Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire

As perhaps the world’s most eloquent witness to the Holocaust, writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s legacy would seem to be firmly attached to the singular horror that he both experienced and spent his life memorializing—the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. But this poetic and powerful documentary reveals that Wiesel’s astounding moral clarity and his outspokenness against the indifference that humans can display to suffering are deeply resonant in our own time. Wiesel’s clarion call to remember the victims and to resist hate wherever it appears feels not a matter of history, but urgent today. Part chronological biography—reconstructing crucial episodes from Wiesel’s private and public life, including his rebuke of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to a cemetery where SS soldiers were buried—but also a moving evocation of Wiesel’s dawning consciousness of his calling, as he wrestled with both the gift and the burden of being humanity’s witness. The film is told largely in Wiesel’s own words and testimony, and is hauntingly illustrated by Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animations. —Peter Stein

West Coast Premiere

Oren Rudavsky is an award-winning filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow whose work spans both fiction and documentary. He has received multiple grants from the NEH and NEA. His film Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People (American Masters) was nominated for a Critics Choice Award. Other works include Colliding Dreams and The Ruins of Lifta (2016), and A Life Apart: Hasidism in America and Hiding and Seeking, both co-directed with Menachem Daum and broadcast on PBS. Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award; A Life Apart was shortlisted for an Oscar. Rudavsky produced over forty media installations for Moscow’s Russian Jewish Museum and was producer/writer of Time for School 3 (PBS Wide Angle), a 12-year study of global education. His fiction feature The Treatment won Best Film Made in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. He is currently producing Everything Seemed Possible, a documentary on Puerto Rico’s cultural shifts in the 1950s–60s.