen is throwing a party, and tells us all about it below.

I have to ask if you’re familiar with Letterboxd, partly because Stacy’s older sister Ronnie’s Letterboxd would be crazy.
Sammi Cohen: She definitely watches everything from David Lynch to Mean Girls; she has a very wide range and Ronnie is very prolific when it comes to music and movies. I made playlists for Stacy and Ronnie but I should start doing Letterboxd s for my characters as well. That’s a genius idea.

It’s so nice to watch a movie about a Jewish family where the neurosis is there but you’re also allowed to feel good. There’s a bit where Sandler’s character says, “Welcome to being Jewish; we don’t get breaks,” and I’m like, ‘No, this is one! This is our break!’
It’s true—we go, “It never ends,” but we wanted this to feel good for everyone. We talk about how neurotic and anxious we are and that’s all very true, but we also were excited to bring this movie to the world and go, “We also know how to throw a party; we know how to have fun.” Judaism is so much about community and family and the shared experiences. There’s so much pure joy that comes from those moments. It feels good, and you don’t have to be Jewish for it to feel good.

That joy does feel like it comes across from the moment that Sandler basically became your fairy godmother who lets you do what you want with your movie—it seems like a dream come true to have that kind of freedom as a filmmaker.
This whole thing has been a dream and a little surreal at times. This is much bigger than my first feature and there was so much more to do. The stakes felt higher because we wanted to represent this world and our people and there was so much care.

Adam’s amazing. There’s something called the ‘Sandler effect’, or the ’Happy Madison effect’. It creates a familial, communal environment. When we shot that big first b’nai mitzvah, five minutes before lunch we were wrapping up a take and all of a sudden ‘Sweet Caroline’ starts playing over the loudspeaker. A wave of chorus begins, everyone’s laughing, it was such a beautiful moment that goes to show that the making of the movie felt so weirdly in tune with the Jewishness of the movie. It’s taking a break, living and being present with one another. We’ve been through a lot of stuff and we’ve been torn away from each other. Being Jewish, there is this sense of when you come together it means so much.

I love that you bring up the b’nai mitzvah, because before seeing your film, that wasn’t something that I had come across before. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah, but I think there can be this misconception among both people who are Jewish or not Jewish that it’s a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah. It’s like, pick one.
Yeah, it’s funny. I identify as non-binary, but it took me so long to talk about that. When I was researching the movie, I was brushing up on my Hebrew and I was like, ‘Everything is still so gendered.’ But I started researching—I was talking to rabbis in Toronto, California, New York— and in having these conversations, I found that it’s very new.

It’s very much in certain parts of the world and the United States specifically, but there’s this thing called a b’nai mitzvah, which is plural. As a kid, I went to one or two, but it was when kids shared a bat mitzvah or bar mitzvah, they pluralized it. Now they’re doing b’mitzvahs, b’nai mitzvahs. If you look at the movie, it’s reformed, very progressive. I know that doesn’t speak to every facet of Judaism—there are conservatives, too—but we wanted to be as inclusive as possible and look forward to a world that is starting to change. I want to normalize the Jewish experience, but also normalize the queer experience. It’s a very small detail, but it was exciting for me to look at. It’s a world that I thought I knew and it’s changing.

We want kids to see themselves. We’re inundated with images where everything is photoshopped, and glossy and beautiful. There is that version of all of us—where we can get dressed up—but the truth is that we can just be people and that doesn’t dictate your value or your worth. You bringing up this detail makes me so happy.

Let’s get into your own taste in films. Can you think of some Jewish movies you really connected with while growing up, or some non-Jewish movies that helped you come into your own identity?
It’s not a Jewish movie, but growing up, I watched The Sound of Music over and over and over. At the end of that movie, the Nazis are around and things are going south. It was a very small window into this terrible, terrible, terrible thing, but also like, ‘Okay, there’s some good in humanity.’ It’s a backdoor to being Jewish and feeling like, ‘Ooh, this movie I loved is in a weird way secretly about helping the Jews.’

When I think about identity, I think about Céline Sciamma and Tomboy. I was a little bit older when that came out, but that was maybe one of the most impactful films still to this day. Sciamma made me feel seen, and like I was okay. I’ve always been very enamored with stories about adolescence because kids are raw nerves. They don’t have this adult filter we all get: we get older, we form coping mechanisms, we keep our emotions tempered. Kids feel feelings on this large scale. I think that’s because every time you do something for the first time, it feels bigger.

Things that specifically influenced this movie were everything from Shiva Baby to Mean Girls. We have a lot of the nuances of indie filmmaking, but we have these big classic comedic swings from the likes of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and a touchstone for us was Sixteen Candles and John Hughes when he’s not problematic. We even step outside traditional narrative film—a lot of our inspiration for the camera and the way we tied it to Stacy was inspired by Waves, then also the photographer and artist [was] Petra Collins, who shot Olivia Rodrigo’s music videos.

Finally, what’s the first movie that made you want to be a filmmaker?
It’s weirdly That Thing You Do!. It doesn’t get talked about enough. That’s the day I picked up a camera and wanted to be a filmmaker, and that’s the day I sat at a drum set and wanted to become a drummer. It’s a fantastic, feel-good movie that I love dearly.