Song Searcher
SONG SEARCHER
DOCUMENTARY
Release Date: 2021
This film is the story of a man’s lifelong search for authentic Yiddish folk music and of his unique archive, which was presumed to be lost forever. MoysheBeregovsky, a musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history in order to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His work began in the 1920’s and led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of those he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were shot by the Nazis and tossed into countless mass graves. Ultimately, Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the Living Voice of his people from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life.
Filmed on location in Ukraine and many other countries, loaded with rare, unique video-footage and archival audio materials, this film is much more than a mere account of MoysheBeregovsky’s life and work. Using haunting historical images, the heart-breaking testimony of surviving eyewitnesses and the commentary of renowned international scholars, it tells the awe-inspiring story of Beregovsky’s people, whose song could not be silenced even during the darkest hour in their history.
Living Drugs
LIVING DRUGS
DOCUMENTARY
Release Date: 2024
This movie is dedicated to Dr. Michel Sadelain, the Director of the Center for Cell Engineering, and the Gene Expression Laboratory, who invented a treatment that genetically alters a patient's own immune system cells to fight cancer. For the first time, this treatment showed to produce remissions in adults with acute leukemia.
Germinated in the 1980’s, the idea that immunity could be engineered faced incredulity if not scorn from the scientific establishment throughout the 90’s. It wasn’t until Sadelain designed a molecule later called CAR and identified its target, called CD19, that a few scientists started paying attention to his work. In the absence of interest from the pharmaceutical industry, academic medical centers had to take the matter in their own hands, becoming CAR manufacturers. Three cancer centers contemporaneously reported dramatic results in their first clinical testing of CD19 CAR therapy, enrolling patients with intractable leukemias and lymphomas and achieving unprecedented reversal of advanced cancer. “Living Drugs” features interviews with scientists who spurred or witnessed the birth of CAR therapy as well as patient stories in the US and abroad.
Through Heaven's Gate
Searching For Klezmer
Through Heaven’s Gate Searching For Klezmer
DOCUMENTARY
Release Date: 2024
Through Heaven's Gate Searching for Klezmer, a historical documentary film made in 2019-2021, never fails to produce a strong emotional response from the most varied of international audiences. Part biography, part Holocaust testimonial and part mystery investigation, it recounts the true life story of Moyshe Beregovsky, a man who saved the Yiddish musical patrimony of Ukraine. Following in the great ethnographer’s footsteps around Ukraine and using heartbreaking testimony of the few survivors remaining, the film reveals the tragic fate of those places where he collected his music before the war and of the people who played and sang for him. Those old Jewish communities were destroyed by the Nazis but their melodies miraculously survived in Beregovsky's archive, even though he himself was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in the Stalinist gulag. This incredible patrimony, published decades after his death, became a source of reference and interpretation for dedicated musicians around the world, who perform their own versions of these tunes for diverse, enthusiastic audiences in hope of reviving the centuries-old European klezmer tradition that was almost entirely destroyed by the tragic events of the last century.