In the worldwide Chabad-Lubavitch community, there are 1,657 single women and 1,440 single men, as of this writing, according to listings on a Chabad website. That discrepancy illustrates what some in the Orthodox world call the “shidduch crisis” — a hotly debated issue about single women who struggle to find suitable husbands.

Now, “The Shidduch Crisis” is the name of a short film by 24-year-old director Chaya Gurkov. In a sea of opinions and emotions, her artistic take on the matter stands out. 

Gurkov, a Brooklyn College graduate and member of the Chabad-Lubavitch community, drew on personal experience to make the film, but invented the characters and dialogue. The film, which is consistently funny and heartwarming, tracks the full life cycle of one woman’s potential shidduch, or match, from the matchmaker’s recommendation to the (spoiler alert!) proposal, which takes place two months later right outside the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights.

Actor Arielle Flax plays Shaina, a young woman hesitant to get married, while comedian Leah Forster plays Faya, Shaina’s spunky mom. The matchmaker, Mrs. Katz, played by actor Goldie Zwiebel, urges Shaina to go out with a man she recommends. “Just one date,” Mrs. Katz says. “If it’s good, it’s good. If it isn’t, you go again!”

The man in question: six-foot-tall Motti, a soon-to-be doctor ready to settle down, played by actor Jake Steinberg. Shaina, on the other hand, is devout but moody. After a rocky start, the two seem to get along well. As the climactic scene nears, only one outcome seems possible. What reason could Shaina possibly have to dump poor Motti in front of all the bochurim on Eastern Parkway?

No reason — at least none that the film shows explicitly. Yet, Shaina does reject him, and she’s surprised by her mom’s reaction to the failed shidduch.

“OK,” Faya says. “What do you want me to do? Force you to marry someone you don’t want?” Faya has given Shaina what she really wants: permission to decline the proposal.

In an interview with Shtetl, Gurkov explained why she made the film, and what inspired its title.

“We’re all just in this pressure cooker of needing to get married, with this idea hovering over us that there’s actually really not a lot of people out there,” Gurkov said. “It’s very antithetical to the belief in God, that at the end of the day, He knows when to send our beshert to us,” she added, using the Yiddish word often used for soulmate.

Forster had another view of the film’s significance. “Parents are starting to realize that children come first, before community expectations,” she told Shtetl. “I think that was super powerful.”

Forster, who grew up Hasidic in Borough Park, was in an arranged marriage before being outed as a lesbian. She hopes filmgoers will leave with a sense of “hope for a really beautiful future, of what it looks like to hold onto your traditional values in a way that isn’t abusive and isn’t hurtful and isn’t traumatic, and is loving.”

Gurkov also said she wanted to combat harmful on-screen stereotypes of Orthodox Jews. “I wanted to create a story that showed that many of us are comfortable in our religion,” she said.

Because she approached the film with these intentions, she wasn’t worried about criticism from her community. “I wanted to portray the nuance of the story. So as long as I achieved that, then I was going to be OK with the fact that I was going in this direction,” the director said.

The film premiered on Sunday at a theater in Chelsea, Manhattan. Gurkov created and screened it as part of a narrative filmmaking fellowship for young New Yorkers hosted by Reel Works, an arts education nonprofit organization.