Israeli filmmaker Ori Gruder's son was 10 years old when Gruder realized — he didn't know how to talk to him about sex.
Gruder's documentary, "Sacred Sperm," explores the taboos in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — in which masturbation is banned — and the struggles a young boy has with his natural urges.
Forty-four-year-old Gruder turned to religion at age 30, AFP reported, after he grew up as a secular Jew. He now has six children and tackles a sensitive subject that "goes beyond the issue of self-love," AFP said, "revealing a profound level of sexual ignorance among religious youngsters."
“For me, that is the most important issue of the film and human beings: how we cope with something that does not go according to the laws we were taught,” Gruder told Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The film began circulating the US festival circuit on Sunday starting in Atlanta, and it's already been shown in Jerusalem, London and California, the AP said.
Rabbi Yisrael Aharon Yitzkovitch explained in the hour-long film the lengths boys take to avoid an erection, AFP reported, like digging fingernails into their legs, standing on their toes, and doing relaxation exercises.
Yitzkovitch also said in the film that young men are taught how to urinate without touching themselves and wear a special kind of underwear.
According to the AFP, the ban on masturbation seems to come from Genesis, in which a man who "spilled his seed on the ground" is believed to have cost him his life.
Approximately 11 percent of the 8.2 million-strong Israel are ultra-Orthodox Jews, according to the AFP. Parts of the movie are also shot in the Ukraine, where 200,000 people identify as Jewish.
“It was impossible to talk about such a topic in the past," Gruder told Haaretz. "But today, Haredi teenagers can find anything by pressing a few buttons, and that changes everything.
“I believe the rabbis feel the time has come to put these subjects on the table and talk about them.”
