|
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
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.
Divan is a Hasidic tale five years in the
making and is her debut feature documentary, developed with the
assistance of the Sundance Institute. Although she broke from
her past, 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.
Gluck's video art includes Trance with
sound artist Basya Schechter for the Eldridge Street Project
in NYC, opening April 30, 2003, 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 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 T. 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.
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.
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 expose 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.
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.
|
