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Oren Rudavsky (born c. 1957) is an American documentary filmmaker specializing in work about individuals and communities outside the mainstream. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1979. Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People. He is also working on a documentary for a program called Witness Theater, which will chronicle the relationships formed between high school students and Holocaust survivors, culminating with a dramatization of the lives of the survivors. His films Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016.
His film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and his film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the permanent installations at the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow which opened in 2013. In 2011, Rudavsky produced a series of profile documentaries for Bloomberg television called Risk Takers. 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, he completed his first fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director: The Treatment, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen. The film premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival where it was awarded Best Film, Made in New York.
Rudavsky’s other work includes writing and producing segments for the ABC national series PrimeTime Live, the PBS series Media Matters, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly and other national programming. He has also worked as a post-production supervisor on the film unit of Saturday Night Live and the syndicated series Tales From the Darkside in the 1980s.
Chabad, also known as Lubavitch, Habad and Chabad-Lubavitch, is an Orthodox Jewish Hasidic dynasty. Chabad is one of the world's best-known Hasidic movements, particularly for its outreach activities. It is one of the largest Hasidic groups and Jewish religious organizations in the world. Unlike most Haredi groups, which are self-segregating, Chabad operates mainly in the wider world and caters to secularized Jews.
Julie Taymor is an American director and writer of theater, opera, and film. Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997 and received eleven Tony Award nominations, with Taymor receiving Tony Awards for her direction and costume design. Her film Frida, about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a Best Original Song nomination for Taymor's composition "Burn It Blue". She also directed the 2007 jukebox musical film Across the Universe, based on the music of the Beatles.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, is a 2006 documentary film made by Firelight Media, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson. The documentary reveals new footage of the incidents surrounding the Peoples Temple and its leader Jim Jones who led over 900 members of his religious group to a settlement in Guyana called Jonestown, where he orchestrated a mass suicide with poisoned Flavor Aid, in November 1978. It is in the form of a narrative with interviews with former Temple members, Jonestown survivors, and people who knew Jones.
Gmina Działoszyce is an urban-rural gmina in Pińczów County, Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, in south-central Poland. Its seat is the town of Działoszyce, which lies approximately 23 kilometres (14 mi) south-west of Pińczów and 61 km (38 mi) south of the regional capital Kielce.
Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust is 2004 documentary film about Menachem Daum, an Orthodox Jew and son of German Nazi Holocaust survivors who has spent his life interviewing survivors about the impact of the Holocaust on their lives. After hearing a disturbing tape of a rabbi openly preaching "hatred" of non-Jews, Daum attempts to raise an outcry in his Brooklyn Orthodox community. When ignored by the media and community leaders, Daum decides to fly to Israel to discuss the matter with his two sons, concerned with the "ethical legacy" he is responsible for leaving them.
Oren Jacoby is a director and producer of documentary films including; Shadowman (2017),My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes (2014), Lafayette: The Lost Hero(2010), Constantine's Sword (2008), Sister Rose's Passion (2005), The Shakespeare Sessions (2003), Stage on Screen: The Topdog Diaries (2002), The Beatles Revolution (2000), and Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself (1998). His stage adaptation of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man premiered in 2012 at the Court Theater in Chicago, starring Teagle Bougere.
Filmworks XIV: Hiding and Seeking features a score for film by John Zorn. The album was released on Zorn's own label, Tzadik Records, in 2003 and contains music that Zorn wrote and recorded for, Hiding and Seeking (2003), a documentary directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky.
Filmworks XVIII: The Treatment features a score for film by John Zorn. The album was released on Zorn's own label, Tzadik Records, in 2006 and contains music that Zorn wrote and recorded for the romantic comedy, The Treatment (2006), directed by Oren Rudavsky.
Marshall Curry is an Oscar-winning American documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. His films include Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Point and Shoot, and A Night at the Garden. His first fiction film was the Academy Award-winning short film The Neighbors' Window (2019).
Bill Guttentag is an American dramatic and documentary film writer-producer-director. His films have premiered at the Sundance, Cannes, Telluride and Tribeca film festivals, and he has won two Academy Awards.
Menachem Daum is an Orthodox Jewish documentary film-maker. Born in displaced persons camp in Germany, to refugees from Poland who had survived the Holocaust. Being Jewish, many of his relatives perished in Nazi Germany's genocide. Professionally a gerontologist, he is based today in Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York.
Mychal Springer is a rabbi and the manager of Clinical Pastoral Education at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Immy Humes is an American documentary filmmaker and television producer. Her first independent documentary was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991, and she continues to make films about contemporary American life. Humes has also taught filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, NYU/Brooklyn Polytechnic and City College of New York.
Sławomir Grünberg is a Polish-born naturalized American documentary producer, director and cameraman.
A Life Apart: Hasidism in America is 1997 documentary produced for PBS about Hasidic Judaism in America produced and directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky, written by Daum and Robert Seidman, and narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Pearl Gluck is an American filmmaker and professor. Her films, which explores themes of class, gender, and faith, have appeared as a part of the Sundance Lab, as well as played at Cannes Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and on PBS.
Moriah Films is the Jack and Pearl Resnick Film Division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Samuel D. Pollard is an American film director, editor, producer, and screenwriter. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. Spike Lee, whose films Pollard has edited and produced, described him as being "a master filmmaker." Henry Louis Gates Jr. characterizes his work in this way: "When I think about his documentaries, they add up to a corpus — a way of telling African-American history in its various dimensions."
Leonard Nimoy was an American actor who had a career in film and television for seven decades. Nimoy's breakthrough role was his portrayal of Spock in Star Trek.
Benjamin Safdie is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and film editor best known for working with his older brother Josh as a filmmaker. His directorial works include Heaven Knows What (2014), Good Time (2017), and Uncut Gems (2019). Transitioning towards acting, Safdie was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his role in Good Time and has since taken on roles in films such as Licorice Pizza (2021), Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. and Oppenheimer.