“Parting the Waters” follows Michele Kuvin Kupfer, a member of the 1980 Israeli Olympic swim team, as she sets out—four decades later—to reunite with her old teammates and compete in the 2022 Maccabiah Games. Once a rising star who came of age in the pool during the 1981 Games, Michele now returns in the wake of personal loss, seeking healing, connection, and a second act. As the film traces her journey from elite athlete to masters swimmer, it also dives into the larger story of Jewish identity, resilience, and community, and shows that it’s never too late to find your light.

Director Michelle Kupfer brings a lyrical and deeply human vision to the screen, weaving together themes of memory, loss, and renewal with striking visual and emotional clarity. The film traces the fragile boundary between separation and connection, asking what is left behind when we let go, and what new forms of intimacy might emerge from absence. Kupfer’s storytelling is both intimate and expansive, marked by a sensitivity to atmosphere and a keen eye for the unspoken.

I was a therapist before I was a filmmaker… and my first calling prepared me for the second. In both disciplines, we tell stories, purge emotions, express our fears and desires, all to try and make sense of the tangle of life. But when I set out to make Parting The Waters I knew I would be the one on the couch. As director and subject, I was forced to open up old wounds and revisit past traumas—growing up the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, overcoming severe learning disabilities, suffering humiliating anti-Semitism daily, struggling to keep my chronically ill son alive, losing my best friend—all while training to swim in an elite competition after leaving the sport for over forty years. At times, it felt like this journey would break me. But in the end, it saved me. I could never have made it over the finish line without the empathy and vision of my directing partners—Marc Levy and Marc Salomon, the Emmy-nominated creatives behind The Marcs Studios.