Credits

Pearl Gluck | DIRECTOR / WRITER / PRODUCER

Ten years after leaving her native Borough Park, Brooklyn, Pearl Gluck received a Fulbright grant to collect oral histories from Yiddish speakers in areas of Hungary once home to thriving Hasidic communities. At heart, she is a zamler, Yiddish for collector, an ethnographer.

Gluck directed a one-hour TV documentary, Soundwalk: Williamsburg, (2007) set to broadcast on Paris Premiere, and the audio tour for Soundwalk which was nominated for a 2007 Audie Award. She is co-writer on Goyta (2007) which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as part of Cinefondation. Gluck is editing Leap of Faith (projected release: 2008), a documentary by Steven Friedman and Antony Benjamin for Humble Films, Conversations with Carl (directed by Muffie Dunn), and was one of the editors on Arusi.

She is developing a narrative project, A Certain Night in Ocotober, which was awarded a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Fellowship (2006). An essay she wrote, Shtreimel Envy, was published in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt (edited by Ruth Andrew Ellenson), a Los Angeles Times Bestseller and winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Her first film, Divan (2004), is a Hasidic tale five years in the making which was developed in part at the Sundance Institute, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, opened theatrically at the Film Forum in NYC (2004) and broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Gluck continues to draw from her rich Hasidic heritage and through her current work seeks to provide both a bridge to the past and a form of cross-communal dialogue through the arts. She was the first to receive a Yiddish Fulbright to Hungary and her work was created with the support of foundations such as New York State Council on the Arts, Eva Eastman Fund, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Her commercial work includes directing and producing documentary shorts for The Covenant Foundation, the Heritage Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries, the American Committee for the Weitzmann Institute of Science, and editing radio and 30-second TV ads for Oxygen Advertising.

Gluck's video art includes Trance with sound artist Basya Schechter for the Eldridge Street Project in NYC, with musician Matt Darriau for the Krakow Jewish Arts Festival installed at Alchemia, and a multimedia installation in Weimar, Germany for backup.loungelab 2002.

She co-directed the award-winning short, Great Balls of Fire (6 mins; 2001) which is a homeless man's response to September 11. The short continues to screen worldwide at venues such as Transmediale, Oberhausen, Walker Center for the Arts, New York Video Festival, and in competition at the Globalica 10th International Media Art Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland.

Gluck has spearheaded community arts programs, curated literary and film events from Hungary to Israel to New York City, and has just returned from a February artist residency at the Paideia Institute in Stockholm. As part of her ongoing commitment to educational outreach, she has appeared on numerous college and university campuses, and acted as writer/mentor at the MacArthur-granted program, The Harlem Writers Crew.

Her first involvement with documentary film was in A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (1998; Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum). Her appearance in the film has encouraged grass-roots organization for an ex-Orthodox creative alliance. As one reviewer of The Boston Globe wrote, "Gluck deserves a documentary of her own."

Zelda Greenstein | EDITOR

Zelda Greenstein has been nominated for a Cable Ace for writing and editing on Before You Go (HBO, 1995). In addition to working on Divan, she edited Praying with Lior (directed by Ilana Trachtman), Hiding and Seeking (directed/produced by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky) 90 Miles (directed/produced by Juan Carlos Zaldovar) Women of the Wall (directed/produced by Faye Lederman). Her work includes Enemy of the People (1998; Director/Producer; Zareh Tueknavorian), An American Love Story (1999; Director/Producer, Jennifer Fox) and The Quiet Revolution in Honduras (1992). Her early work included assistant editing on Partisans of Vilna (1987). Greenstein is currently editing the ITVS supported documentary by Oren Rudafsky and Menachem Daum.

William Tyler Smith | DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

A graduate of the UCLA School of Cinema, Smith's first feature documentary, The Third Mind, on The Door's keyboardist Ray Manzarek and beat poet Michael McClure, had it's international premiere at the 1996 Venice Film Festival in Italy, its US Premiere at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel in November, 1997.

In addition to directing the photography of Divan, Smith is currently producing and directing a documentary on the progressive Summerhill School in the U.K., founded by A.S. Neill in 1921. Under the tutelage of award-winning Hungarian director, Gyula Gazdag, Smith was camera operator on the documentary about Allen Ginsberg, A Poet on the Lower East Side. Smith is a UCLA graduate from the filmmaking program on a Lew Wasserman Fellowship and a Jack Sauter Award for excellence in video journalism. He received the Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Award for filmmaking achievement and was an Eastman Kodak scholarship finalist. He currently teaches at the New York Film Academy.

Miklos Buk | SECOND CAMERA

Susan Korda | co-WRITER

Susan Korda has worked as a writer, director and editor on documentary and narrative films, including The Sweetest Sound (2002), Trembling Before G-d (2001), One of Us (1999), Vienna is Different (1989) and the Academy Award nominated For All Mankind (1989). She was born in New York and raised in New York and Vienna, Austria. Between 1979 and 1984 she studied at the City College of New York/Picker Film Institute. She made her first film, Filial Dreams, in 1983. Since then she has been working as a director and editor and been teaching at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and the International Filmschule, Cologne.

Frank London | COMPOSER

Trumpeter/ keyboardist Frank London is a member of the Klezmatics and the Hasidic New Wave and co-founder of Les Miserables Brass Band and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. His compositions for film, theater and dance include Yoshiko Chuma's How Loud Could It Be, Sharon Pollack's Everything Relative, Yvonne Rainer's Murder, Bruno de Almeida's The Debt (prize winner, Cannes Film Festival, 1993), John Sayles's Hombres Armados and The Brother from Another Planet, Tamar Rogoff's Ivye Project, and Chelm, California with Flying Karamozov Brother Paul Magid. London scored the Czech-American Marionette Theater's production of The Golem, Great Small Work's The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, and the Public Theater's production of Tony Kushner's A Dybbuk.

His latest projects are an opera/song cycle A Night in the Old Marketplace, and Davenen, a commission for the Pilobus Dance Company featuring the Klezmatics. As a trumpeter, he has performed with John Zorn, LL Cool J, Mel Torme, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne, Jane Siberry, Itzhak Perlman, Ben Folds 5, Mark Ribot, and Gal Costa. London has been featured on HBO's Sex and the City, the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Lincoln Center Summer Festival and over 100 CDs.

His own recordings include Nigunim and Zemiros with Klezmatics' singer Lorin Sklamberg; Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstar's Dishikere Kapelye (winner of the Deutsche Preis der Schallplatenkritik); Invocations; The Debt; Shekhina; the soundtrack CD for the film The Shvitz; as well as five CDs with the Hasidic New Wave and seven with the Klezmatics.

Andras Suranyi | ASSOCIATE PRODUCER

Andras Suranyi is a board member of MaFilm Studio and teaches film at the Academy of Theater and Film, Budapest, and at ELTE University. He was an associate producing on Jacob the Liar (directed by Peter Kassowitz). His award-winning work, Fenykepek (Photographs for My Children; 1989) was screened in Jerusalem, New York, Edinburgh, and San Francisco. In 1992 he co-directed Midon A Ver (Then the Blood: Blood Libels after the Holocaust) with Sandor Simo, and Edit Koszegi, a controversial film exposé on the blood libels/pogroms of 1946 in Hungary. The film showed in Berlin, Jerusalem, and Oberhausen. He is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship for Media Research (1991), a grant from the New York Actor's Studio and Visiting Professor at SUNY, New York.

Cast

Amichai Lau Lavie - [email]

Founder and creator of Storahtelling, sacred ritual theater

Basya Schechter - [email]

Leads her internationally acclaimed band, Pharaoh's Daughter, a mix between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and altogether different rhythms

Louis Farkovitz - [email]

Louis has always been an artist at heart, but he thanks his late brother Joseph Farkovits for encouraging him to take it to the next level. He is now an accomplished jeweler/designer.

Mark Joseph Altman - [email]

Mark is the founder and only known practitioner of Talmudic Universalism. He is a Yiddish director and actor, and the Associate Art Director at the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater.

Michelle Miller - [email]

Sings with the Stonewall Chorale & the Oratorio Society of New York and has appeared on the stages of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

Pessy Sloan - [email]

Dr. Pessy Sloan broke out of the Boro Park mold to journey "from GED to Ph.D." and earned her doctorate in clinical and school psychology.

Rosalie M. Osian - [email]

Rosalie is studying to be a chaplain. Her father's rebbe was (mostly) Wiznitz. Her own mix of rebbes includes Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reb Joseph Soleveitchik as she works to merge the physical and spiritual to levels of great holiness.

Sarah Cecilie Finkelstein

Sarahís admiration remains with Rav Pam, who spoke of not losing faith in humanity, even in the face of great tragedy. As an active member of Take Root, an organization for adults who were parentally abducted as children, she uses that teaching to instill hope.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub - [email]

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is an English and Yiddish language poet, a Yiddish translator, and a librarian. His English language poems have appeared in numerous online and print publications. In 2001, his poem "questions of dress" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His first book of poems, The Insatiable Psalm, has recently been accepted for publication by Wind River Press.

My Father, Brothers and their Families

Anonymous

Museum Appraiser

Hungarian Applied Arts Museum

Kossonye Rebbe's Grandchild

Reb Meshulem Rottenberg

Budapest Baker

Frohlich Basci with his son, the rabbi

Budapest Wigmaker

Katalin Sommer, Prof. Wig Kft.

Budapest Kosher Butcher

Deszo Kovari

Upholsterer

Leon Breuer

Lonely Planet Guidebook Writer

Steve Fallon

Hasidim in Debrecen Synagogue

Gross Brothers

Jewish Guide in the Ukraine

"Billy Basci" - Zev Goldinger

Meet-A-Mate Ladies

Eva and Sherry Singer

Men on Pilgrimage in the Ukraine

Anonymous

Development Support

Developed in part at the Sundance Institute

With support from:

New York State Council on the Arts
National Foundation for Jewish Culture
Minneapolis Film and TV Board
Institute for International Education, Fulbright/Hungary
Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research