Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
After the screening, join us for a Q&A with director Oren Rudavsky, moderated by Dr. Ingrid Anderson, Associate Director at the Elie Wiesel Center.
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, public figure and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
About Oren Rudavsky
Oren Rudavsky’s film Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire was an official selection of the Telluride International Film Festival and has been awarded the Audience Award at three film festivals, the Yad Vashem Award at DocAviv and the Torchbearer Prize at the Miami Jewish Film Festival. He 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 PBS American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People which was nominated for a Critics Choice award. His NEH funded film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and broadcast on PBS 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 Producer/Writer of the series Time for School, a twelve-year longitudinal exploration of the education of seven children in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle.
Oren co-wrote and directed The Treatment, his fiction feature, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen which was awarded Best Film Made in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. Rudavsky recently completed the NEH funded film Everything Seemed Possible along director Ramón Rivera Moret, about an era of profound cultural and social change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s-1960s. The film was an official selection of the Rotterdam International Film Festival and recently screened at the Barbican Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.
About Dr. Ingrid Anderson
Dr. Ingrid Anderson specializes in modern and contemporary Jewish theology, philosophy, and political thought, and currently teaches courses on images of Jewish masculinity and post-Holocaust ethics. She serves as the Associate Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. Professor Anderson holds a Master’s degree in Jewish Studies and a doctoral degree in Religious Studies from Boston University, in addition to a bachelor’s degree in Literature and Women’s Studies.
