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Filmmaker Oren Rudavsky
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Rudavsky, who lives in New York City and has a home in Lakeville, has been screening films at The Moviehouse for nearly three decades. “I was the first independent filmmaker to show a film there back in 1997 or ’98,” he recalled, with “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America.” “I think I’ve shown four or five films there over the years.”
Best known for his searing 1958 memoir, “Night,” Elie Wiesel forever altered how the Holocaust would be written about and remembered. A teenage survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the Romanian-born author became an international spokesperson for memory, conscience and moral responsibility. Yet Rudavsky’s documentary looks beyond Wiesel’s public role, revealing a man who was, in the director’s words, “intensely private and profoundly public.”
Rudavsky’s connection to Wiesel is also personal. “I grew up in Boston,” he said, “and Elie started teaching there in ’77 or ’78, and my mother took a class with him.” His father was a Reform rabbi, and the family’s shelves were filled with Jewish books, including Wiesel’s, such as “Night,” “Jews of Silence,” and the volume that would later lend its name to the film: “Souls on Fire.”
“His mystical storytelling is where he’s at his best,” Rudavsky said of the book. “So eloquent and beautiful — you could pick up any page and be transported into this other world, this other realm. ‘Night’ does that too, in a horrifying way, but it achieves that same sort of consciousness change.”
Wiesel, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, would go on to establish what is now the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University, an institution devoted to ethical inquiry, dialogue and human rights, principles that shaped both his teaching and his writing.
“One of the things that is most striking to me in living with Elie Wiesel’s work for the past four years,” said Rudavsky, “is how civilized, cultured, eloquent, soft-spoken and gentle a person he was, how loving in general a person he was.” That gentleness and quiet insistence on civility becomes one of the film’s most moving revelations.
The documentary does not present Wiesel as a saint or a monument. It lingers instead on the human questions. “How do you overcome trauma?” Rudavsky asked. “How do you live with it? Do you ever overcome it? I don’t think Elie did overcome it, but I think he learned to live with it and learned to enjoy life — sleeplessly perhaps — but he enjoyed the world.”
To evoke the inner life of memory, the film incorporates hand-painted animation by Joel Orloff, inspired in part by the illustrator Mark Podwal, who collaborated with Wiesel on several projects. “A few of the animations are inspired by his brilliant work,” Rudavsky said. “Everything else is from Joel Orloff’s imagination.”
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The technique they employed in the film was influenced by South African artist William Kentridge, whose charcoal drawings evolve through erasure and reworking. “We wanted to evoke memory through the animation,” Rudavsky explained. “Joel painted on glass, smudged it, poured water onto it.” The result is a haunting, fluid visual language, neither literal nor ornamental.
“At first, I wasn’t sure I was going to use animation,” Rudavsky explained. “But when I read portions of Elie’s autobiography, he intersperses these dreams about his family, his father, and I thought, ‘This just cries out for animation.’” The effect is striking: a fusion of conscious and subconscious, past and present.
Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife, translator, and closest collaborator, passed away in February of last year. She was able to see the film at a screening at Lincoln Center. “She said to me, ‘I love the film, but it caused me pain because it made me fall in love with Elie all over again,’” Rudavsky recalled. “Which was heartbreaking — but for a filmmaker, what more can you really ask for?”
Marion, he added, was a remarkable figure in her own right, deeply involved in civil rights activism. A member of the NAACP in the 1950s, she encouraged Elie to look beyond the Jewish world he mostly traveled in and toward a broader global perspective.
That outward gaze was central to Wiesel’s public life. The film revisits moments when he spoke directly to political power, including his famous confrontation with President Ronald Reagan over a planned visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where SS members were buried. “Elie lost the battle but won the war,” Rudavsky said. “Because how he spoke up was much more lasting than whatever Reagan did.” He adds that what mattered most was the tone: “It was a civil dialogue. A gentle dialogue.”
Moderating the post-screening discussion will be Ileene Smith, editor at large for Farrar, Straus and Giroux and editorial director of Jewish Lives, the prizewinning biography series published by Yale University Press. Smith worked closely with both Elie and Marion Wiesel on many books, including the new translation of “Night.” In 1986, she accompanied the Wiesels to Oslo when Elie received the Nobel Peace Prize. Her husband, Howard Sobel, served for many years on the board of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
Wiesel believed that memory was not passive; it was a moral act. Asked about the moral obligation to bear witness, Rudavsky said, “It’s an endless moral obligation. And we all take on what we can, which is always too little.”
And what would Rudavsky ask Wiesel now if he were still here to bear witness?
“People ask, post–Oct. 7, what would Elie have said? And I can’t speak for him but I know he would have spoken up from where he comes from. Some would have disagreed with him. But in the U.S. today, when immigrants are being shipped off to places unknown, when people trying to defend them are facing violence, even death, we all need to try to do whatever little bit there is to do.”
Even within disagreement, Wiesel believed in dialogue. Rudavsky, speaking about his relationship with Wiesel’s son, Elisha, said: “We have different political perspectives, but we’re united in saying we’ll keep talking, we’ll keep working together. It’s such a divisive time where people don’t talk to each other — they yell at each other and kill each other. That’s something Elie Wiesel certainly would have spoken up about.”
Because for Wiesel, bearing witness was not only about preserving the past. It was about refusing indifference in the present.
For tickets, visit: themoviehouse.net
Artist Peter Gerakaris in his studio in Cornwall.
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‘Orchid Oculus Tondo’by Peter GerakarisProvided
At the heart of the exhibition is a four-foot-diameter hand-painted “Orchid Oculus Tondo,” surrounded by four hand-embellished prints and a shimmering cut-glass mosaic. The central painting conjures a dreamlike cosmos where endangered St. Lucian parrots glide through oversized tropical orchids and foliage. Built through a “call-and-response process” that allows drips, spills and chance encounters to remain visible, the work is alive with motion and improvisation. In the depths of winter, “Oculus Serenade” offers a kind of visual warmth, a reminder of the beauty, fragility and music of the natural world.
“Oculus Serenade: Artwork by Peter D. Gerakaris” runs Jan. 17 through Feb. 28 at the Cornwall Library. An artist’s reception will be held Saturday, Jan. 17, from 4 to 6 p.m. Registration is requested at cornwalllibrary.org/events/.
Cynthia Rothrock and Steve McQueen's son saunter purposefully in "Martial Law."
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Because she’s not named Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan.
It’s an outrage, and we’re gonna do something about it.
In “Martial Law” (1990), Rothrock and Chad McQueen (Steve’s son) are cops and David Carradine is the evil kung fu-practicing international car thief. We’re talking fun with pizza, the most annoying snitch in cinema history, and a compelling visual discourse on the inadvisability of stealing cars at night from a well-lit dealership located on a busy highway. No gratuitous nekkidity, which really isn’t a problem here, as nobody wants to see any of these people nekkid.
Chad is replaced by Jeff Wincott for the sequel, “Martial Law II: Undercover” (1991). This is much rougher stuff, not least because it has a “sex scene” involving Billy Drago. A kung fu villain runs an expanding underworld empire from the kind of bar you can’t get into without a double-breasted suit and a ponytail. There are large, grunting lackeys, a bit of gratuitous nekkidity, and Rothrock delivering swift justice while clad head to toe in teal.
Rothrock and Michelle Yeoh in "Yes, Madam," featuring the scorpion kick.Provided
“Yes, Madam” (1985) is Rothrock’s debut, as Carrie Morris, a Scotland Yard inspector in Hong Kong to help Inspector Ng (Michelle Yeoh) do something about a piece of errant microfilm. There is an exceptionally unconvincing dubbing of a British accent for Rothrock, who strongly resembles American Olympian Mary Lou Retton — except Retton didn’t do kung fu. The movie makes no sense, which is OK because it’s short. Plus, Rothrock delivers her trademark scorpion kick to some hapless goon’s forehead, which is worth the price of admission.
“City Cops” (1989):Here our heroine is FBI agent “Inspector Cindy,” who comes to Hong Kong to fight crime in warehouses, alleys, office buildings and airports. Featuring the spectacular Receptionist’s Desk Roll. We also get a comical cop duo, a martinet police superintendent, and an extended opening riff on gender that would be impossible to make today.
Rothrock fights crime after rolling arounda receptionist's desk in "City Cops."Provided
“Undefeatable” (1993) was directed by Godfrey Ho, the Jess Franco of the East, and despite Ho’s Hacko di Tutti Hacki status, this movie actually has a story and makes sense. Rothrock plays Kristi, who participates in illegal fights to earn enough money to get her sister through med school. Meanwhile, Anna dumps her psycho husband, Stingray, who fights on the same underground circuit as Kristi — but he’s a lunatic and has a mullet.
Anyhoo, there is a lot of plot involving a couple of cops and Kristi’s dorky gang, and none of it matters because at the end Kristi and the cop subdue Stingray in extremely gory, horrible and entertaining fashion. And then everybody goes to college.
“Black Creek” (2025): Rothrock produced, co-wrote and starred in this crowdfunded Western, in which she plays a tough woman who rides into town to find her family has been destroyed by the local bad guy, played by the late Richard Norton. You could make a 15-minute reel of Rothrock and Norton kicking each other over the years, so this is a fitting coda. (Norton died in March 2025.) It seems Rothrock spent most of the budget on sets, lighting and costumes, figuring the writing would only get in the way of the story. So it’s heavy on the fighting, and anyone who thinks kung fu and Westerns don’t mix deserves a scorpion kick to the noggin.
