Middle school students in Newark grapple with Elie Wiesel’s harrowing Holocaust memoir.
The short stand-alone film Night in Newark takes place in the 7th grade classroom of the extraordinary teacher Paris Murray and her deeply thoughtful students at the North Star Academy in Newark. Filmed over the course of five days, we observe Paris teaching the students in her class as they discuss Elie Wiesel’s memoir “Night.” North Star Academy has a yearlong curriculum on the theme of freedom and Elie Wiesel’s memoir is the centerpiece of the course. Students spend five weeks studying the book as personal history, relating it both to their own lives and to other books across a spectrum of human experience.
“Night” is a nonfiction memoir detailing Elie Wiesel’s personal experiences in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald from 1944 to 1945. Wiesel describes the events of the Holocaust from a deeply personal, remembered point of view. His first-person text fully communicates the horror and depravity of life within Nazi concentration camps. The original Yiddish publication of “Night” was 900 pages long and entitled “And the World Remained Silent.” In its final form, it is a brief, spare, and powerful description of the personal and societal darkness of the Holocaust. Of “Night,” Elie Wiesel said, “If in my lifetime I was to only write one book, this would be the one.”
A statement from director Oren Rudavsky
I found out about Paris Murray and the Northstar Academy from a teacher, Todd Levine, who both teaches at the school and is a member of my synagogue. I was looking for a school that was not a Jewish school but was a public school. And when I met Paris and her students, I truly fell in love with their whole process of teaching and interaction.
What I found delightful in the making of this film was the eloquent insights and the empathy exhibited by a classroom of thirty students who were all deeply involved in the conversation. I was also moved by Paris’s powerful focus and the razor-sharp back and forth between teacher and students. It was honestly one of my favorite educational experiences and a wonderful filmmaking experience as well.
Elie Wiesel cared about teaching and educating the next generation. His wife, Marion, shared this passion. Most heartening was the attendance of Paris and several of her students to a screening of Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire during the New York Jewish Film Festival at the Lincoln Center, where Marion was in attendance. The students were deeply moved by meeting Marion as she was in meeting them. Another high point for me was when Paris participated in a Q&A when the film was released theatrically in NYC, as she shared her insights about teaching “Night” with the audience.
About the filmmakers
Oren Rudavsky, director and producer, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts grants. Rudavsky produced, directed and co-wrote the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People which was nominated for a Critics Choice award. His film Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016. Colliding Dreams was broadcast on PBS in 2018. His NEH funded film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and broadcast on PBS in 1997 and his ITVS funded film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and was chosen for the PBS POV series. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the forty permanent film installations at the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow which opened in 2013. In 2009 Rudavsky was Producer/Writer of the two-part series Time for School 3, a twelve-year longitudinal study examining the education of seven children in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle. In 2006, Oren completed The Treatment, his fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen which was awarded Best Film Made in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded film Everything Seemed Possible along director and editor Ramón Rivera Moret, about an era of profound cultural and social change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s-1960s.
Tal Mandil, producer, is an independent filmmaker/producer based in New York City who got her start in film while living in Chile. There she produced Más Allá de las Olas/ Beyond the Waves, a four-part documentary series about blue whales in Patagonia that aired on national Chilean television in 2022. While there, she co-wrote and produced a narrative short film, Sumergido (2019), starring Daniel Antivilo and Lux Pascal. She is currently working on an NEH-funded documentary, Everything Seemed Possible, about an era change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and ‘60s directed by Ramón Rivera Moret currently in post production. She produced the documentary feature Taking Venice (Rome Film Festival, DOC NYC, 2023, US distribution Zeitgeist, Kino/Lorber) about the role of the U.S. government backing artist Robert Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale. She has been working with Oren Rudavsky on Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire since the project began in 2021
Michael Chomet, editor and producer, is an accomplished and experienced editor, creative director, and executive producer with four EMMY nominations and one win, seven TELLY awards, three CINE Golden Eagles, three International Film & Television awards and is a member of the Television Academy. He owned Chomet Editing Inc, a successful post-production company for 18 years which merged with Spark Productions and later with Tribe Pictures. He edited the PBS series Reading Rainbow, was the executive producer for MTV/Viacom’s reality series “College Life”, and also produced and edited projects with Ben Stiller, Eugene Levy, Martha Stewart, Levar Burton, Michael Moore, Marlo Thomas, and Hype Williams. Michael edited Oren’s first two documentaries Dreams So Real and Gloria: A Case of Alleged Police Brutality and in recent years acted as a consulting editor on Oren’s film Witness Theater. Michael is the child of a holocaust survivor.
