Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
Director/Writer: Oren Rudavsky
USA | 2024 | English and French with English subtitles | 88 min
Q&A with Director Oren Rudavsky and Jennifer King, who as Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Boston University, oversees the papers of Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other collections
NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE
This deeply moving new documentary offers an engrossing look at the life and legacy of Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), one of the most profound leaders and teachers of our time. Night, Wiesel’s eloquent and terrifying 1958 memoir of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager forever changed the way the Holocaust would be read and written about. With rigor, nuance and tenderness — and with unique access to Wiesel’s personal archives — the film traces Wiesel’s journey from his childhood in Sighet, Romania, a close-knit Jewish community devastated and destroyed in the Holocaust, to his emergence on the world stage where he became a beacon of universal human rights.
In many ways a private man despite being one of the most public voices of Holocaust remembrance, Wiesel is presented here in newly intimate ways known only to his closest friends. Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire stands as a crucial testament to an extraordinary man who helped shape our collective memory of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, and to the relevance of his teachings in today’s increasingly hostile world, where the memory of the Holocaust is fading and authoritarian threats loom large.
Elie Wiesel was a beloved friend and mentor to many in the Boston area, where he was on the faculty of Boston University for four decades. Don’t miss this masterful film from award-winning documentarian Oren Rudavsky (A Life Apart: Hasidism in America and most recently Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People).
Screening commemorates the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ebensee and many smaller concentration and death camps.
We mourn the passing of Marion Wiesel who passed away on February 2nd. May her memory be a blessing.
Co-Presented by Facing History & Ourselves
