Germany-Hungary-Israel-Romania-USA / 2024 / 86 min / English / Documentary
Soul on Fire will seek to understand the known and unknown Elie Wiesel – his passions, his conflicts and his legacy as the most known and public survivor of the trauma of the Holocaust. The film implements Elie Wiesel’s words and voice, with unique access to family and personal archives, original interviews and hand drawn, painted animation.
DIRECTOR: Oren 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, awarded Best Film Made in New York at the Tribeca.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT: Soul on Fire is a natural progression of my work, creating documentaries that explore the past through personal and family stories. My mother grew up in Poland before the war and was one of the lucky ones who left before 1939. In my twenties after my mother’s untimely death, I visited Poland to write and direct Spark Among the Ashes where I followed a Jewish family from the United States to celebrate their son’s bar mitzvah for Jews in Crakow who had not seen one in a generation. I went on to produce and work as cinematographer on a number of holocaust related documentaries. I produced and co-directed A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, and Hiding and Seeking about a Polish family that hid three Jewish brothers.
Our project is unique due to its access to Elie Wiesel’s family and their personal archives including letters, photographs and amateur film.
Contact: oren.rudavsky@gmail.com
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Sponsored by:
