Film Screening: Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire

“Sometimes I'm afraid the tale might be forgotten. Sometimes I'm afraid it is forgotten already.”

- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winning author of Night

SYNOPSIS

Eighty years after his liberation from Buchenwald, we seek to understand the man behind Elie Wiesel's searing and widely read memoir Night. Told largely through his own words and eloquent voice, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire seeks to penetrate to the heart of the known and unknown Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) - his passions, his conflicts and his legacy as one of the most public survivors of the trauma of the Holocaust. With unique access to personal archives, original interviews and employing hand painted animation, the film illuminates Wiesel’s biography as a survivor, writer, teacher and public figure.

ELIE WIESEL

Born in Sighet, Romania, Wiesel, his family and entire community were deported to Auschwitz in the Spring of 1944, followed by a forced march to Buchenwald concentration camp in the winter of 1945. Wiesel barely survived this ordeal and he was liberated by American troops from Buchenwald at age 16. From there he was sent to France with other orphaned boys to recuperate. In France, he reunited with his sisters Hilda and Bea, (his father, mother and young sister did not survive) and went on to earn a living as a journalist in France and in the United States where he covered the United Nations. Ten years after his liberation, first in a longer Yiddish version, then in French, Wiesel wrote Night (La Nuit) 1958, his memoir of his experience during the war. It was translated and published in the United States in 1960. Among the earliest to recount his experience during the Holocaust, Wiesel became one of the world’s most outspoken and well known survivors. Dedicating his life to the memory of the Holocaust and those who were murdered, and perhaps its most eloquent spokesperson, Wiesel’s fame slowly grew. The writer of over 50 books, including Souls on Fire, a book of mesmerizing tales of Hasidic Rabbis, The Jews of Silence, written after visits to the Soviet Union in the mid 1960s and many other novels and non-fiction works, Wiesel was invited in 1976 to become a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Boston University where he taught for forty years. A year after his iconic 1985 speech, pleading with President Ronald Reagan to not honor SS soldiers alongside German soldiers at the Bitburg cemetery, Weisel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Over the past fifty years, his memoir Night has become required reading in many middle and high schools in America and around the world. Along the way Wiesel gained audiences through his storytelling and in speeches focusing on his messages of “the sin of indifference,” the importance of “not remaining silent,” and speaking “truth to power”. Wiesel became a guiding light to American and world leaders and to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences who came to hear his tales.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

I create documentaries that explore the past and present through personal, family and community histories. These films - Spark Among the Ashes, A Life Apart, Hiding and Seeking, and Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire have frequently drawn me to the homeland of my mother - Poland and throughout Eastern Europe, in search of lost worlds that fill me with equal parts melancholy and excitement. The Jews who inhabited those countries often thrived and flourished n in the face of difficult even perilous circumstances and shared homelands in close contact with their non-Jewish neighbors. Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire is a continuation and in many ways a culmination of previous film adventures. It is an intimate and a personal film that seeks to understand the private and driven man even close friends only partially knew. The memoir Night serves as the film's touchstone as it was key in transforming Elie Wiesel’s life and in cementing the public understanding of the Holocaust. Weisel’s memoir also helped encourage other survivors to share their stories and through his many public addresses helped make the Holocaust an American story. Elie Wiesel’s example of speaking up to Presidents and others in public forums, resonates in our troubled times. The history of how the Holocaust came to play a central role in Jewish life, in American life and around the world, is wrapped around Elie’s story. Rather than comprehensiveness, the film seeks intimacy, and emotional and intellectual depth, trying to understand who Wiesel was at his core.

FILMMAKER BIOS

Oren Rudavsky, Writer/Director/Producer

Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts grants. Rudavsky produced, directed and co-wrote the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People which was nominated for a Critics Choice award. His film Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016. Colliding Dreams was broadcast on PBS in 2018. His NEH funded film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and broadcast on PBS in 1997 and his ITVS funded film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and was chosen for the PBS POV series. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the forty permanent film installations at the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow which opened in 2013. In 2009 Rudavsky was Producer/Writer of the two-part series Time for School 3, a twelve-year longitudinal study examining the education of seven children in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle. In 2006, Oren completed The Treatment, his fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen which was awarded Best Film Made in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded film Everything Seemed Possible along director and editor Ramón Rivera Moret, about an era of profound cultural and social change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s-1960s.

Michael Kantor, Executive Producer, AMERICAN MASTERS

Prior to becoming Executive Producer of the AMERICAN MASTERS series in April 2014, Michael Kantor produced 21 hours of television for national broadcast. In addition to winning the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Nonfiction Series, Mr. Kantor’s independent productions have been recognized with six Primetime Emmy Award nominations and one Writers Guild of America Award nomination. His six-part series, Broadway: The American Musical, was honored with a special screening in Washington on the occasion of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 40th anniversary. Mr. Kantor directed Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle (funded in part by the NEH), served as Producer of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater (written and hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas), was Executive Producer on Give Me the Banjo (narrated by Steve Martin, directed by Marc Fields), and wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning profile, Quincy Jones: In the Pocket, for the AMERICAN MASTERS series. With Laurence Maslon, he co-authored the companion books to his popular series, including Superheroes! Capes, Cowls and the Creation of Comic Book Culture (Crown Archetype), Make ‘Em Laugh (Twelve) and Broadway: The American Musical (Bulfinch). His most recent documentary was Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy, which won a Peabody Award in 2014. Mr. Kantor served over ten years as a nominator for the Tony Awards, and holds a B.A. in Theater Studies from Cornell University and a M.F.A. in Directing from the University of California, San Diego.

Tal Mandil, Producer

Tal Mandil is an independent filmmaker/producer based in New York City who got her start in film while living in Chile. There she produced Más Allá de las Olas/ Beyond the Waves, a four-part documentary series about blue whales in Patagonia that aired on national Chilean television in 2022. While there, she co-wrote and produced a narrative short film, Sumergido (2019), starring Daniel Antivilo and Lux Pascal. She is currently working on an NEH-funded documentary, Todo Parecía Posible/ Everything Seemed Possible, about an era change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and ‘60s directed by Ramón Rivera Moret in post production. She produced the documentary feature Taking Venice (Rome International Film Festival, DOC NYC, 2023, US distribution Zeitgeist, Kino/Lorber) about the role of the U.S. government backing artist Robert Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale. In 2024 she produced Javier Tellez’s short film Amerika that explored immigration through a collaboration with eight recent Venezuelan immigrants to NYC. She has been working with Oren Rudavsky on Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire since the project began in 2021.

Michael Chomet, Producer/ Editor

Michael Chomet is an accomplished and experienced editor, creative director, and executive producer with four EMMY nominations and one win, seven TELLY awards, three CINE Golden Eagles, three International Film & Television awards and is a member of the Television Academy. He owned Chomet Editing Inc, a successful post-production company for 18 years which merged with Spark Productions and later with Tribe Pictures. He edited the PBS series Reading Rainbow, was the executive producer for MTV/Viacom's reality series "College Life", and also produced and edited projects with Ben Stiller, Eugene Levy, Martha Stewart, Levar Burton, Michael Moore, Marlo Thomas, and Hype Williams. Michael edited Oren’s first two documentaries Dreams So Real and Gloria: A Case of Alleged Police Brutality and in recent years acted as a consulting editor on Oren’s film Witness Theater. Michael is the child of a holocaust survivor.

Joel Orloff, Animator

Joel Orloff is an animator based in Providence, Rhode Island. He has led animation teams for a number of documentary projects, including Oren Rudavsky's Witness Theater, American Masters' Unladylike2020, and Joe Dorman's Don Quixote in Newark. He is currently in production on Pamela Hogan's upcoming documentary about the 1975 Iceland women's strike, and is subsequently set to begin work, alongside Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, on Joe Dorman's NEH-funded feature on the Colfax Massacre. He co-created, with Riley Thompson, the award-winning short film When Planets Mate. He is a recipient of two artist development grants from the Brown Arts Institute and is a member of their 2021 Cohort. He was awarded a MacDowell colony residency for his work in 2017. He teaches animation in the Film / Animation / Video department at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Annette Insdorf, Co-producer

Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and Moderator of the popular "Reel Pieces" series at the 92nd Street Y, where she has interviewed 300 film celebrities. She is the author of the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel); Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski; Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director's work; Philip Kaufman, and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has. Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, currently in its fourth printing. She is the Executive Producer of Shoeshine, nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Live-Action Short of 1987; the 10-minute movie starring Jerry Stiller and Ben Stiller also won the Grand Prize at the Montreal Film Festival. In addition, she served as Executive Producer of Performance Pieces, starring F. Murray Abraham, which was named Best Fiction Short at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.