It’s been almost a decade since Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel passed away at age 87, and it is hard to believe that there are many people, especially young ones, who do not know the writer and Holocaust survivor.
A new documentary about the author and activist, “Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire,” directed by Oren Rudavsky, is aiming to share Wiesel’s story with the world.
The movie opens on Sept. 5 in New York’s IFC Cinemas and in Los Angeles on Oct. 3. It tells Wiesel’s story using materials from his personal archive, testimonies from his late wife Marion and son Elisha and hand-painted animation from Joel Orloff. It highlights Wiesel’s story of survival but also his relentless activism, like asking President Clinton to take action during the war in Bosnia and speaking against President Reagan for planning to honor the fallen at Germany’s Bitburg Cemetery, where SS soldiers are buried.
Rather than go after comprehensiveness, Rudansky shared in a press statement, he hopes that the movie “seeks intimacy, and emotional and intellectual depth, trying to understand who Wiesel was at his core.”
Wiesel’s memoir “Night” (1960), is known as one of the most important contributions to Holocaust memorialization. It is about how he survived the Holocaust when many of his village of Sighet, now in Romania, perished — including his father, his mother and his little sister. Wiesel’s father, with whom he was sent to a work camp in Auschwitz, starved to death.
In the trailer for the documentary, you can see, reenacted with harrowing animation, Wiesel write the original words in Yiddish: “I decided to write my testimony. I wrote it for the other survivors,” he says, touching at the guilt and shame many survivors felt for merely surviving.
Wiesel, who taught at Boston University, wrote more than 50 books. This documentary is named after one of them, “Souls on Fire,” which is about Hasidic wisdom and rabbis. You can see Wiesel signing another, “A Beggar in Jerusalem,” about his experiences in Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, in the trailer as well.
“Suffering confers no privileges; this is why survivors have tried to teach their contemporaries how to invent hope in a world that offers none,” we hear Wiesel say in his famous 1985 speech to President Reagan. Four decades later, it seems that remembering Wiesel — his legacy, words and wisdom — is perhaps more important than ever.
“Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire” comes to us just in time.
